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I have opinions about most everything. From time to time, I'll try to share some of the most useful of them with you here.


SEO Consultants and Other Charlatans

October 15, 2014

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about raising your rank on search engines. There are thousands of "Consultants" who promise to raise your Google ranking. I know that there are some companies that can work with you to do that, but that's going to cost a good deal more than the $10 - $50 a month that the companies that approach you are charging. For the rest of this article, let's call those people Search Engine Scammers, or SES's.

Your Google ranking is determined by a sophisticated set of algorithms that try to determine how relevant your site is to different search terms ("keywords"). SES's are basically trying to "cheat" those algorithms to deliver a high ranking. Some of the techniques they use include:

If you are a potential client of mine, the odds are that you are a local business or organization. You're in Iowa, not New York City, and you probably don't have pages worth of local competitors. You don't need a huge Google ranking to be found by your customers. If you have your business on Google's local database (currently, that 's Google+), you already have a good start.

Still, you can take advantage of the above-mentioned criteria with a moderate amount of work on your part:

In other words, use your strengths, assets and experience to make your site more reputable and more useful to readers. If you do that, your search engine rankings will improve without tricks or cheats.

2030 Dubuque Road

Iowa City, IA 52245

info@dawoods.com

voicemail: 319.338.7753

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