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For some business owners, SEO seems like an elusive skill. There is a lot of talk about keywords and links, but what exactly does an SEO vendor do?

SEO vendors use a variety of on-page and off-page optimization techniques. On-page strategies can be broken down into two categories: those on the front end of the site and those on the back end. The front end refers to the sections the user can see, whereas the back end is the coding that occurs behind the scenes.

One of the first steps an SEO vendor will do is carefully choose the keywords to target for your website. Keywords are 2-5 word phrases that people type into the search engines. SEO vendors will do keyword research to determine these phrases by using keyword research tools, looking at competitors’ keywords and figuring out which words will give you the highest ROI.

Longer keywords, or long-tail keywords, are often times easier to rank for and bring about higher conversions as well. For example, suppose you have a ski equipment website. Someone searching for “buy black Atomic skis online” is probably more likely to buy those skis than someone simply searching for “black skis”. There may be fewer searches for the long-tail keyword, but the people searching for it are much more likely to buy.

Once the SEO vendor has chosen the keywords, they will then embed them in your content. The vendor will strategically place the keywords in your titles, headers and throughout your content in a natural fashion.

The SEO firm will also add the keywords into the meta tags (titles, descriptions and keywords) for each page and make each page’s meta data unique. They can also place the keywords into the alt text, which is the text that describes the images on your site.

The SEO vendor will create a site map for your site, sometimes building one they submit to the search engines only and another that lives on your site for the users. They will also look at the code, and make sure your pages load as quickly as possible. If a site has extensive JavaScript, for example, the SEO vendor will move it to external files so that the text (with those ever-important keywords) shows up higher in the source code. The SEO vendor will also look at your URL structure and file names.

Google Webmaster Tools and analytics platforms are often an SEO vendor’s best friend, and he or she will monitor those to make sure your site is being indexed properly and that there are no errors preventing the search engines from fully spidering your site.

Since competitive research is often quite valuable, many SEO vendors analyze competing sites with high rankings to see what they are doing right. The SEO vendor will look at those competitors’ meta tags, content, keyword density and page layout for possible ideas. He or she can also analyze those sites’ backlinks and try to obtain backlinks from them as well.

Link building is a crucial component of SEO, and having high-quality, relevant links that point to your website is invaluable. A knowledgeable SEO vendor will try to obtain links for you from relevant sites. Using our ski example again, your SEO guru may contact ski groups or ski instructors and see if their sites will link to yours. Since Google weighs links from .edu’s more heavily than commercial websites, perhaps your SEO vendor will contact ski clubs at universities to ask for links.

You can never have too many quality links, and the SEO vendor will also make sure your site is in the top directories such as Yahoo’s Paid Directory and DMOZ. They will also make sure the pages on your site interlink with one another.

Your SEO vendor may suggest a blog and social media strategies for your site as well. They will also track certain metrics to gauge how the current SEO strategy is performing.

The bottom line is that Google strives to rank sites according to the benefit they provide to users. Therefore, your SEO vendor will try to make your site as robust and valuable as possible. Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of what an SEO vendor does and the role they can play in boosting your traffic and profits.