Beware The SEO Snake Oil Sellers
We recently wrote an article on how to spot SEO companies that engender the least amount of good vibes. What to look for and how to assess whether they were worthy of your trust and money or not. But if you are trying to organise and perform your own search engine optimisation, how do you differentiate between the excellent, good, poor and simply dangerous advice that covers the internet in forums, discussion groups and across the hundreds and thousands of sites dedicated to this one topic. Whereas some advice is good, honest and well intentioned, other advice can seriously destroy your hard efforts and at worst, result in your site being banned from the search engines.
From serious sounding suggestions of linking strategies to die for to marketing campaigns using auto generated articles, your email inbox will groan with the weight of SEO spam mails. Unless you asked for the information in the first place or the email is sent to you by a trusted, known contact – always ignore any spam email and disbelieve the enticing sounding claims made in the subject line. Remember the golden rule of “If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is!” This rule exists for one prime reason. It is a rule based on FACT! Too good to be true means it's a lie! A huge growth has been noticed recently in the submission and depth of articles about SEO which are published on article directories.
Reading well and full of sage sounding advice, these can be just as effective at ruining your sites reputation and leading you into areas you really don't want to go with your optimization efforts. All too frequently webmasters get exposed to bad and dangerous SEO advice. Often, it is presented in such a tone as to appear professional and above question. Self-styled guru's seem to spring up just about every day, releasing some new method of driving traffic to your sites that will leave your servers gasping for electronic breath and your bank manager thinking you've won the lottery. So how do you work through these potential traps and appear the other side, unscathed and wiser? The best method of defence that any webmaster could employ is to read everything carefully and then question it. Work proposals or ideas through, both in your mind as well as live on a forum with other like-minded webmasters.
Good SEO discussion forums are plentiful and you are, quite literally, spoilt for choice. Simply search in Google for 'seo forum' and find one that you feel comfortable with. Many of the best forums about SEO practices and threats break their areas down into sub sections, allowing you to home in on specific topics and aspects of SEO so much easier. A benefit of moving in such areas, discussing and questioning with informed others is that the chance for a Snake Oil salesmen to strike it rich by duping you, a very prevalent and real threat, will be greatly reduced, if not abolished completely.
Pete Arkwright
This article has been sponsored by The Little Things in Life, Online supplier of Wedding Jewellery
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