For those who do not make a living in the internet space, search engine optimization (SEO) can be an intimidating and often misunderstood topic. This has contributed to the continued growth of SEO Service Provider  businesses claiming big traffic growth from their services. I’ve worked with and around several of these services first hand, and that’s the focus of this article. If SEO is an unfamiliar term to you see my article explaining it in depth here – SEO for Beginners.

What SEO Providers Offer – A Claim by Claim Review
Claim: No Website Changes Required

A website needs to be built with certain elements in place for the it perform well in a Google search. Things like the title of the page (page title), the description your provide to Google (meta description) are some of the many essential elements that simply need to be on a page for it to perform well. Any service that claims they can help you improve SEO and make no changes to the content on your site, is likely missing a critical opportunity to make improvements.

Claim: Better Performance in the Search Results

Every publisher wants to appear higher in the search results. Everyone wants their product in front of people. Your performance in the searches can be hard to gauge, and monitor. Often you may trade better placement in the search results for one term, for poorer performance for another. There’s really little substitute for creating quality content around the keywords and topics you’d like to perform well for. Then include good site architecture with the required elements in place to perform well.

Claim: Quick Results

This takes time. No single change brings results quickly except maybe search engine marketing (where you pay for your ad to appear in the search results).  For organic  search, your changes will take time to take effect. That is by design, Google and Bing prefer to move slowly to analyze the changes you make. Immediate results are unlikely. What some organizations do is they inject links to your site into many lower quality and unrelated sites to generate increased traffic to your site. That’s like stacking the deck. That’s often referred to as link spamming. The result is low quality traffic, or users which are not particularly interested in your content, visit the site. On paper, your traffic may increase yet a closer look would reveal very little positive impact to your business. It’s important to look at more than increased traffic. This link spamming technique will have a negative impact on your business in the long-term as Google and Bing understand what is happening.

Summary of SEO Services Review

There are many legitimate SEO specialists who can generate more traffic for your website. However, these are never quick fixes. Anyone boasting a quick fix is over-simplifying things. We design, architect, and deliver websites that are structured to perform well for SEO. We walk our clients through the entire process, and include SEO in everything we do because that’s the way a site should be built. We also offer our SEO services for established websites, which often requires us to make changes to how a website’s architecture. Short-term tactics are ill conceived, and have a negative effect on your websites ranking and performance in the longer-term.