It is important that you know how your company is being marketed and how your money is being spent. For small business owners, every dollar is important and stretching it appropriately can be the difference between success and failure. Unless you have arranged a deal with an SEO/web marketing service prior to them obtaining the search engine rankings that can be vital to a variety of businesses, it may not be kosher to ask for trade secrets from the service as if they were a paid employee under your complete control.

But there is a silver lining: the web is like an easily accessible library, where just about anything published is easily searchable. Just because a company has produced the rankings they promised, does not mean they’ve done so in a way that will keep them at the top. Nor does it mean they’ve done so in an ethical way that is representative of how your company presents itself in the day-to-day realm.

For example, many of my competitors will randomly place backlinks (links pointing to a clients website) that have nothing to do with the clients website. Many of these are paid blogs, where one posting will deal with porn and the next investment strategies and the next braces for teens.

Other strategies are a bit more clever but none-the-less blackhat and long term doomed for failure. One of my old bosses in fact originally made his millions by offering a free web counter to websites, which secretly contained a link back to his very profitable niche website. Google caught onto this after a couple years and his ranking (and revenue) stopped. But the profits allowed him to go after rankings the right way, or it should be said in a way that will sustain Googles algorithms over an extended period of time.

So monitoring your outsourced money is important, outside of knowing that someone is busting their tails to get your rankings, as opposed to sitting on their hands. In fact, the amount of labor poured into the ranking I would argue is far less important than the ethics of it all.

If you want to monitor what your SEO service is doing you should ask how them how to do this. If they won’t help, be weary. To save you the time from asking, check out the tip below, which should provide the intel you need to know if they are operating in a way the is best in the long term.

• Yahoo Backlinks is  a great tool for a quick look into backlinks and it is an excellent add-on for most browsers. A search result such as this will tell you most, if not all, of the root domains pointing at your website (replace YOURDOMAIN.COM with your domain).

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s&p=YOURDOMAIN.COM

Yes, it really is that easy. Execution is a whole other ball game though. For more insights or ways to spy on your SEO friends/competition, fill out the contact form and I will respond promptly.