Should you be wary of SEO firms?


Good Call Commander!

You should absolutely be suspicious of SEO firms these days. The industry is unfortunately saturated with unscrupulous, downright devious companies that prey on  unsuspecting business owners attempting to better their rankings. They pump your site full of fluff and post thousands of links around their web of interconnected spam sites. We’re not saying what they do doesn’t work; in most cases you’ll see some results. But there will be reckoning in a very short time and you will undoubtedly be blacklisted by the major search engines.

How to spot the phonies.

  • If you hear the work “link farm”. Then run.
  • Do a Google search of the company. You can probably find out what they’re all about.
  • If they guarantee you this or that or promise you the world, they are probably blowing smoke.
  • Ask what they’ll spend their time doing? Is everything Paid-Per-Click or are you doing organic optimization?
  • Are you locked into a contract where you are forced to stay with the company for a certain period of time?
  • Local = Trusted in most cases. It is difficult for small local firms to run SEO scams.

There have been some big players that have fallen prey to these black-hat SEO companies. JCPenny comes to mind. A few years back  they used a company that did things the wrong way, the real wrong way. And JCPenny paid the price. Google set their search engine results to the back of the line and their web traffic went into a freefall. It took them months to recover.

The point is. Caveat Emptor… buyer beware.

 

 

More Web Design Blog Content

Small Business Sees A Rise In Cyber Threats

Come on, let’s all live in the real world: we’re all vulnerable. Really the only chance you have these days is to make it as difficult as possible for any potential hacker to get to your valuable data. First and foremost this means protecting your data in transit.

New Projects

We’re excited to have new projects coming in on a regular basis. On the menu for the next few weeks are some great opportunities to expand our portfolio and our reach. Lake Butler is electing a new Sheriff soon and we’ll be creating one of the candidate’s websites.

Using Google URL Shortener

It really could not be easier. Google’s URL shortener is certainly the best one out there. https://goo.gl/ Our latest rollout, InfoGopher, uses this extensively. Our unique texting app needs short URLs in order to remain inside text character limits. Anyway, we love it. Google as usual gives you

Firefox is dead to me

That happened a long time back. Now it seems that the once beloved browser is now in the same situation with the majority of its former users. I personally feel that the browser lost its roots in version 12, but it was showing signs of becoming yesterdays news

You get 15 seconds! Web Design Trends for 2016

Mobile is in and users are becoming increasingly impatient. In 2014, 55% of users spent less than 15 seconds on a webpage according to data by Tony Haile of Chartbeat.  This means you only have 15 seconds to capture a users attention and convert a visitor to a customer.

Domain names other than .com a good idea?

Top Level Domains (TLDs), which are suffixes, are the final part of URLs. Although.com is well-known, there are more than 1,000 TLD choices available; however, not all of them are open to the general public. Prior to TLDs, IP addresses were used to visit websites, however this proved