Posted by admin on Tue, 01/22/2008 — 01:24

Because SEO is a bit confusing at first, and the need for it can be so great, there are a number of people/companies that take advantage of the SEO idea for personal and monetary gain at the expense of unwary business owners. Well, we will show them now won’t we?

There are a few myths that you should know before you even consider hiring a person or firm to provide SEO or Internet marketing services.

Guarantees
There are none. Plain and simple. I know I know. I must be crazy to say such a thing. After all, I offer SEO services myself. I should be touting huge successes. Well, that’s just not how it works. The search engines change all the time. They are in a constant state of «get better and return better results.» As such, as an SEO, I can only provide to you a promise that I am experienced, have provided successes in the past, and abide to the search engine guidelines. I can also talk to you about some of the methods used to optimize and rank your site, but I can not guarantee any sort of rankings or traffic. As SEOs, we can discuss expectations, but we can’t go too much further than that.

You might be thinking «well, this doesn’t sound too good for me at all. I need guarantees.» To that I ask you to think about other professionals. Doctors, lawyers, firefighters all have a job that relies heavily on their experience and diligence. SEO is no different. With experience in this field comes a knack for ranking a website and driving traffic.

SEO Is Tricking The Search Engine
This is probably by far the most important topic in the industry. Often when typing or speaking, it is perceived that what we do as SEOs is tricking the search engines into ranking a website. This couldn’t be further from the truth (except for those «black hat» guys. We will talk about them in a separate post). This is mostly our fault, as we tend to discuss methods between ourselves, even publicly, more than we talk philosophy. The idea behind optimization is not to trick the search engines, but to promote quality websites effectively by cleaning up the site’s structure, and promoting it by providing more exposure. We don’t want to rank something that isn’t of quality, we want to make sites easier for search engines to see, easier to navigate, and use. This has a lot to do with the users of the site as well. For more reading on this idea, you can refer to another post title ‘Optimize For Eyes, Nots The Bots.’

SEO Is Witchcraft
As odd as that sounds, I’ve actually seen this written by a few very popular people. SEO seems pretty tricky at first, and if someone doesn’t understand something, they tend to lable it as something it simply is not. This is due in part to the misleading SEO firms out there, which we will talk about in just a little bit. With time, you will see that we SEOs are all to willing to tell you what it is we do, and how we do it.

Those are just a few of the myths about SEO, but they are the most common that I’ve seen. While we are talking about topics you want to consider when looking for an SEO service, we might want to read ‘Misleading SEO Services’ for a few of the things to watch out for as well.