Website Guide - SEO Experts and SEO Cowboys

Someone's promises seem to good to be true. They are.

The idea of a search engine is to fish the most relevent useful details out of a massive and ever expanding ocean of information, finding the best results and avoiding the dross. Good websites get to the top by being the most relevent useful information - i.e. providing exactly what the surfer is looking for.

Professional webmasters know how to design their site to be 'Google Friendly', in other words to clearly label information and present it in a logical way that makes sense, and makes it easy for Google to supply the right results to its users. But the aim first and foremost is to provide useful information for people.

However, because of the huge profits to be made in clicks and cons, unscrupulous people bully and cheat their way to the top of the listings with tricks and underhand methods aimed at search engines, not humans ... this results in surfers wasting their time on sites which contain nothing of value (usually just lots more links, which send you round in circles), but once the unsuspecting visitor has been tricked into clicking, the webmaster has made his money, whether or not you got what you wanted. These activities degrade the quality of the Internet and frustrate users, not to mention honest website owners and designers.

Google have a very low opinion of these people and regularly ban such players from their listings meaning they don't show up at all. This can be potentially fatal for a business, and don't think it's just tacky little sites that it happens to - the BMW website was banned for trying to cheat the search engines.

So when you're doing your SEO campaign, you need to make sure you're using someone reputable and trustworthy, otherwise you will be giving your money to con artists and putting your website at risk. People who have no qualms about gaming Google will have little compulsion to be honest with you either.

How can I spot an SEO cowboy?

Anyone can claim to be an SEO expert, so you need to be particularly vigilant. You can usually spot an SEO cowboy because they are guaranteeing results, and they're cagey about the methods they use. If you come across either of these things, alarm bells should start ringing:

Other signs to look out for:

They want access details to your website - this is critical information and once they have it they can do anything they want to your website. If they are link building, they shouldn't need this information

Guarantee of #1 ranking - nobody can guarantee this, not even Google

Overly fast results promised - Google reviews and ranking adjustments take weeks, even months. Is Google going to make an exception for this company?

Overuse of jargon - SEO is complicated, but it's not rocket science. If they confuse you with complex terminology and make out that it'll all be over your head, it's time to duck out. Good practitioners can explain roughly how it works in simple terms.

Vagueness about the methods they are using - similar to the point above, if they can't give you specific, clearly explained methods it means either they're doing something dodgy, which could end in your website being penalised, or they simply don't know what they're doing.

Email offers out of the blue - SEO cowboys use crawlers and robots to create emails that appear to look personal. They've been ro your site! They know what keywords to help you on! They're really impressed! Do even the slightest amount of digging and you'll usually find the 'personal' research isn't actually accurate at all. As Lahle Wolfe says: 'put the email where it belongs: in the Spam Folder'

For more information, follow the following links:

Google Search Engine Optimization Guide

12 Warning signs of a Bad SEO Company

Signs of a Dodgy SEO Company

 

Go back to the web guide and find out more!