7 Things Your SEO Should Never Do

Here's a quick list of some simple things that should tell you not to work with an SEO. We'll do it countdown style, from least important (though still important) to lockup-your-credit-cards most important.

#7 - An SEO should never require you to link to their web site. This should be entirely up to you. If they offer freebies in exchange for a link on your site, you may want to perk up and pay attention. This is usually an indication that their site is not doing so well. And if their site isn't doing so well, yours probably won't either. Feel free to link to your SEO if you want to though, it will not harm your site.

#6 - Your SEO should never install a link exchange script of any kind on your site. This is fairly old news, but you'd be surprised how many people I've seen still get talked into this. Under no circumstances should you have this on your site. Google is a smart search engine. They can figure out that you are doing this for marketing purposes.

#5 - A good SEO would never add a links page to your site. There is nothing wrong with having a page dedicated to links with supplementary information, or business partners, or things that you endorse, but stay away from pages that serve the sole purpose of posting reciprocal links. This worked a long time ago when the big thing in SEO was reciprocal linking, but it just isn't the case anymore. Any SEO stuck in that era should probably re-educate themselves or find another career.

#4 - Your SEO should never tell you that social networking is not necessary. It is! For everyone! Especially if you have a new web site. SEO can take time to bring traffic to your site, and while you wait for your effective SEO campaign to take it's course, you can still get traffic to your site with a proper social networking campaign. Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again, social networking is going to put the search engines as we know it out of business. If you're not on those networks, you won't be able to compete.

#3 - A good internet marketer will never tell you that a blog is not necessary. Just as necessary as social networking, a blog that offers great reading material and information is going to supplement your web site with more marketing power than you would be able to imagine. I have worked with countless businesses that get more than half of their business from their blog readers. Even when they rank number one for their targeted keyword. A blog gives your company a transparency that nothing else can, outside of standing in front of your customer. It develops trust and makes it much easier for anyone to do business with you. When you offer good information, it also lets your audience know that you know what you're talking about and great blog posts are the best link bait.

#2 - Your SEO should never tell you to take your email address off your web site to avoid spam. Spam is an unfortunate fact of digital life. Get yourself a good spam filter - Gmail handles spam well. Never remove methods of contact from your site, because that can alienate users who prefer that method of contact.

#1 - The number one thing you should never hear from an SEO is that they can guarantee your rankings. Not even a Google employee can guarantee your rankings. The Google search engine is a massive mathematical algorithm that has been developed, tweaked, added to and changed over many, many years and is so complicated I doubt there is any one person that understands it's entirety. This algorithm is worked on daily, the way it handles search results and crawling changes daily. There is absolutely no way for any SEO to know how your site is going to be handled by the search engines, and there is no guarantee that a month into your SEO campaign, Google won't change their algorithm completely and everything you've been doing up to this point is now cause for penalization. The only thing an SEO can do, is base their campaign on what has worked in the past, and to continue to monitor search results so that they continue to understand patterns and what Google likes and dislikes. There is always an element of risk to SEO. An SEO company that guarantees your results, clearly just wants your money and will say anything to get it.

Outside of these things, use your common sense. Hire people who sound confident, who speak your language and not industry jargon. Most of all, hire an SEO company that ranks number one for their targeted keyword, because if they can't do it for themselves, they probably can't do it for you.

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By Courtney @ 2:53 PM