Over the time we have been in business we have had many clients tell us about claims other web design companies have made regarding SEO. Unfortunately most of them are untrue, not necessarily because the companies are deliberately telling untruths, but mainly due to a lack of knowledge by most web design companies. The purpose of this article is to outline a few of the things we have heard and why you should question them.



1. We include SEO in the price for your website.

If a company tells you this, please ask them what they will be doing in regards SEO. In our experience this usually means that they will be making your site ?search engine friendly? which is great, but alone will not get you to the top of the rankings. Any decent web design company will ensure they make your website search engine friendly, so always ask if this is the case.

The main reason why SEO cannot be included in the price for a website is that it is a highly targeted marketing campaign and not a onetime thing. The aim of almost every website is the get to the top of the search results and if it was a onetime event to achieve it then everybody would do it. In order to obtain top rankings you will need to obtain links from other sites along with taking care of the onsite factors. Link building is something that will happen over time and any effective SEO campaign will go about getting links over time and increasing your links. Once you reach the top this needs to be maintained otherwise you will get overtaken.

2. We guarantee you top place in Google.

Always ask what you will be at the top of Google for. If your web address is myname.com and they will get you to the top for the term myname.com then that is easy but is it worth anything?

The other thing to consider here is nobody can guarantee anything with search engines. You can run a really amazing SEO campaign but if all your competitors are doing the same or more who is to say where you will come. Remember if it was that easy that it could be guaranteed, I would go to that company as would everybody else and we would all be guaranteed top spot.

3. Updating your content regularly will get you to the top of the search engines.

This is not completely wrong as sites with new and fresh content, that is also well written, will most probably appear at the top of the search results. However this alone will not get you to the top. As mentioned before you need to take care of the offsite factors as well otherwise you will have no chance.

4. We will get links for your chosen 3 keywords and optimise your site for a one off price.

If you are selecting your own keywords are you doing the research to find the best ones to choose? The company you are working with should be offering this as a service as well. Also find out how many links they will get you and where they will get them from.

There are all sorts of problems with this kind of approach that you need to consider. Will they get you enough links to affect your search engine ranking? If you are in a really competitive field and they are getting you 100 links this will probably mean you are still nowhere.

Where are the links coming from? Are they from high quality sites that will help your ranking or are they putting you into a link exchange with sites with low page rank? On this point, if you are getting a lot of links from sites with a page rank of 0 that are not relevant to your site then they are virtually worthless. If you are doing link exchanges then this is ok but Google will put less weight on these links then they will one way links and some people believe they disregard them altogether.

You also need to ask if they are using your keywords in their linking text. This is really important and one factor that will really help your rating.

This service is not necessarily a bad thing, if done properly but you need to make sure you delve into what you are being offered and don't take things on face value.

In conclusion we would just like to remind you that nothing is free in this world and if you are being offered free SEO services or very cheap ones, take a step back and think about it. How many competitors do you have, if like most of us it is in the millions consider what they are doing. If you can get to the top that easily it means your competitors are doing nothing and letting you get to the top to take all their business. If this does not seem like a realistic option to you then maybe what you are being offered is not as good as it seems.