Many clients have asked about vendors that claim to give better search engine priority by paying a monthly fee. This can be both expensive and a waste of money. The first distinction is whether or not your business is selling a product on line. Many telephone solicitors don’t understand that they are selling SEO services to people who needs help in their SERVICE business, not product business.
Additionally most vendors promising something like getting your business to the ‘top of a Google Search’ are promising something they cannot deliver any more than Google can offer. Without getting into details, Google offers a means to show up at the top of a Google search under certain circumstances, and businesses will have to pay for it. To have someone else sign them up for that same service is simply a waste of fees. Google offers terrific hand holding for this service.
Yet companies that offer specialized SEO help are also suspicious. Almost daily people are figuring out a means to get around the Google search engine methods to get businesses to the top of a search. Google has teams of people dedicated to finding these tricks and loop holes and critically penalizes those companies for trying to get around their processes. (There are reputation companies that help get out of this mess, but it will not work if the web code still has such offending tricks inside of it.)
Google offers search engine priority based on a number of factors; website design, the amount of detailed information on a website, linking to other content on the web similar to your website, participation on the web in general through social media and blogging, how appropriate the content of the website is and how it relates to the keywords tied to the site, existing ‘hidden’ tricks in the web code to try and get around these methods, etc.
JCPenny has been a regular offender of Google Search Engine prioritization. They have employed teams of people themselves to get to the first page of almost every product search that they offer. This article posted by Stone Soup Technology from March 18, 2011 explains how companies could find themselves in trouble with Google for devious practices in web site code.
As Valerie writes:
As important as SEO is to a business, it is important to utilize this marketing technique in an ethical manner that follows rules that are created by the search engines themselves. If a company does not follow rules that have been created in order to minimize unfair competition, they find out, much the same as JCPenney’s did, that there are consequences to breaking the rules.
The consequence of offending Google is worse than not having an SEO plan. Be sure you are dealing with a reputable web development firm, or SEO firm before signing any contract.
