There are many individuals and seemingly legitimate companies offering search engine optimisation services. Some will appear to be more professional and experienced, which will make the process of deciding who to hand over your hard earned cash to.

To make the task slightly easier for you, politely decline the SEO services of those who claim any of the below!

1: Meta Keywords Are Vital In SEO
This was true in 1998, but unfortunately that era has long since passed! Instead of simply adding your chosen keywords into your websites Meta Data, you will need to gain a glut of quality links from a lot of different sources.

2: Links aren’t that important in SEO
This completely goes against the foundations of Search Engine Optimisation! Links are vital in SEO as they can be considered as “Votes” for your website. The more “votes” your website has, the more relevant it will appear and will gain higher placements in the search engines.

3: Content doesn’t matter, you just need a flashy looking website
In terms of user experience and basic “on site” SEO this is completely wrong! Although a website build in flash or full of fancy graphics may look pretty, search engines will struggle, or not be able to understand what your website is offering the public. If it can’t do this, you won’t be ranked in the organic listings, meaning you won’t be found by potential visitors!

4: You will be ranked #1 in 1 month: Guaranteed!
For long, obscure or uncompetitive phrases such as ” welsh ninja gingerbread men” (which has less than eight thousand matches in Google) gaining top placements in a short period of time is certainly achievable. However due to the frequent changes in the search engine algorithms for ranking websites, no guarantee can ever be given.

5: We can easily get you ranked for “Insurance”
If Google “Insurance”, you will be greeted by roughly 583 million results. Ranking for a term like this one would realistically take years of work without any guarantee of ever really breaking into the listings high enough to actually gain visits! Be careful of definitions for “ranked”, as technically if your website was on page 222 for that phrase, you would indeed be “ranked”, but obviously never be found!