SEO and Web Design Consumer Advice | Dispelling the Myths and Misconceptions

I have come across some pretty sad cases of fraud, deception, malpractice, inexperience, and misinformation propagated by SEOs, designers, hosting companies, and other web professionals. Its easy to say " I didn't say that so I'm not responsible", but any professional SEO worth a salt should not be charging a client to do submissions monthly for a site nearly 100% in the supplemental without at least suggesting a solution! I cannot see financially why you wouldn't, maybe you are too busy you don't need the sales? Or maybe you are fat collecting unsuspecting customers money for useless endeavors without any REAL work!

Today lets talk about SEO, SEM, Hosting, and Web Design myths.

1. Web designers are NOT SEOs in most cases. They will design a website, but they cannot generally make it marketable, nor optimized for search and indexing.
2. Paying a company to submit a website to search engines that has not been optimized is a total waste of money........it's like fishing without a hook!
3. SEOs should not make Guarantees of page 1 search results, its a gamble for EVERYONE!
4. Its fairly unethical for a SEO to promote more that one website in the same genre, as they will be competing for the same market and results.
5. You cannot add words you wish to be searched for to a keyword tag and they will magically be connected to Internet users. You will be searched by the densest terms on your page according to relevancy, or phrases you have paid to be searched by.
6. It is not the job of your hosting company to handle duplication and canonicalization issues. If a bunch of your pages get dumped in the supplemental index because they are seemingly duplicate, then many times there is a canonical issue.
7. If you build or have a website built and publish it on the Internet, it is not automatically going to be indexed by the search engines. It must meet a minimum set of standards and accessibility.
8. Even with an SEO your site will take several weeks to months to begin to perform as you might like in the search engine results.
9. Your web designer, nor SEO, is necessarily responsible for writing a great deal of custom text for your website. That responsibility is yours, or you can hire a copy writer.
10. Pay Per Click and keyword bid search results will not continue to rank your site after you stop paying, that is NOT SEO and has no residual effect. SEO on the other hand builds an organic platform for search engines to rank and place you based on merit, relevancy, and mechanics...which can be very long lasting.
11. Don't get locked into a long commitment with an SEO, 6 months for a newly launched site is sufficient. By then they should put up or shut up. If your site is already in trouble, it may take longer.
12. You can do serious damage to your own site by adding your link to places without checking with your SEO first!
13. When you find a designer for your new website or redesign, ask them for a few examples. The run them in this tool, if they cannot score 8.5 or better keep looking. Pay close attention to speed, broken links, and html errors.
14. Search engine Marketing is NOT Search Engine Optimization, but rather SEO is part of SEM. SEM is the total package, the advertising, SEO, development, design, every element for the consequent success of your website.
15. Generally, unless you negotiate otherwise, your websites structure and code will remain the "intellectual property" of the web designer as an industry standard. I urge you to register and maintain the registration of your OWN Domain.
16. It is NOT good to hire a company to submit your website to search engines and directories though automated processes. Find an SEO or company, pay a little more, and have manual submissions completed...even if it is not as many, they will yield a far better success rate.
17. You cannot have several Domains, pages, addresses, or websites making use of the same content. This is called duplication, it is not allowed.
18. It is not a bad idea to have your SEO's work checked out by another SEO, or in a SEO forum occasionally to verify no spam or illegal techniques are being used that will damage you reputation and ranking ability.

I hope this is a helpful piece for consumers moving into the Internet with a new or existing presence, maybe even just beginning to consider it. Unfortunately there are a great deal of less that ethical designers, SEOs, SEMs, and webmasters out there.....making some very dedicated and conscientious ones look bad. If you are a consumer reading this and you have a question about your project, or planned project please feel free to contact me and I will do my best to answer your questions. Not a sales pitch in any way....you may leave a comment also if you don't mind sharing.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"



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