In today’s market, everyone wants to get the most bang for their buck, marketing companies and clients included. But much of the inexpensive deals on the market could actually be too good to be true. Along with cutting cost, many marketers who claim to be SEO experts have no problem cutting corners during the optimization process, keeping their prices low. But, could these low prices actually end up costing you more?
Avoid signing yourself up for an SEO scam by knowing exactly what you’re paying for and which services are included in optimizing your site. Taking the easy route when building or marketing a site can come with many hidden costs and risks. The following are some things to be weary of as you venture into the crazy world of online marketing, and those out there who are making cheap promises.
Overnight Tricks
Websites are constantly popping up over the web each day. Google experts work to promote quality sites by increasing the ranking of reputable domains, and decreasing or even banning domains that have been poorly constructed, contain inadequate content, or appear spam-like. Some of these cheap SEO “magic tricks” include:
- buying links– Link-building is a great legitimate way to increase your site’s authority. Nevertheless, SEO schemers sell the idea of purchasing heaps of links on sites to rapidly increase your sites authority. Short run, easy authority, long run, Google will view it as spam and can ruin your online credibility.
- overnight results– If you’re ready to begin improving your site’s SEO, marketers can start work immediately but the results come a little after. Companies claim to boost your viewers drastically overnight through their campaigns simply won’t be able to do this- and if they are, they’re possibly doing it in a way that could end up ruining your ability to rank for a long time.
- page farming– SEO professionals will build pages and pages of content to help your site beat the competition, but what is really going on these pages- is it quality content?
- keyword stuffing– Browsers do not want to see how many times you can fit a keyword into a sentence, yet some professionals choose to stuff your site with keywords in order to rank highly for those keywords. Since search engines are marking these type of campaigns as spam, you should opt for enticing content that will grab your audience’s attention and compel them to read more or browse your site.
Google, as well as other search engines, will recognize these tactics as the same faulty actions of spam sites or sites that are “cheating.” The issue with the content remains that while content is king, in reality, quality content is king. Poorly-written content and masses of purchased links is a dead end for your site that will get your domain absolutely nowhere.
Poor Structure and Build
Cheap sites may give off a charming appearance, but when it comes to site infrastructure and functionality, these websites are needless to say, ugly. Yes, browsers do enjoy sites with great information; however, sites that run with malfunctions and errors are a nuisance and will only compel browsers to leave. After all, glitches within the site or broken links in pages do not scream high-end, nor attractive.
Don’t leave customers, and search engines for that matter, with the frustration of browsing a dysfunctional website. Putting in the time, effort, and capital to build a well-managed, operative site will ensure that everything runs seamlessly on the site and behind the scenes, to keep the clients satisfied.
The Results Can Be Damaging
Because of the spammy tactics and the possible malfunctioning of the site, your online efforts can fall flat in either two ways: loss of viewers, or punishment against your site by search engine updates and changes.
The main purpose of improving a site’s SEO is to increase page ranking, thus attracting more browsers or potential clients. Cheap sites often lack relevant content usage, as well as sound website structure. This makes the site less searchable, and if found, less appealing to web surfers and engines alike. Poorly written content will often result in a high bounce rate, meaning that browsers may land on your page and leave without viewing other pages often because the site.
The Good News
Google has dedicated two security tools implemented in their last largest algorithm updates by the names of Panda and Penguin to reduce the appearance of spam-like or dishonest sites. These algorithm updates made in 2011 and 2012 work in two ways:
- Google Panda- As of February 2011, Google implemented the Panda update to ensure that sites with poor quality and useless information would be negated on the search engine. Before the update, many SEO’s would take the easy way out of content building by flooding their site with keywords. The idea was that the more times the keyword had been used on the page, the higher it would rank in Google’s search results for those phrases. Cutting these corners consequently produced websites full of horribly written content that was unappealing and in no way helpful to browsers. The Panda update promotes fresh, quality content. If higher ranking isn’t enough of an incentive to spend time building a content-rich site, note that pages that lack interesting content are a terrible way to market and will not appeal to clients nor result in positive feedback.
- Google Penguin- Google launched this update in April of 2012 to filter out spam websites from the internet. In doing so, the search engine could allow honest sites with quality content and links to have a fair chance in ranking against the unfair competition. However, Penguin also removes sites that resemble spam, such as websites with an overload of purchased links. In conclusion, Google Penguin encourages dependable sites with integrity and penalizes sites that have taken the shortcut through banning.
SEO prices and services vary from company to company. Don’t fall for cheap SEO scams and shortcuts that can leave both your reputation and your site in shame. Ask questions and be familiar with the techniques necessary for the progression of your site.