I often see developers or marketing companies offering deals for free search engine optimization added in when buying some other product or service such as a website or social media plan. The problem with this is, it is at best out of ignorance, and at worst, a known scam.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing service. To do it right it takes a lot of work building relationships, content, links, and researching target keywords for which you want to show up in search engines like Google and Bing. Some developers think SEO is throwing some labels on a video or pages of your site, and poof, your site is optimized. I’m here to tell you it is not.
The only time that simply labeling your page will get you any traction is if you actually research terms that are high traffic and very low competition. In today’s search environment, these situations are nearly non-existent, and I talk further in my blog post about instant SEO success scams (link this to other post).

Though the fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed in years, the methods of gaining site strength have changed as more and more of the scammers have tried to exploit the rules and turn once promising tactics in to spammy rulebreakers. Unfortunately to Google, links are still a big part of your website strength. So just labeling your pages won’t get you anywhere if you don’t have any strength built up in your domain. This is the hardest part.

The good thing is domain strength is relative, so if you are a small business looking to show up in local search for what you do, you don’t need to have the thousands of quality links that top sites like Amazon or Facebook have. You need to be stronger than your competitors, but you do need to get stronger. Though video, local, and general SEO all have better links and methods to increase strength, they do all have this piece of the formula that can’t be matched by one time labeling that does little more than aim a weak domain at terms it isn’t strong enough to rank for.

With an industry that is unfortunately full of scammers, find someone that you can trust and has a long history of success with search. Once you find them, you need to stick with them and let them show you how you are growing over time. SEO is not an instant thing but can pay off tremendously if you build your site properly over time. Anything immediate is most likely going to get you in trouble.

Feel free to give us a call and we can set up a plan to take you to the top of search the right way, and keep you from getting penalized by Google or getting scammed by someone that simply doesn’t know what they are doing and is trying to capitalize on the popularity of the SEO term.