There’s no denying the fact that SEO specialists can help you increase the traffic to your website and earnings from it. Having high search engine rankings for your targeted keywords will help your site consistently get more visitors, which will result in more customers or clients for your business. Whether your business is entirely online or you have an offline business with a website, it’s very important to utilize SEO strategies for it.
A true SEO expert will increase your sites rankings, traffic, earnings, and overall visibility on the internet. The work they do should give your site more authority and higher search engine rankings. And it should be done using safe methods so the results stick long into the future.
Considering the fact that you are reading this right now there’s a good chance that you already know all of the stuff said above. However, you might not know that there is a HUGE difference between ethical and unethical SEO practices. And choosing the wrong one can have a massive negative impact on your business for a long time! Be very careful.
I think it’s important to specify what I mean when I say “unethical” practices. I’m not necessarily referring to anything that is illegal, although I suppose some of it could be. What I am talking about are certain shady tactics that some SEO services use to temporarily boost the search engine rankings of a website. These are often called “black hat” techniques.
The good guys on the other side of the spectrum practice what are usually called “white hat” techniques. There’s also a grey area in between that both sides sometimes journey into. But that could be a whole other post in itself, so I won’t get into it right now.
Typically a black hat search engine optimization specialist will use various tools and software to blast backlink “spam” to your web site. They may even use other tricks to try to fool the search engines into giving you high rankings. Sometimes they will even use software on your site to make the search engines think that it has more pages than it really does.
These things can give search engines the impression that your site is more of an authority in your niche, which can quickly boost your rankings. Basically they are trying to use any fast and easy tactic they can to achieve high rankings. They don’t worry about the long term affects of it or who they might hurt in the process.
If you don’t know any better then you might very easily be tempted to use these techniques or hire an SEO company that does. Fast and easy rankings sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, there are some very important things that you need to know before you go out and hire one of these unethical blackhat search engine optimization specialists, or end up doing it yourself…
For starters the results of these unethical tactics rarely last very long. They are almost always short term and can often do more harm than good. It’s sort of like a never ending game where the black hat SEO specialists create or find ways to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms. It works for a while until Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines realize what they are doing and put an end to it. The sites get buried so far down in the results that they will most likely never be seen again, or they get completely de-indexed and rendered useless.
What this means for you and your business is that if you hire a person or company that uses blackhat strategies they might give you very quick results, but it won’t be long until you are right back where you started — Or much worse! Thus making it a total waste of your time and money, and potentially ruining everything you have built up for your business on the internet.
It’s pretty easy for these guys to market their services and make them look good. They can advertise something like “Rank on the first page of Google in one week” or whatever, and can even deliver on their promises a lot of the time. However, what they don’t tell you is how disappointed you will be when your rankings drop and never come back.
Another thing you may not realize is that a lot of the strategies these black hatters utilize are completely taking advantage of other site owners that are trying to run their own businesses. They blast them with spam links, steal the content they worked hard on, abuse their sites, and sometimes even completely ruin their businesses altogether. Basically they bring hell upon these innocent people that are actually trying to play by the rules and run a legitimate online business.
I’ll just come right out and say it in case you haven’t figured out what I am getting at here… Stay away from anyone that practices black hat SEO techniques! Do NOT hire them and do not let them do anything for your site. I just wanted to make that very clear in case you have any doubts about whether or not you should.
Their services might work well for a while and you might even get great results very quickly, but they won’t last. In fact, they can end up doing a LOT more harm than good in the long run. Your site could be de-indexed, banned, dropped so far down in the rankings that you’ll never be able to dig out, or anything else along those lines. It’s simply not worth the risk!
So, in summary, it is very important to know how your search engine optimization consultant works and the strategies they use. With ethical or “white hat” techniques the results may not show up quite as fast, but they will last much longer, and they aren’t nearly as risky. For any business looking for long term results it will be much more effective to hire an ethical SEO specialist.