SEO Warning Signs – ways to avoid the wrong contractor
With so much emphasis put on internet advertising these days, it’s no wonder that companies are willing to spend big dollars (and i do mean BIG dollars) to get their sites ranked at the top of searches on all of the major search engines. To do this organically (without pay-per-click advertising) is a detailed science, and is quite labor intensive and time consuming. For the novice and experienced web owner alike, the task of getting ranked high can seem daunting, and that is why many site owners choose to leave the job to the pros. But how can you know which pro is the right one, and which one is just scamming you?Choosing the right SEO company or contractor can be a difficult process, and as always, cost can be a major factor. I’ve seen adds by companies who tout their SEO services for $50/month contracts, and then there are the top-of-the-line consultants that literally charge upwards of $1,000 per hour (and they are well worth it if you want to be ranked well).
So how does one go about choosing the right company for their needs and their budget? Well, that is a difficult question, so lets start with signs of companies that you should avoid.
1. $50/month contracts for SEO marketing. Yes, this is the very first sign that the SEO company is probably one to avoid. They are either so inexperienced they do not realize how much money they are going to be losing, or they are counting on you to not understand anything about what they are doing (or more appropriately aren’t doing). SEO takes time, dedication, and lots of research. How much of any of these can you really get for $50/month, even if that is being outsourced to a country where people are working for $8/hour?
2. We guarantee your site will be ranked #1. Really, with what obscure search term? NO good SEO company will EVER guarantee your site can be ranked #1. Even with dedicated staff, and countless hours of research, copy re-writing, and site optimization SEO is still an un-exact science. There are no guarantees of being ranked #1 no matter how much time (or money) is spent.
3. You will see an increase in your ranking in one week. This is another flat out scam. Changes can takes MULTIPLE WEEKS to propagate through to search engines. There is no way to force a spider to crawl your site, so you have to wait for this to happen before any changes will be seen in your SEO results.
4. We don’t need to make changes to your site. This one really boggles me that people fall for this. If they aren’t changing your site, how are they increasing your SEO? The heart and soul of SEO STARTS with the website itself. Not just the design of it, but the construction and more importantly, the copy. If the supposed SEO company isn’t working with you to change the copy on your site, and they aren’t making suggestions as to how to change the construction of the site itself, than they aren’t doing much for you. The only possible thing they could be doing is placing your URL in link farms, which brings me to:
5. We will generate (insert ridiculous number here) links to your site. This is another scam to be wary of. A lot of the fly-by-night SEO companies that make these claims are either blatantly lying to you and are just in it to steal your money for a few months before you realize you’ve been scammed, or they are setting up link farms which are really nothing more than pages, and pages of HTML with nothing more than URLs of numerous sites that have absolutely nothing in common. And these links aren’t good for your SEO, in fact, search engines may actually view these links to your site negatively and actually decrease your ranking accordingly.
So those are just a few of tips of avoiding bad SEO companies and contractors. I hope this leads you and your organizations to finding one of the good SEO companies out there.
Tags: CSS, html, search engine optimization, seo, web design, website design