subject: First Impressions Can Help You Find A Good SEO Practitioner [print this page] First Impressions Can Help You Find A Good SEO Practitioner
As with any operating environment, the Internet is home to both good and bad SEO practitioners. As a seasoned business person, you are probably aware of this and will want to pick a good practitioner to help you increase the visibility of your website. The best way to do this is to treat your first meeting with a potential practitioner like a job interview. People are the same the world over, no matter what their occupation is so you should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with some careful observation. You have worked hard to build your business and it is your right, and the duty of the SEO practitioner, protect the reputation of your business and the last thing you want to do is throw it away on bad SEO.
Research has shown that first impressions are formed in the first thirty seconds of meeting someone and are largely based on visual clues, so when you meet a practitioner for the first time, you would do well to literally 'look them over'. Don't be obvious when you do this but do it nevertheless as it will give you a good idea of what a person is like from the purely visual clues that you are seeing. If the person you are seeing has arrived late for your meeting and is now sitting with their legs spread across from you, chewing gum and exhibiting a bad case of bed head, then it is highly unlikely that they will do a very good job for you. Their lack of professionalism and respect toward you indicates that they will probably approach their work the same way. It may seem superficial to judge people by their appearance but this technique goes back to prehistoric times when survival was based upon the accurate visual interpretation of a situation. Now, we are not talking about people who have untamable hair but about people who indicate to you, by way of their slovenly appearance and lack of manners that they are unprofessional.
On the other hand, appearances can be deceiving and there are people who put a lot of work into presenting you with an appealing package. They are usually articulate and well groomed but might be a snake oil salesman in disguise. If this is the case, then you need to be scrutinizing what they say rather than how they it and what they look like. Do they have their sales pitch down pat yet fail to give you satisfactory answers to your questions? This indicates that they may not have in depth knowledge or experience to back up their words. In short, they cannot put their money where their mouth is. Or do they make a lot of expansive gestures to fill in the gaps in what they are saying, or worse, speak about all the things they are going to do for your website in a patronizing tone. People like this are more interested in what you can offer them than what they can do for you, and are not necessarily concerned with delivering on their promises.
There are many ways of judging people by their appearance and only a few are listed above. You should be careful in your judgments, however, as it is possible to misinterpret these clues. For example, it may seem as if a person who crosses their arms has a bad attitude, when in fact, they are simply feeling cold and trying to get warm.
