As a SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) owner, you may want to advertise and promote your website as cost-effectively as possible. In current economical situation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as one of the cheapest way for long-standing business promotion. A typical business owner is not likely to be conversant about SEO and its benefits. Even if an owner knows SEO, he/she is not confident enough on how to choose an ethical SEO who can get the work done at the competitive rates and within given timeframe. Choosing a SEO consultant or company for your website can be an exhausting and overwhelming experience. Every SEO specialist will boast about taking up latest SEO practices, testimonials from old clients and assurances of #1 placement on Google, but how you as a non SEO expert select a legitimate SEO consultant? Listed below, are few pointers on how to detect a fake SEO consultant.
1. #1 Google ranking for Website:
If any company or SEO Consultant guarantees you that they can place your website on number one position on Google for your keywords then don’t trust him. Its understandable that this company is desperate to get business and is willingly misleading you to get your hard earned cash. No company can make such claims as Google’s ranking algorithm is one of the best kept secrets. What SEO companies can do is optimize the on-page factors, and promote the website according to broadly known methodologies, best practices and lot of hard work. At most a company can claim that they can acquire good ranking like top 10 on Google, but even then, authenticate their past track record to guess on how they worked with other clients.
2. Very Low Prices:
Many companies charge incredibly low amount of money for quite a lot of services. As an shrewd business person, you can cleverly presume that any work that requires hours and hours of hard work, research and analysis by a team of experts cannot come cheap. Most of the times, specialists from various fields like programmers, content writers, SEO analyst, link builders etc. group their boys to make a site successful on Google and obviously SEO services cannot come as cheap as many companies charge.
3. Secret and Proprietary Technique that cannot be Revealed:
I don’t think we need explanation on this. As the owner of the website, you should be conscious of what’s happening to your site and what steps are been taken to optimize and promote it in search engines and on Internet.
4. Recommending Black Hat Techniques:
Lot of companies suggests suspicious tactics known as black hat practices to get your site up in search engines quickly. Not only these techniques have very short term benefits but they can be very counterproductive because search engines ultimately catch website following these shady practices. Many websites have been seriously penalized for using these black hat techniques. So play safe and avoid these SEO companies like plague.
5. Using Outdated Techniques:
Five years ago, techniques like reciprocal link exchange, keyword stuffing etc. were used to get good rankings. Google and other search engines have advanced their algorithms, so they rank a site for its worthiness and not just back links and keyword stuffing. Choose a company that will advise steps to make your site useful & relevant and not take short cuts.
If you keep these tips in mind while choosing a SEO company for your website then it’s very much possible that you will finally select a SEO company that knows their job and can handle your website promotion very well.
Another thing i’ve noticed is the so called guarantees to get a site ranking for a particular keyword phrase….often the phrase will be totally useless in terms of bringing in business and one that has very little competition. making it easy for these people to look good while doing the client no good at all
I totally agree with you Lesley. No SEO can guarantee the top ranking anyways. Here is the link from Big G that states the same thing:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
It takes time to find informative posts like this one.
Thanks for sharing. Will share this to my readers.
More confusing are the SEO periodical reports that are sent by the consultants. Many points in these reports are confusing and contradicting each other. It is even more difficult to convince the client because we ourselves are confused 🙂 And when asked the consultant about the same doubts, they give reasons which are highly unacceptable after spending so much money. Sufferers are the mediators, who neither can ask clients to directly coordinate with the consultant nor we are able to convince the them.
Yeah,
There r many people that claims to rank ur site on top for specified keyword, but thats just a hype.
“If you truly wanna rank for the 1st then be what you claim to be.”
Post on the forum and many similar comments in blogs. It was the best way to promote the measure because it combines the public more quickly. I’m not interested of the traffic, I would be interested in people in my niche for us to press to talk about my problems.
They are increasingly available traffic from Google and not your mouth. If the goal is to rank in search engines, the quantity and quality of backlinks are the decisive factor # 1
Firstly Kaushal, let me congratulate you for such a nice blog, I liked it.
As I was researching on the same topic, I found your article to be very helpful.
Just a point to add to above 5 points can be reference check, as I am sure no unhappy client will give a testimonial to such fake seo companies or consultants.
there will be always fake people on fake business.
Hello Kaushal, Thanks for sharing this informative post. I am totally agree with you. I seen in Google SERP, there are lots of companies charging only $99 for SEO service. I don’t know what they do and what result they provide to their clients. 🙂