There is a lot of subtle, intricate work involved in SEO and SEM. More often than not, as business owners we’re either too busy or not skilled enough to handle all the tasks that are necessary for good SEO. This causes us to lean in the direction of hiring an SEO professional to take care of the dirty work for us. It’s important to know a little about the business itself before selecting an SEO consultant, however. A consultant who doesn’t adhere to the stricter standards that are developing could do more harm than good. If they do anything the search engines deem as “Black Hat” or unethical, it could get your entire site index banned from listings. The worst part is that there is nothing you can do to repair that damage.
Doing it yourself without the proper knowledge can also yield devastating results. If you’re not sure about terms like “DoFollow” , “PR5″, “One Way Links” then you could very easily get your own site banned by making innocent changes in your SEO campaign.
So how exactly are you able to sabotage yourself (or have someone else do it) from innocent marketing?
The major players in search engine technology (Google, Yahoo and Bing) are always developing and refining the algorithms that drive the search engines. These algorithms decide the rank of your page and its placement on result pages. There are a number of sites and methods that are listed as Spammy and Black Hat. By mixing your site in with those, you start running the risk of being penalized. This is something that you need to avoid, because if you are removed from indexing all together then you lose a substantial amount of business. Over 80% of all organic traffic comes from search engines
This is why it’s important to educate yourself on White Hat tactics (I love the spy vs spy images this creates in my head). This is key, especially if you’re going to have someone else do your SEO for you. You should be able to query the consultant and ask them what their marketing plan entails, in detail, including where they will be targeting link placement.
If your site is blacklisted and subsequently removed from listings, you might as well shut the site domain down and start over. It’s not an uphill battle to get your site relisted. It’s more like trying to climb a 500′ sheer wall made of smooth glass with nothing but the hands God gave you. Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t really care whether or not you got in bed with a poor quality SEO company that took you for a ride. All they care about is that you tried to trump the algorithm and lost.
A lot of business owners and site administrators are looking for the best traffic boost, and they’re turning to SEO “experts” in freelance communities and internet upstart SEO “gurus”. Too many administrators and business owners want a pile of DoFollow links back to their site, and many times that gets delivered abruptly. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t sit idly by in a stupor as these things occur. Sudden bursts in growth on a website, such as an unnatural number of links, can get a site red-flagged. The outlook becomes bleak when Google takes a human interest in you and has one of their content managers audit your site and all the links that were built for it.
It’s quite simple for them to chuck a website off their listing. With millions of websites being indexed on a regular basis, your site is just a flash in the pan and they don’t need you to boost their user count.
I don’t want to spook or scare anyone into avoiding SEO consulting. It’s more a matter of making sure you educate yourself on the standard operation involved in SEO and online marketing.
The answer to dealing with all of this is rather simple. Organic Growth should be your focus. It’s just what the name implies, that being natural growth of your site. Your advertising campaign and site promotion should be targeting a wide range of possible targets in your industry or market – Do not target just the high value traffic sources.
Just because a link is posted on a nofollow site or blog, doesn’t mean you can’t get quality traffic from it. Even though the search engine doesn’t calculate that link while weighing in your site strength for rank, you can still get traffic from users on those sites that click-through to your pages. This provides a more natural growth in traffic and search engines won’t view that traffic as Spammy.
While it may seem like a way to save a large amount of time and money, having an inexperienced SEO “professional” handle your project can cost you more than just the finance behind the work.
Proper “White Hat” SEO is more than just the High Payout stuff. It’s a lot more than pulling out the biggest gun you have. It involves many different variables, and consideration should be given to each one individually. While some are more beneficial than others in regards to the payout in the end, and they may not seem fruitful by themselves, together they create a fantastic traffic campaign that effectively generates visitors and sales.
Don’t try to rush your marketing campaign. By taking the time to study the various methods, you’ll be able to select the most appropriate campaign and you’ll feel more confident in working with an SEO consultant by making educated decisions based on their recommendation.
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Joerg Weishaupt is a 46 year old entrepreneur, software architect, search engine optimization and social media expert. Joerg has been building a lot of profitable Internet businesses since he put his first website online in 1995. He is also one of the founders and partners of Social Media Science LLC, where he launched a content syndication network called SYNND.
Joerg resides in a small, quiet community about 100 miles outside of Munich, Germany. If you ever seek to find him, look for where the cows gather.
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