Avoiding SEO Scams

SEO is an acronym for a couple things (in the realm of web design, anyway). Primarily, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of creating and revising web sites in order to improve their natural (or "organic") placement in search engine results. SEO also stands for Search Engine Optimizers. This refers to people who optimize web sites for search engines. Anyone can claim to be an Optimizer, but the nature of the search engine industry impedes our ability to regulate what an Optimizer does. Confused? Don’t worry - we’ll explain everything. But first, a brief introduction:

Back in the beginning (which was barely a decade ago), search engines decided to allow webmasters to submit their sites manually to the search engine index. Webmasters also were able to add keywords, site descriptions, and other meta information to their sites in order to help the search engines index the pages. This was all fine and dandy until people started to abuse this newfound power. They began using Black Hat SEO techniques to inappropriately boost the popularity of their sites in hopes of increasing sales or pageviews.

Black Hat SEO techniques include link farming, keyword stuffing, blog spam, and many other nasty tactics. Black hatters sometimes use CSS styling to hide large blocks of inappropriate links or keywords by making the text the same color as the background color, or by hiding the text under an image or outside the boundaries of the browser window. Sometimes they also include keywords and content about very popular but wholly unrelated content, much like this online jewelry store does. This particular jewelry store has pages about dating services, cash loans, hair removal, and pictures of money. The reason these pages exist on a jeweler’s web site is to hopefully boost traffic to the site. But imagine that this store was real - an actual brick and mortar business. Would you buy thousands of dollars worth of jewelry from a salesman who also tries to sell you on anti-balding cream, debt consolidation, and asbestos poisoning legal services? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

While tactics like these saw their prime in the late nineties and early this century (and despite search engines finding plenty of ways to detect and punish such behavior), there are still many people out there who still use Black Hat SEO techniques. While some of these people are merely beginners who stumbled across the wrong tutorials for Search Engine Optimization, others consider themselves to be professionals and charge clients (exuberant amounts of) money for such "services".

We’ve had many clients come to us for our SEO services, which we admittedly take pride in. Usually, they bring us quotes from other companies around the nation, and almost always those quotes are five-digit figures. The interesting thing is that the companies in question are usually charging for outdated services (and Snake Oil™). Sometimes they are so secretive about their magical SEO elixir that they won’t even let their clients know what they’re doing for all of that money. What a shame!

The bottom line is this: If you’re looking into implementing SEO into your website yourself, use White Hat techniques instead of Black Hat ones. Don’t revise your web site according to what search engines do and don’t like. Pretend they’re not there and instead create focused, relevant content that is user-friendly and accessible. The more value your pages can have for the end user, the better. If you don’t have the time or talent to do this yourself, find a web design company that can (like us). Study up on SEO before contacting anyone, and don’t settle for a company that doesn’t seem good enough for the job. If they won’t tell you what SEO techniques they use, find someone else!

Posted at 10:00 AM on 10/29/2007 by Ray