Posted by admin on Tue, 01/22/2008 – 01:44
I’m sure you’re getting tired of me repeat myself when I say that “SEO is confusing” and “it’s a new industry.” I repeat these things because, like many other lucrative businesses, there are a lot of misleading information and services out there. Some SEOs make a business out of providing very poor service, and you should keep an eye out. When looking for a service provider, you will hear a lot of claims. Here are just a few signs that something is wrong.
We Rank Your Site, But Can’t Tell You How
SEOs have no problem at all telling you what sorts of methods will be used to optimize and promote your website. Much like a doctor will explain an upcoming surgery, or a real estate agent will walk you through a house. If someone doesn’t want to tell you, then they don’t want you to know about something fishy. SEOs are hired and paid because of their experience and successes, not because it’s difficult. With enough searching, you can find most, if not all of the methods a quality SEO will use.
All It Takes Is Putting You Search Terms On Your Site…A Lot
Often times I hear of some company or person advising that, if they want to rank for a certain word or term, then a site owner only needs add that word or term repeatedly throughout the site. The more the merrier. Well, the search engines have gotten pretty good at checking for that sort of tactic. Once they see that, you are likely to not only not rank, but put your sight in risk of being banned from the search engine all together (that’s a bad thing).
Mass Submissions
Some SEO companies market their submissions as a service to help your site. Some claim to submit to 100’s or even 1000’s of search engines. I can only count about 15 without looking them up. Where are these 1000’s of search engines? Now, to be fair, a long time ago, this may have meant something, but even then there were only a few search engines. It used to be common practice to submit your site to a search engine so it could find it. However, this is not the case anymore. Let me put it into perspective for you. I’ve been involved in SEO for 4 years as of this writing, and I’ve submitted no more than 10 websites to a search engine. They just don’t need you to do that any more. The search engine spiders are crawling so much these days, I’ve actually purchased a domain name, and had it indexed before I could put a site up (it took about 14 hours).
$89.95 A Month!
SEO takes time. It can be a few months before you even see a number of visits worth writing home about. It also takes a lot of work and research to learn and effectively provide SEO services. Small prices with big promises usually don’t end in anywhere but disappointment. I can put this one into a personal perspective for you as well. Take a look at my Freelance SEO page. See where my prices start? Yeah, seems high. And I’m what you would consider conservative with my prices. Some consultants won’t even answer the phone for less than $10,000. To be fair on that though, I only deal with small businesses. I want you to remember 2 things. 1. The bigger the project, the higher the price. 2) My brother is a very successful person. When I was younger, he would bestow upon me tidbits of wisdom. He had a saying that still rings in my ears: “Fast. Cheap. Quality. You can have any 2, but not all 3.”
I know Someone At (Insert Search Engine Here)
This isn’t as common as it used to be, but there are times when someone will throw out the name of a search engine employee to persuade you that they can get you ranked from the inside.
Put White Text On A White Background
Sometimes, a firm will come right out and tell you they are going to “trick the search engines.” This one’s a little old, and with new ways of designing websites, this method turned into a few other ways of hiding text. The idea is much like the one above, in that you would use a lot of the words on your site that you want to target for rankings, only this time, you would hide them from the eyes of humans, and only let the search engines see them. Again, the search engines know very well the old way, and catch up to new ways rather quickly.
Now this last one borderlines on “black hat” SEO, but even those guys have moved past the basics. For more on that, Check out ‘Bad SEO, Or Black Hat?’ Don’t be scared, they aren’t as bad as they sound.