When to NOT hire a SEO and why

By Zoran Makrevski
Posted Sunday, November 28, 2004

When you get an e-mail from SEO Company with content similar to this:

"We submit your site on X00.000 search engines and directories…"

Stay far away from companies which offer you to submit your site on thousands of directories and search engines.
Why?

What they do is: they use submission software and advanced scripts and they submit your site to different guest books, local search engines, search engines in other languages, post your URL in comments in different Blogs, FFA etc…You will not have any benefit from this.

FFA stands for Free For All, pages which are designed to carry a designated amount of links on each page. Have in mind that when comes to link popularity relevancy counts and links form this pages will not going to help you much. Add to this that FFA pages have very limited life span, you will get the picture.

When some SEO company claims that they can guarantee #1 on Google

Why?

No one can guarantee #1 on any Search Engine! (Except the owner of course) I can guarantee you first place in the search results in my Greek Business Directory, since I am the owner, but there is no chance that ethical and honest SEO company will give you such a guarantee in real life.

Even the biggest companies in SEO industry do not give such a guarantee. There are companies who claim that if they don’t achieve specific number of top 10 positions, you get your money back. Take even this with great caution, and be sure to read their guarantee 2 times, including the small letters on the bottom (if there are any). Many of them will attempt to propose you non competitive phrases, which will give you no traffic and therefore you will have no benefit from this.

When SEO Company offers you to get paid on base on delivered traffic
(Though THEIR domain)

Why?

Many SEO Companies offer to the prospective client’s deals on base on delivered traffic. This traffic to be measured easily, they propose new domain, or sub domain to be created, optimized and to deliver traffic though this domain. Be sure to ask which property will be that domain or sub domain. If SEO Company told you that domain will be their property, your site will not be optimized. Here is what will follow: SEO Company will register domain name on THEIR name, and will optimize that domain for your keywords. They will redirect all traffic from that domain to your site.

You will be forced to pay monthly maintenance to that company and if you decide to stop their services, they will redirect their traffic to some other company in same industry. Keywords which worked well for you, will work well for your competitors too.

Fair and honest company might offer similar deal because of many reasons, but the domain from which the visitors will come will be YOURS, so if you want to change SEO Company, you will have the traffic directed to your site until the new company takes over, and your investment (optimized domain and the traffic) will remain your property.

In case that SEO Company doesn’t want to disclose the techniques which will use to rank high your website.

Why?

Legal and ethical SEO Company will give you very clear idea what they intent to do with your site, and will give you detailed plan of activities. You have to know that some SEO Companies use techniques forbidden by search engines and your site may get banned from the search engines because of this.

For example if your SEO company use thousands automatically created so called doorway pages, which are full of your keywords only and are useless to the visitors, your site might get banned because of this.

So be sure to ask your SEO Company what they intent to do, and which techniques they plan to use. Good SEO Company is always ready to educate their client to some level.

When SEO Company claim that you will see the results within 1 months

Why?

In this case, don’t walk away. Run!

If your site is brand new, it might take up to 3 months to get listed on major search engines. To get some results even in less competitive results, you should count that 4-6 months is the timeframe where you can expect to see first results. Note that if your website has 5-10 pages only, you will need much more content that this. SEO Company will have to add much new pages to your site, and that is time consuming task.

So, if the SEO Company claims that you will be on the top within a month, they have PPC (Pay per Click) in their mind, and that have nothing with Search Engine Optimization.

About the Author
Zoran Makrevski
Search Engine Positioning Firm
SEO.Goto.gr