Beware of your SEO past!

Everyone has secrets that they don’t want people to find out whether personal or business, and of course this is the same for the SEO world, however there is a tool which can catch people out.

The SEO industry was tarnished a few years ago in the UK because of the amount of companies offering the service but not being able to deliver the goods. They might offer listings very quickly, very cheaply or actually use underhand techniques or techniques deemed not within Google’s guidelines.

Of course this paved way for an abundance of sceptical people in the realm of SEO. So if you want to “Get Found” how can you make sure you are choosing the right company?

• Firstly read the potential firms website; Do they mention ethical SEO? Do they practise any spam methods, i.e. hidden text, very long titles etc.
• Now a good website to look at is www.blagger.com, Put in the company you want to check and if it brings them up you can read what their other customers had to say. You do need to take an open view with this site as every company always has one moaning client, however if you search blagger.com for a company and their are multiple entries then you can take this information into account.
• Now look at the companies prices, often two cheap will give away a poor service, SEO firms and programmers generally charge between £30 – £120 an hour, if a company only wants to charge you £500 then that might only equate to a days work, this might be the case, but if you are trying to achieve competitive keywords more work will normally be involved.
• Another good indicator is time-scales, rogue sales people will often promise results very quickly to encourage you to buy their service, be aware that it is rare that results can change within a few weeks, unless you have a very established website it is still difficult to know how the Search Engine Results react when a company makes changes to a website.
• Now if you are really concerned to make sure that a company has always been ethical then you can view websites from the “wayback machine” http://www.archive.org/web/web.php click a date and look at their website, have they learnt from previous mistakes, if you look for companies under “Search engine Optimisation” for one of the top companies you may find some crafty hidden text on the front page around the 20th February 2006, not mentioning any names!

Neil
Head of Organic search