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.

Using Warning Lights or Guages

A good article on fox-business about whether your business uses warning lights or gauges to understand how your business is growing. The proper answer should be: gauges. A light is just either on or off, a gauge gives you much more information about where your business is headed,

CSS Animation, The New Flash?

I’ve used it, so I am not immune to the pull of CSS animation, but what are we doing here folks? Used sparingly, CSS animation is at best a small way to augment conversions (button wiggle), but at worst it is a resource hog that destroys readability and

Don’t Think Page Load Times Matter? Think Again.

A recent study by Google really hit home for online retailers or anyone looking to make a sale/conversion online. As Forbes points out: “53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.” Google’s recommendations usually hover around one to one

New apps coming down the pipe

We have 6 new apps coming out over the next few months. Very excited to roll these out – unfortunately we can’t give you too many details but we have a couple apps geared toward attorneys and the legal industry, one that deals with product shipping and another

Redirects & Canonical. What’s The Difference?

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between setting redirects and canonicalization. Here’s the deal. What a 301 says to search engines. Hello, Mr. Search Engine. My page has has moved, permanently, to this other address. If you will please remove my old domain from your

What You Should be Asking

When hiring a developer, many people don’t know what questions they should be asking – if they knew, then they’d probably be doing the work themselves, right? First and foremost – ask for examples of previous projects. The surefire way to weed out the novices is to look

Should you be wary of SEO firms?