I was thinking this morning about what article I would write today and I have been having no end of troubles trying to get an article out today. Until … I went and visited a prospective customer today and they told me some of the things other companies offering Search Engine optimization and Traffic Building Services wanted to do to their website to give them a better ranking in the Search Engines. So, I thought it was worth creating a basic list of four warning signs you need to look out for when you are meeting with these types of companies.


To start off with, let me give you a bit of background information about this client, without telling you intimate details of their business or who they are. The client, as they shall be eloquently called supplies services to the scientific community and has been in business for over 20 years. They have had a website for over ten years however in that time they have never ranked well in the search engines even for their own products, which is a real shame as they have some awesome products.

Ninety-Nine percent of the problem with their website is simply that they have not provided fundamental elements to their website like add keywords to their Titles, Use Keywords through their webpages, put a Description and Keywords list in their metadata etc. Which all in all, give them virtually no chance of ranking well and further to that, they have never actively sought backlinks to their website, so the things we have to do to get them ranked well was pretty much a no brainer. This site however has a general Google page ranking of 5 and most of their webpages on their site also have a PR5 value which for me will not take much to get them ranked well, even for the more general keywords.

What really scarred me today was some of the advice they were getting from other so-called Web Page developers and SEO Strategists. Some of their recommendations, if they were implemented, would have plunged this site into the backwaters of the search engine index and with some of their recommendations the prospective clients site could have been banned from the search engines, so I thought it was worth putting out my list of Four Warning Signs all website owners should look out for when looking for somebody to help them get their website ranked well in search engines.

Warning Sign #1 - Delete Whole Website and Start Again

Anyone who knows anything about search engine strategies should know this is the biggest way, to hurt your website traffic and to make your life harder than it needs to be. If you have a well established website that has a good PR ranking in Google, then deleting the whole website and starting again will do nothing short but destroy any chance of you ranking well in a short period of time plus more so, any traffic you were attracting through the links from other websites would be lost.

This tactic was used by one of the people visiting our prospective client simply because they wanted to charge them a lot of money to build them a new website. The other key issue for this company was that they had a lot of quality links from Education and Government Websites. Now most people who work in the SEO industry would kill to get backlinks from these websites as search engines give their links a higher value then those from normal dot com website. Our prospective client would have lost this huge benefit from these links. By the way, the cool part is that seeing these prospective clients work so close with Education and Government agencies we can get them to upgrade their links to include keywords in the hyperlink, which is a massive bonus for them.

To finish this warning sign off, if someone recommends deleting the whole website and starting again, then show them the door!

Warning Sign #2 - Use Link Farms

Link Farms, Link Farms, Link Farms. One of the people who came to see our prospective client actually recommended building their own links directory on their website and they informed them they do this for all their clients and they get all their clients to link back to each other which would help them link well. If you go back ten years ago this was an acceptable practice but Search Engine operators are not dumb. This tactic has long lost its usefulness and will only further hurt your rankings.

The best way to get back links is to write quality articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release submission sites. This is a great way to pickup your backlinks. If somebody recommends link farms then show them the door. Further to this, I should note that the person recommending this strategy, after a bit of investigation, had put all their clients websites on the one server which means I doubt very much if any of their clients were ranking very well as the search engines would have seen this link farm strategy and would have penalized those websites.

Warning Sign #3 - Duplicate Webpages on Your Own Website

Duplicated Content is one of the biggest issues we all face on the web. Nobody likes do a search in a search engine to find the top five pages are exactly the same webpage repeated and the search engines have really taken the issue of duplicate content very seriously. Personally, I cannot understand why anyone would want to put five pages of the same thing on your website anyway.

One of the reasons why people do try to do this is to tailor pages to certain keywords but any decent SEO Strategist will tell you that you are better focusing on your backlinks from other websites than trying to duplicate webpages. There are webpages in the search engines that have none of the keywords you have searched on in the webpage but still rank well simply because there have sufficient links from other websites with the keywords in the Hypertext component of the link to help them rank well.

Look the bottom line is this, do not duplicate content on your website. It does not make sense and you can in fact be penalized for doing so by the search engines. Apart from that, look at it from your client's perspective, who wants to read the same thing twice. I do not!

Warning Sign #4 - We Can Trick the Search Engine to Rank You Higher

I have seen some really bizarre software around of late that is supposed to increase your Search Engine rankings, the software is suppose to trick the search engines into ranking you higher. I had a person come into our offices purporting to be using this software and ranking highly but he told me I was not to tell anyone. Personally, I think it is simply a claim someone is using to con money out of unsuspecting people. Even for a moment, let us consider this might be true, do you honestly think behemoths like Google, Yahoo or MSN are not going to find out about it and ban those sites that use unacceptable tactics. Lets get real.

Would you like to know the secret to ranking successfully? Build quality websites. That's right, quality websites. There is no trick to it; if you build informative and interesting websites then your site will rank well. If you simply want to trick the search engines to rank quickly then you really do run the risk of getting yourself banned.

There are strategies that will help you get ranked higher on the search engines that are ethical and acceptable. Nobody wants to see an Internet which is simply full of spam websites and the search engines are spending billions of dollars in research to ensure their algorithms are going to provide the most relevant results for its users. They do ban sites that do not play by the rules and more so play in an ethical and acceptable manner.

If somebody comes to your home or office who is an SEO Strategist and they offer to help you rank well using one of the four Warning Signs I mentioned earlier then simply show them the door. If you get banned, then only you will be the one to suffer, they will already have your money and onto the next sucker.

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