Advice on how not to get ripped off when buying SEO help
Are you planning to hire an SEO consultant to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website. This is a good step actually, because a professional person is in a much better position to get you rankings you need for your website. But is the person whom you are hiring as your SEO help really qualified to give you the help you require? Here’s how you can find that:
- A list of previous SEO clients and how he or she performed: How many clients your SEO help has served so far? A consist performance always helps. Some “seo experts” get a website to the first page of Google by a fluke and they decide to provide professional SEO services. They should be able to show you work of at least 5-6 clients and these websites presently should be appearing on the first 10-20 search engine results.
- A list of testimonials from SEO clients: Only happy clients give testimonials. Look for the testimonials page on the SEO consultant’s website and verify they link to the actual client websites. If things seem shady, contact the clients and verify that the testimonials are for real and not fabricated.
- What SEO strategy he or she is going to follow: Is your prospective SEO still stuck in the early 2000s mentality of senselessly getting hits and submitting to 1000s of search engines and web directories? Is he or she aware that you don’t really have to submit your website to major search engines because their crawlers do the job on their own? What overall changes are they going to make in your website’s architecture and content to make it more search engine friendly? Do they resort to spamming and suggest that you should lots of gateway pages (you should not!)?
- Does your SEO help promise you the stars: Getting to the top of the search results is not a definitive occurrence unless you run a rare and unique business. It takes time and lots of effort and even then the results don’t manifest within the promised time frame because there are so many people competing for the same spots. Lots of factors are involved and they take shape with time. If your SEO claims that he or she can get your website to the first page of search results pages within, say, two months, you can assume that something is fishy.
You online business depends on relevant traffic from search engines and other websites, and only the right SEO help can deliver you the desired results. Scrutinise thoroughly before hiring your SEO help.
Today is July 6, 2008
Is your SEO strategy up to date?
The only current SEO book on the planet.
Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. But don't take my word for it...
This is the #1 ranking SEO book on all major search engines.
The search engines love it. Thousands of webmasters have build their business using SEO Book. Learn why today.
If a SEO emails you, they are likely not terribly good - spamming just plain annoys people.
Very true WTL, if they were good they wouldn’t need to resort to email marketing (spam) and would have plently of organic traffic from search engines.
I agree Gary, i’m gobsmacked at the amount of “professional” SEO Companies who actually charge clients for a search engine submission package.
Also if someone guarantees you No1 placement, they must work for Google because Google ultimately control the index and not the SEO.