There are plenty of people who are willing to “help” you achieve success with your search engine optimization goals. However, not everyone can actually do the things they say they can do. Below you will find a few red flags that should tell you to steer away from a company or individual.

Guaranteed Rankings

There are companies out there who claim they can guarantee you #1 rankings in the search engines. This is not true. No matter what they tell you NO ONE can guarantee you a #1 ranking. They cannot guarantee a specific amount of traffic, they cannot guarantee you anything. If anyone tells you they can, steer far, far away from them. This does not mean you don’t need a search engine specialist. Just like doctors and lawyers you are paying them for their expertise and not for a guarantee. A good search engine specialist will know what is required to create traffic and promote higher rankings and that is what you are paying them for. It requires a specialized skill set that the average webmaster or web designer does not possess.

Trade Secrets

There are no real secrets in search engine optimization. Experience will give good search engine optimizers some tools that are helpful but in general they are not paid for some secret they have. Generally, if they won’t tell you what they are doing, how they are doing it, or why then they probably have no idea of what they are doing.

Submit Your Site to 1,000′s of search engines

First things first. If you never submitted your site to one search engine, your site would still eventually be found by ALL the major search engines. They are not called search engines for nothing and over the years they have gotten pretty good at finding websites, even the ones who did not submit to them.

Special Relationships

There are companies that have laid claim to knowing someone on the “inside.” Do you really think that the search engine companies allow just anyone in the company to have the algorithms that are used to rank websites. These are literally trade secrets. There are hundreds of programmers that work on pieces of the search engine coding puzzle. You would have to know a lot of people and be able to put together all the information they each possess to in order to even have a clue, let alone the answer.

First Contact

If you have been online for any amount of time it is quite possible you have received an email offering one of the above ploys. Generally speaking I would not use someone who contacted me online without my requesting information. Does this mean that any company who contacts you is a fraud. No. It simply means be careful and use due diligence when asking questions.

Package Pricing

SEO is a service, not a product. This means that it would be basically impossible to create a package price that could be used for any website or business. Every business requires research into the target audience, keyword phrases, competitive intelligence, and the hot points for that particular industry or business. What works for one client will not necessarily work for another. Every search engine optimization client requires and deserves a customized plan in order to have a chance at succeeding.

Last but not Least

Search engine optimization is not all about getting the highest ranking. High search engine rankings are a by-product of the process of driving qualified traffic to a client’s website. If your site is ranked #1 but makes no sales then what good is your ranking. Search engine optimization is about driving traffic to your site and converting that traffic into sales.

Virtual Marketing, LLC is a Colorado based Internet Marketing company that is experienced in all areas of online marketing. You may contact us for a free internet marketing consultation at any time without obligation or pressure.