Does a Guarantee Protect You?

There are guarantees that you can get with your SEO, but do they really protect you the way that they should, or are they there to protect someone else?

For the most part, they don’t protect anyone. The bottom line is that most SEO companies don’t even offer guarantees anymore because they know that they really have no control over rankings, even with good SEO. The only things that they can guarantee – and some of them do – are things like how much time they’ll devote to your campaign or how much experience the person working with you has. They can also guarantee performance improvements and customer satisfaction, but these are also hard to nail down.

There are risks for both the SEO company and the client, so it’s important to be sure what the real risks are before you offer or accept any type of SEO guarantee. Remember, there really are no guarantees when it comes to how well your site will perform, even with the best SEO in the world, so be cautious of such claims.

What To Do When Clients Come Knocking: Patience in SEO Campaigns

I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we’ve all seen some SEO get berated or pressured because a particular SEO campaign isn’t going at the ‘right’ speed. Even when every procedure is followed to the letter and every option explored, sometimes it’s truly out of our hands.

Let’s look at several reasons why SEO’s don’t function as well and as quickly as we all might have hoped:

1) Even algorithms take time. High quality links, for example, withstand the test of time. Shoddy ones, links that attempt to manipulate the crawler and create an illusory sense of legitimacy, simply don’t. In other words, earning the algorithm’s trust is essential.

2) Patience with engines is vital. I know we’ve all seen a colleague, or maybe even ourselves at one point, luck out and get highlighted in a week or so. But that’s not very realistic. Sometimes the crawler process can take months.

3) Don’t forget those link partners. It can be a frustrating wait while that new viral content you posted or some other feature gets the attention it deserves.

And perhaps the last thing I should mention on this topic: it may take awhile to attract links and increase your standing from that, especially if you’ve just created new content. You won’t get counted by the search engine until those links start coming in, so sit tight!

How to Spot a Sleezy SEO

Link requests are nothing out of the ordinary, naturally. But we need to be on the lookout for requests that go above and beyond just an average request. Does the request fall within, say, Google’s guidelines? What does the mighty G consider above-board? Most don’t know these guidelines and thus fall for unscrupulous SEOs.

After suggesting that every webmaster study Google guidelines meticulously, it seems the dilemma revolves around just how to handle these creeps.

Responses from site owners range from apathy (survival of the fittest) to more community spirit (sweeping up Google’s SERPS is advantageous to all of us) to a lukewarm hostility (why do the job Google is supposed to be doing on its own).

I for one don’t see anything wrong with exposing others who put others at risk by benefiting off of ignorance and outright lies. What do you think?