After spending the better part of everyday working on optimizing my website, adding content, building links and trying to please the search engines, it makes me mad to check my email and see another company offering guaranteed rankings. These emails often claim that for a certain amount of money they will get your site to rank number one for the keywords of your choice. Just give them a pile of cash and a few months and they will get you that #1 ranking no matter how competitive your field. Here four reasons why no one can guarantee rankings with the search engines...
1. No company can guarantee anything from the search engines except the search engines themselves. There are certainly things that you can do to help your site in the eyes of the search engines. However, at the end of the day there are hundreds of factors that influence your ranking with the search engines. No company can control all of these factors.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO for short) can be a long and grueling process. Sometimes you can see results very quickly. However, more often than not the results take months to show up. This is especially true for markets or keywords that are highly competitive. There are companies out there that spend millions of marketing dollars each year trying to get rankings for certain highly competitive keywords. There is no way that paying a company a few thousand dollars will guarantee that you will rank higher than the big boys.
3. Search engine rankings are based on algorithms that take into account a whole bunch of factors including: inbound links, page content, meta content and the age of the page in question. There are ways to subvert some of these factors and trick the search engines. However, tricking Google and trying to manipulate search results is a very bad idea. If and when the search engines discover your sites deception it is quite likely that your site will be removed from the index. Being removed from the index means that all of your rankings and probably most of your traffic will disappear. Before you try tricking the search engines you need to make sure that you consider the potential consequences of your actions. Can you really afford to get your site banned from Google?
4. Anyone who does search engine optimization on a regular basis should know all of this. Companies who try to tell you that they can guarantee your results either don't know what they are doing or they are simply lying to you in order to steal your money. Either way, they aren't the people that you want to trust your business to.
If you need help getting rankings in the search engines, there are lots of reputable search engine optimization companies that are out there. However, you need to make sure that they are up front and realistic with you about the potential for results as well as their methods. In the world of SEO rankings are never guaranteed but hard work usually pays off.
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