Not search engine optimization (SEO) itself — that you need to do. But there is many an SEO company, consultant or service for which the only answer is no. So many of them, in fact, that I have a simple rule: if someone contacts you out of the blue, just say no.

SEO is a area ripe for scams. It's hard to understand. It's hard to measure. And that has a attracted a lot of less-than-ethical folks into the mix. There are several large "SEO" companies that are hardly more than back rooms full of telemarketers who do next to nothing to help your website, or worse, use techniques so old that they actually hurt your search engine rankings. The Wall Street Journal had a great article on this last year, 'Optimize' Rankings At Your Own Risk.

Warning signs for an SEO company:

• "We'll submit you to hundreds (or thousands) of search engines." It's just a ridiculous statement; first of all, there are only a handful of search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask). And, there's no point in submitting to them. They want to find you via links to your website.
• If they say "we have secret techniques" or "inside information". SEO is just plain hard work, and any real secrets are fleeting and not meaningful to your success over time.
• Be wary of guarantees, particularly for "#1 rankings". It's just not something that an SEO company can guarantee, unless they do it for long, useless keywords.
• If they ask you to make a bunch of links to websites that aren't directly related to your business, run. They're engaging in "link farms" or "free-for-all" links. This actually worked a few years ago, but these days will hurt your rankings.
• If they use "doorway" pages. This approach isn't building value in your website. The SEO company can just decide to switch where they're sending traffic from the doorway pages to someone else.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO) • Share • Trackback

One Response to “Just say no to SEO”

1. Peggy Evans Says:
   June 27th, 2008 at 9:10 am

   If someone is looking for a great SEO company, we found one! Yellow7 has been assisting us in our efforts for about 6 months now and the traffic results have been awesome.

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