SEO and spam

We all receive spam emails.  However as website owners we often get emails from (mostly) overseas companies offering to “optimise” our websites and get amazing results.

Firstly what is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation is the process where a website gets “optimised” to boost visibility within the Natural (also called “organic”) Search Engine Results

Who you should be wary of companies offering to “optimise” your site.

When you get an email from a company offering to optimise your website, it usually contains some fairly generic statements i.e:

• “I was surfing through your website and checked it for a few keywords on Google. Unfortunately, it was not ranking well on any of those.”
• “Your website is not ranking top in Google organic search for many competitive keyword phrases.”

Note none of these statements make reference to what “keywords” they are searching on.

When you receive one of these, the first thing to do – is to check how you are ranking on keywords that are relevant to your business (a lot of the time you might be ranking well, but these companies prey on the fact that many people do not check before they engage a company).

Offshoring

It is very tempting to get an overseas company to optimise your website (it can be a lot cheaper).  But the most important questions are:

1. What happens if they under perform (or worse, take your money and do nothing).
2. Are they using “best practice” or are they using unethical (often referred to as “black hat” SEO) methodology to artificially “inflate” your rank.  Important note:  Google can penalise your site very heavily if it discovers you have been using “black hat” SEO.

Go with a company you trust.

Before you get a company to optimise your website, you should really sit down with them first and have a chat to them about:

1. What keywords / phrases YOU think you should gain placement on
2. What keywords / phrases THEY think you should gain placement on
3. The chances of getting a good placement (page 1 or 2)
4. What happens if you do not get good placement.

Our Philosophy:

To be honest we don’t accept all SEO jobs.  If we feel that the chance of getting decent placement on a very generic term (i.e “real estate”) – we very rarely take on the job.  We do however always guarantee an increase in “visibility” within Search Engine Results (i.e we make take a client from page 10 to page 2), but we do not guarantee a “first page placement”.

It’s a minefield out there …

SEO is a potential minefield – give us a call, and we will give you a down to earth and honest appraisal of how to best approach getting a decent rank within search Engines such as Google.