Welcome one and all to the first of many posts on The Path Web Designs Blog.

The first post will discuss the un-ethical tactics of some supposed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies and how to identify the fraudsters. Please dont be fooled by their tactics and sales pitch and never sign up to a service straight away. Take time out to go over what was discussed.

If you have a website with a contact number on it, sooner or later you will recieve a call from a SEO company claiming to get your website page one rankings on Google and Yahoo for your chosen keywords no matter how competitive they may be. Sounds good right! Well yes if they are legitimate.

The first thing to ask the sales person is ‘Are you selling me improved organic listings or pay per click advertising?’ Its amazing how many companies use the guise of SEO to sell pay per click sponsored listings.

OK so they have confirmed they are selling improved organic listings. Now the sales person should tell you about the services they offer. Listen carefully to what the sales person says because some will tell you about services that are just not important in SEO terms, Ive had some very interesting chats with SEO sales people (normally they dont know what they are selling and will refer you to their manager or ‘expert’ when questioned)

Questionable Services they would offer include:

Daily Site Submission to Search Engines: this is totally unnecessary, submitting your site once to a search engine is enough but if your really keen dont do it more than once a month. Doing it too much may flag your site up as potential spam to search engines.

Meta Tag creation: this is old hat in SEO terms and wont make much (if any) difference to your organic search engine rankings. Plus your web designer should already have completed Meta Tags for each of your pages. Meta Tages are really just used by search engines for a page/site description thats displayed on their search results pages. If no meta tags are found the search engines should replace it with other text found on your page.

If the sales person seems to be pushing these services and repeating them, then you should really be questioning their SEO abilities.

The sales person will now convince you with real evidence. They will ask you to go to Google and type in a search term of their choice, normally relating to their business. On a recent phone call I recieved, they asked me to type in ‘Search Engineering’ which related to their SEO company website. I did as they asked and they appeared 4th on the 1st page of Google. Not to bad you will think, which is of course what they want (immediately put them on the back foot by asking why they are not first).

Please pay close attention to the key term they ask you to search for as this can be misleading. ‘Search Engineering’ is a fairly unused term and classed as a ‘niche’ term. An easy way to check if its a popular term is to look for the sponsored listings. If no one is paying for the term it means nobody is searching for it, which means its a niche term and so much easier to optimise for! Which should lead you to question their SEO abilities yet further!

Now do a check for a more competitive key term relating to SEO which I did. I searched for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ which yielded no results for their company. I searched for other key terms relating to their services and absolutely no results were shown in Google. Now if the company is that good at SEO surely their site should be listing well for more competitive key terms and other terms relating to other services on offer?

Now is the time to either ignore them or convey your concerns to them. But on no account should you buy services from a company like this. You should be running the preverbial mile at this point!!

Also be warey if they require a one time payment of £xxx for the whole years optimisation and constantly remind you that they will be working on your sites SEO constantly (because they wont be). At The Path Web Design we offer our SEO services on a monthly basis that can be cancelled at any time. So if you feel after a few months that your site is ranking highly for your key terms and you want to stick with them for a while then simply cancel the service. Then if you find your site is slipping in the rankings or you want the site optimised for different key terms just contact us and start up the service again!

On a slightly different tac I have also come across downlaodable .pdf documents claiming they have a loop hole that allows them to achieve first page results on search engines with one page (no content) sites. It may well be true but what are the effects of using such techniques. The search engines will get wisae (if the are not already) and you could find yourself banned from the search engines all together. So why risk it. Employ a good SEO company for a few months and see the results for yourself and run no risk of being blacklisted by the search engines.

Stay tuned for more posts on SEO and other web related topics.