Why you shouldn’t use these cheap services

Often, certain SEO deals and companies promising the earth for an apparent low cost, don’t often look too bad and it might be tempting to use them.   These may include cold callers, someone you know who is apparently ‘great with computers’ and that cheap offshore company that can deliver the earth for a few pounds.  But, here’s the facts:

When it comes to search engine optimization, it does not make sense to cut costs at the expense of lost sales and revenue. All of the services above have in common that it can be risky to use them. For example:

• The fully automated solutions offered by many hosting companies and CMS vendors are usually outdated methods that worked ok in the early 2000’s. Nowadays, these methods don’t work anymore. Some automated methods are considered spam and your website might get penalized if you use them. SEO isn’t point-and-click anymore.
• Your nephew might know how to code an HTML web page but that doesn’t mean the he has any SEO knowledge. If your nephew is good with numbers, it still doesn’t make sense to let him do your accounting (if you don’t want to get in trouble with the tax office).
• Many of the offshore companies use automated spam tools to ‘promote’ your website. Hiring these companies is often a sure way to get your website banned from Google in the long run. Some of these services even tweak the meta keywords tag of your web pages, which is a sure sign that they do not know what they’re doing.

Search engine optimization is more than point-and-click

SEO is more than building a few links, adding a few keywords to your web pages. There’s nothing that you can ‘install’ on your website and that’s it.

The right visitors from search engines are crucial to the success of any website. It’s important to understand that search engine optimiation is not a one-off project. If you focus on short-lived optimization tactics, you will get short-lived results.  It’s much better to develop a long-term search engine optimization strategy based upon your industry, products and services and making your website content interesting, engaging and up to date.  Get this right and you’re a winner, try using short cuts and you will find yourself climbing a long road back if penalized.