Monday, January 23, 2012

Organic SEO Placement Guarantees: Good Value, Or Warning Sign?

As business owners, it's natural to want guarantees covering work. After all, most projects can have a guaranteed beneficial outcome. That's why it's natural to think well of SEO companies that offer guaranteed results: it's a promise that you'll have a good result, right? When you're talking about organic SEO, the answer is a definite no.

Can SEO Companies Guarantee Ranking?

At the most fundamental level, it's just not possible to make any kind of certain declaration about where your company will end up in the results. The reason is simple: no one has control over Google's results, other than the Google algorithm. The same is true for Yahoo!, Bing - every major search provider uses a specific algorithm to determine how they organize what their users see. It isn't possible for anyone to artificially insert your company into that list. What's shown there is designed to be unbiased by definition; any search provider that did anything else would immediately lose credibility.

What SEO companies do instead is make your website as friendly to the known requirements for high ranking as it can be. This means adding keywords, adding content, optimizing code, and much more. But even with all these changes, it's still not an exact science. The exact details of how a particular engine gets its results are not public. It's not as simple as matching a checklist and achieving the desired result. Plus, there may be a lot of competition - other websites targeting the same people you're after, which makes it harder for yours to succeed. In addition, those other websites could have a significant advantage if they've been focused on organic SEO for longer, or are pursuing a more aggressive strategy than you. The bottom line is simple: unless SEO companies do research into specific keywords you're interested in, it's hard to even provide a guess of how successful you might be. Even if that research is performed, it's impossible to really provide a guarantee.

Ways That Companies Can Seem To Offer Guarantees

It isn't possible for any search marketing firm to offer a firm promise of a place in the top results. So how can any of those offering such promises make them come true? Well, some of them just don't. They attract customers based on promises, and then fail to deliver. So many people are looking to the internet for promotion that there is nearly an endless string of potential victims for this kind of scam. That is perhaps the best reason to be wary of guarantees: they may well indicate a company that is dishonest and actually unskilled at organic SEO.

If they actually provide some kind of delivery on their promises, there's a couple of ways to follow the letter of their statement without following the spirit. The most common is to achieve great results on search engines that no one has ever heard of. These may very well be paid engines that no one uses; they could even be maintained by the company itself. Another way is to simply target the least competitive keywords. This is the least dishonest, because it provides at least some possible benefit to you. However, focusing on very non-competitive keywords means they're probably neglecting some of the more competitive ones, which could well be the strongest ones for your individual strategy.

The best SEO companies won't offer you a promise of results. Instead, they'll pledge to do their best for you. They will promise strong tracking, analytics, and quantifiable progress.

Author writes about a variety of topics. If you would like to learn more about organic SEO, visit http://www.customermagnetism.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christine_M_Harrell


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