How do you know if your Savannah SEO Agency’s links are worthwhile?

If you are a business owner that recently hired a Savannah SEO agency or an SEO agency in any major city for that matter, you might be wondering how to quantify SEO work.  Every business owner knows that SEO is a type of online marketing that they simply cannot afford to ignore, but SEO can appear complicated when a business owner starts searching for an SEO agency or consultant.  Everyone has a pitch and Google’s search engine is proprietary so how can you know who is right and who is wrong?

In terms of web design and development there is no shortage of bad ideas and certainly I could write a 5000 word article that discusses the sleazy things SEOs are doing in website footers or using excessive keyword text links to connect first tier pages, but for the purposes of this article I am going to focus on how to evaluate the links created by your Savannah SEO company.

A link is either a follow me link or a no follow link.  A follow me link is a link that can take both a human website visitor and a Search Engine bot like Google to another website.  A no follow link is a link that a human website visitor can follow to another website, but a Search Engine bot is instructed not to follow that link because of an attribute in the link which is rel=”nofollow”.  This attribute was created in 2005 by Google as a way to stop SEOs from doing comment spam on blogs.  Google Spokesman Matt Cutts is fond of saying that only a very small percentage of links on the web are no follow, however, what he fails to point out is that most of the popular websites in the World (such as Wikipedia or Twitter) now use this attribute on every link that appears on their site.  This attribute has changed the web forever.  Why is this important to you?  If you hire a Savannah SEO agency and most of their web marketing results in no follow links to your website then you have wasted a lot of money.

If your Savannah SEO firm has set up Google webmasters tools you can navigate to “Traffic” and then “Links to your site”.  This will show you exactly what your SEO Agency has accomplished.  If your SEO conducted an audit of your website, corrected everything that was wrong with it, starting developing your site with new content, they were out there marketing your business website, and getting quality follow me links the fruits of their labor should be reflected in your Google webmasters tools and analytics data.  Their theories and sales pitch does not make you money, but driving quality traffic to your website from organic search on Google will make you money.  Your SEO company has proprietary secrets and you do not need to understand everything they are doing, however, it is critical that you can quantify the work performed and the effect it has on finding new customers for your business.