If you choose not to DIY, Be careful who you hire to do your SEO – Search Engine Optimization
In the past, we have touched on the subject of SEO and how it can be used to improve your search engine rankings. The truth is that SEO is very time consuming and most businesses out there outsource this task to SEO firms, who’s sole purpose is to improve rankings of websites.
There are two types of SEO firms out there, the ones that charge a lot of money but do a nice job at organically improving your website rankings using white hat SEO and the ones that charges much lower than the competition, promise the world, but do not mention that they will be doing black hat SEO to achieve those results.
What is white hat SEO?
White hat SEO is when content is published on real websites and link back to your site. This has to be done over time to keep the search engine crawlers coming back for new content. The more content these bots index, the more changes you have that your website will rank up.
Firms that use white hat SEO also make sure to optimize your website’s content so that it is very easy to index. This process is very time consuming and usually costs a lot, however it is the BEST way to get your website rankings up WITHOUT the risk of getting penalized by Google and other search engines.
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is white hat SEO but with some elements added to it.
Most blackhatters will use unconventional ways to improve rankings, these unconventional ways are usually against Google’s terms of service and can result in getting your website BLACKLISTED for a long period of time. Getting blacklisted on Google is pretty much the death of any website out there, you must avoid this at all costs.
Some of these unconventional methods used by blackhatters are comment spamming, where they use automated tools to publish hundreds of fake comments containing their website link. If these comments make it to the comments section of that website, it will be considered as a “backlink” and the more of those you have, the higher your ranking will be.
There are many variations to this method but it usually involves spamming your link everywhere possible. All of a sudden ranking higher in the searches becomes a cheap automated task that anyone can do.
Google introduces Penguin update
In 2012, Google introduced the “Penguin” update to its ranking algorithm. What this update did was penalize all of the websites that were using these “spamming” methods to improve their rankings.
The result? – A lot of legit and innocent website owners suddenly lost their business because their website weren’t showing up anymore!
They were furious because they paid money to make sure they would be on top, so to them they had every right to be there. However, little did they know that the agency they hired to do this job had used black hat methods to promote their website, and unless you are very skilled on the web, it can be hard to track if black hat techniques are being used.
I see more and more website and business owners outsourcing their SEO to shady businesses that are charging hundreds of dollars less than a legitimate SEO shop. The end result is usually thousands lost by those businesses from the penalties being handed out by Google.
The whole point of this article is to educate website and business owners out there to make sure that they are 100% sure that their SEO is getting done right, and always, always!!!, ask yourself if the SEO agency is legitimate if their prices are under everyone else’s estimates.
I hope this helps most of you, and for those that wish they had this seen this article earlier and are currently being penalized by Google, I offer you this link, just press on the Google Webmaster Tools graphic, and find instructions of how to have Google “review” your site to see if it can be removed from the black list.
Best of luck!
Jose
Don’t forget to list your website on The Tutor Report’s Business Directory to help circulate your website address.
The Oases Online website and the TutorFirst website are built designed and maintained by Jose and he does SEO for both websites and this blog. He also fixes The Tutor Report when Kath breaks it.
