Greetings!
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective tactics for generating leads or sales from your website. So, I'm sure that your company either has a marketing team who knows about SEO, or doesn't because it's constantly changing and requires someone full time to monitor and learn about the latest SEO technologies and strategies out there.
If you're looking for someone who is an expert in SEO beware of the following "get rich quick schemes" that are out there. How do you know you're getting snake oil scalp tonic? Read on..... |
|
Making Promises that are Too Good To Be True |
Watch out for these kinds of promises:
- Guaranteed #1 rankings. Google warns against these types of promises on their marketing guidelines by stating that, "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
- Fast Results. Search rankings are famous for being unstable and there are a variety of factors such as location of the person searching, using personalized results, etc.
Rankings alone are a bad metric for overall performance. What you want is for your web visitor to take action on your site, such as signing up for an email newsletter or making a purchase once they get on your site.
A good SEO site can take two to three months to begin showing an impact and depends on the age of your site, quality of inbound links you already have and of course, your keyword strategy.
|
| Using Black Hat SEO Tactics |
Although not technically illegal, it's considered bad practice and not taken lightly with search engines which can definitely hurt your business in the long run. Here are some black hat tactics:
- Keyword stuffing. Cramming as many keywords into the text of the page which often confuses web visitors into what your website is really about.
- Invisible Text - Using white text on a white background to fool a search engine into ranking your page for terms that may not be relevant to what your site is about.
- Link Schemes - If anyone offers you payment for inbound links so you can link back to them or placing your website link on hundreds of unrelated pages is a big SEO no-no.
Search engines can penalize websites that are found to be using black hat techniques by tossing their page ranking from perhaps page one to page 77. A good example of this is J.C. Penney during the 2010 holiday season. They used a link-buying scheme to get top rankings for broad search terms like "rugs, furniture and jeans." Once Google discovered this, their ranking went from page one to page 52. |