Jun

5 things to look for in an SEO campaign – Fallacy of SEO Packages

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5 things to look for in an SEO campaign – Fallacy of SEO Packages

Before you hire an SEO consulting firm to boost your website’s performance, search engine rankings, traffic and consequently, revenue, there are some basic precautions that you should take. It is common knowledge that without search engine optimisation, your website does not stand a chance to succeed online and so SEO becomes a prerequisite for every company. However, what the so called SEO experts do not tell you is that there are several harmful practices which can do uncontrolled harm to your web business, or even get you banned. How does one discover whether a company is genuine or not? Below are some things to look for in a web promotion or optimisation campaign -

1. Company’s reputation – If the company which you are considering is old but still low on reputation, it might be possible that they use malpractices to promote websites. Do a thorough check on your SEO consultants and ask for references to ensure that the firm or individual is genuine.

2. Low prices and quick results – Always note that search engine optimisation is a time consuming process which required patience and dedication. So if someone ‘guarantees’ good results such as first page rankings on Google, you can be assured that they are out to scam you. Moreover, if the prices are ‘unbelievably’ cheap, it is a sign for you to be extra careful.

3. Black Hat and spamming – Black Hat refers to the use of unethical practices to improve a website’s ranking. Common black hat methods include cookie stuffing, link masking and cloaking, link spamming and building link farms, keyword stuffing, etc. These are practices which are shunned by search engines and usually results in the website getting banned. Ensure that your SEO expert is aware of such practises and does not employ them (this can be found out through other competing experts).

4. Content spamming – A genuine SEO firm usually includes content writing services in their SEO packages. Ensure that they keep a healthy density of targeted keywords in the articles without going overboard. Keyword stuffing is a spamming technique and search engines penalise websites heavily for doing so. Also ensure that your meta information such as titles and descriptions have limited keywords and lots of variations of long tailed keywords. Not only does this prevent dilution in the importance of your main keywords, it helps the search engine in identifying spammy sites from genuine ones.

5. Beware of Flash and Javascript – Agreed that flash and javascript can add oodles of eye candy to a website and make it attractive, but from the search engine point of view, they are totally useless. There are companies out there that will add loads of flash content to your website and tell you – ‘Look, your site is much more attractive now so it will rank better’. This is nonsense and you should sidestep such firms.

These are just five fallacies which anyone can encounter in a SEO package. Look out for more and you can do that by researching on the internet.