If you have a Web site, you will, more likely sooner than later, be contacted by someone who will promise “GUARANTEED First Page Placement On The Search Engines“.
Don’t you believe it!
Before you take up their offer, save yourself some time & potential money and read the following.
If you ask them how exactly they achieve this remarkable accomplishment, their answers are often vague or cloaked as a “trade secret”. Some may say that they have developed techniques to automatically submit your site to 100s or 1000s of search engines to keep rankings high. All of these companies have one thing in common – compelling sales representatives.
If you think logically about their claims however, they don’t make much sense. Ask yourself – and them:
- Top rankings for what keywords? The ones your customers are likely to use?
- In which search engines? The ones your customers are using?
Unscrupulous techniques can hurt your ranking
While there are legitimate SEO companies that can help improve your search engine ranking, the truth is, because of the way search engines work and other factors, no one can guarantee you top position in the top engines all the time.
In fact, some of the techniques used by unscrupulous SEO companies can actually hurt your ranking, or worse, have your site banned from listing entirely.
Some techniques that could hurt your ranking are:
- Search engine spamming: excessive repeat submissions
- Mass submissions to obscure directories
- Link Farms: being listed on a site whose sole purpose is to list recipricol links.
- Hidden Text: text with text color the same as the page background color, there but not visible.
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects: using programming to present one page to search engines and another to people.
- “Doorway” pages: pages loaded with keywords and little relevent content created just for search engines.
The people who run search engines are smart. They can detect these sneaky techniques and attempts to fool them. They ignore the tricks, or worse, penalize your site or may even remove it from their index.
So, what CAN you do?
The major search engine sites, Google, Bing and Yahoo, offer guidelines on how you can improve your ranking without resorting to dirty tricks. That’s the subject of another article:
Improve your Search Engine Ranking »
Have questions about getting better search engine ranking?
At A Street Web Design, we can help you develop a highly relevant keyword list. Then we’ll help you to integrate your keywords into effective, informative Web text that can improve your search engine ranking.
call: 541-582-0597
Or
A Street Web Design – We take care of the details.
About A Street Web Design
Web design is our full time job. Since 2002, we’ve been designing websites that work for business. That means getting found. Persuading people to call you. Making sales. If you are looking for someone who can help you get a website that works for your business within your budget, call A Street Web Design – 541-582-0597.