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I work for an online company. I am trying to improve our ranking among the major search engines and directories. I've noticed many companies that "guarantee" this and that, and in my research I've found that some of these companies are legit, and some operate in a less than desireable manner.
My question is this: is there a "blacklist" of sorts to help me from getting into trouble with directories/engines? I do not wish to have companies get spammed with our name attached to it. Some of these services help improve your site's structure, some serve an xml feed to engines, others seem more concerned with meta tags, etc.
what's the best? the worst? thank you! :)
John
Here is a really good discussion we had recently regarding search engine optimization guarantees [webmasterworld.com] given by SEO companies.
There are two ways to get ranking within the search engines, and two different things that will happen, in my opinion:
1) Use techniques that are seen as spam to get into the engines and rank well.
Risk and After effects: You risk having the site thrown out, the domain banned, and losing the ranking and traffic. Too much risk.
2) Optimize the site properly, emphasizing content, or themes, or site structure and navigation, internal and external linking, PageRank, link popularity, meta and HTML tags, Title tags, keyword density, etc. Everything!
Risk and After effects:Risk has been eliminated, and although you may have to wait a little bit longer to see results, the site will get longer lasting results and usually higher ranking.
That is an excellent thread, it was very informative. I do not wish to use shady, spam methods. Also, my IT and programming department is too bogged down in other projects to optimize the site inhouse. In addition to that, there are people and companies who are expert optimizers, and we are willing to determine who will do a good job for us.
I realize there can be no suggestions or names mentioned in here, but the info provided in that thread should help to point me in the right direction.
this is a great message board, by the way!
