If you want your web site to rank on the first page of Google, you’re going to need a lot of links from other web sites, right? The answer might surprise you. Like many things in SEO land, link-building, the process of getting other web sites to link back to your web site, is not very well understood by many business owners (and probably some SEO companies alike!).

If you spend any time listening to the radio, you've probably heard the commercials about how you can get a FREE website when you sign-up for XYZ service for your business. If you've been thinking about building a website for your business, this might seem like a pretty sweet deal. You need XYZ for your office and, as the commercial mentions, "if you don't have a website your business is invisible" - it seems like a win-win offer!

The internet has quickly become one of the world’s greatest resources for information about... well, just about anything. For better or worse, a certain level of authority comes with what is written on the web. So when a dissatisfied customer goes online to write a nasty rant about how one of your employees tracked mud throughout his house, this is a reflection on your business that is very public, visible, and archived in history for anybody who searches your company name.

There's a lot of talk right now about the impact of Social Media on SEO - how important it is for businesses to be building online communities, monitoring mentions of their brand online and connecting with customers throughout the web. Social media is churning up so much data that can be tracked and mapped that it is inevitably becoming the backbone of the internet. For a growing number of consumers, Facebook has become the window through which they browse and view the web. Think about it...

Before you hire an SEO company, pause for a minute and ask yourself, "how will I measure success?" If the answer is something along the lines of, "increased visibility for relevant keywords" or, "more first page rankings," you're setting yourself up to hire the wrong SEO firm and you're going to waste an awful lot of money in the process of finding the right long-term partner.

In the words of Stephen Covey, "begin with the end in mind."

As a business owner or marketing executive, you know that SEO is important. If your company's website is not found multiple times in the first page of search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you're losing business to your competitors - guaranteed. Reputable SEO consultants are famous for telling prospective clients that no SEO consultant can guarantee a #1 ranking (or even a first page ranking). Part of the explanation for this is the two dozen or so variables uncontrollable by the SEO consultant - i.e.