Will Chatham

I’ve been doing a lot of read­ing up on Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) over the last cou­ple of months. I find it an inter­est­ing field with lucra­tive poten­tial. Nat­u­rally, I find myself being aligned with the Lighter side of The Force, thus more inter­ested in the ‘eth­i­cal’ search engine practices.

The rea­son behind all of this is that I had a web design client who got tan­gled up with a shady SEO firm and spent a lot of money for ser­vices that could be summed up as ‘Spam’.

Just read this to save your­self a lot of money and headaches:

From “Beginner’s Guide to SEO”:

If you choose to out­source to an SEO firm, be well aware of the many pit­falls that await the unin­formed. SEO has clas­si­cally been an indus­try that has attracted many untrust­wor­thy and dis­hon­or­able firms, result­ing in an unfor­tu­nate per­cep­tion from many. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the following:

• Manip­u­la­tion & Search Spam — Overly aggres­sive tac­tics can get you banned from search engines.
• Link Exchanges & Free-for-All Links – While the promise of easy link build­ing through link exchanges or link farms is tempt­ing, these tac­tics often achieve sub­par results. Nat­ural, organic inbound links from sites that your com­peti­tors can’t get links from are the best way to rank well in the long term.
• Opti­miz­ing Pages for Search Engines vs. Vis­i­tors – Pro­fes­sional SEOs should have spe­cial­ist copy­writ­ers who can craft well-written pages that attract both users and search engines. Repet­i­tive key­word use (as noted above) is largely use­less, but com­pelling, intel­li­gent dia­logue is a great way to get both searchers and engines inter­ested in your content.
• Guar­an­teed Rank­ings – Guar­an­tee­ing rank­ings is often one of the first indi­ca­tions that you’re deal­ing with a less-than-reputable firm. No SEO can guar­an­tee rank­ings, because the search engines are respon­si­ble for the results and are con­stantly chang­ing. Be wary, too, of promised suc­cess at “thou­sands of engi­nes” (remem­ber that the top 4 account for 95%+ of all search traf­fic), daily sub­mis­sion (com­pletely unnec­es­sary) and other “tricks” or “secrets”. Great rank­ings come from hav­ing great sites with qual­ity links – no tricks or secrets required.
• Inves­ti­gate – The firm you work with should be able to pro­vide ref­er­ences, prefer­ably from both cus­tomers and indus­try folks that will let you know their skill and abil­ity. Use your best judg­ment here – if a review or response seems canned or fishy, it prob­a­bly is.