If you have a website you would have discovered by now that you are going to need some search engine optimisation to help to increase your traffic flow. There is a lot of competition in every niche, and small business owners have to utilise search engine optimisation, and every other technique available to drive traffic to their web pages. The big question facing most website owners is whether to do the search engine optimisation themselves or pay an agency to do the work for them. Let us look at the pros and cons and see which option is best for you.

Pros of Hiring an SEO Agency

1. If you hire a professional to do your search engine optimisation you will have more free time. If you do this work for yourself you must check the back links you establish on a regular basis to make certain that each of them is in proper working order.

Back-links are direct links from one web page to another web page. Usually when a person is really interested in something they are reading about they will click on links to go to another page that is supposed to contain more information on the subject. The only problem with these links is they sometimes fail, and you have to keep a close eye on them. If the link is broken the people cannot get to your pages and the spiders may give you a lower ranking when you have a broken link.

A handicap of back linking is that you must make sure that the page you are linked to is relevant to your content or the search engine could reduce your ranking. You never want to link to a page that is not relevant, and you want to link to pages that have high traffic so you will get more traffic.

2. The search engine optimisation specialist is capable of helping you choose the best keywords and phrases. You might have a website that sells tyres, but there are a lot of keywords that could connect to tiyres, and there are a lot of spelling variations that could be applied to a website about tyres. Some keywords cost more than others, and a search engine optimisation specialist will know which words will likely work the best, and which ones will cost the most. It pays to have a professional helping you choose keywords.

3. A search engine optimisation specialist knows how to market your website so that you get the most attention, and they know which types of marketing strategies might cause you harm. There are some methods of marketing that can hurt you more than they can help you and sometimes it takes a professional to tell you which of the strategies to employ and which ones to avoid.

4. The specialist can teach you the techniques they are employing and if you reach a point that you feel confident that you can do the search engine optimisation work without professional assistance, then you can stop using them and do the work your self.

5. A search engine optimisation specialist is like having a technical team at your side making sure that your advertising is done right, that the search engine spiders see you in a good light, and that the traffic to your web pages increase steadily.

6. These professionals know when to wait for something and when to push for something. Sometimes being patient is the answer to developing a steady stream of traffic but patience is not in most of our natures.

Cons of Hiring SEO Agencies

• You will have to pay for the professional services.
• The results of the search engine optimisation strategy will not happen overnight. It takes a little time to get your name to be recognised.
• The results of an SEO strategy cannot be guaranteed.

There are many SEO “specialists” who have little to no knowledge of SEO at all so research companies extensively as a bad SEO agency could cost you dearly.

How to Choose the Best SEO Agency

We should all know now that every agency is not created equal. There are some search engine optimisation agencies that do excellent work, and are reputable, and there are some agencies that do shoddy work, and cost you money. You have to choose the right search engine optimisation professional and if you have never hired one before this can be a daunting task.

Look for the following things in the SEO agency you are considering hiring.

• The amount of experience they have. Just because someone has been in business a long time does not mean they are the best, but nine times out of ten if a person has been in business for more than five years it is because they do a good job.
• See if anyone you know has heard of the agency before. Ask the agency representative for customer referrals and be sure you check those referrals and read all of the reviews concerning the company.
• Find out how busy the agent is. If the agency you are considering is too busy then they will not have enough time to pay adequate attention to the search engine optimisation needs that you have. You want an agency that is busy, but that has enough employees to do the job right.
• Ask the professional what strategy they have for your website SEO. They can use backlinks, blog postings, forum discussions, adwords, contests, social media advertising, and article writing. You want to hear the plan of action they have, and be sure that you check on them often to see if the plans they had have been implemented, and if some of them need to be altered.