I have previously written some remarks regarding the problems the companies can experience with SEO companies. Here are a few more comments that hopefully will be of use to other companies. If you are like us, our administration gets probably about 10 or more solicitations from SEO companies daily, and most of them are from India or other foreign countries. I have no problem with India, in fact, we do side job work with some programmers in India sometimes, and have had a great experience. However, the majority of SEO companies that offer ‘Rank on Page One of Google!” or ‘150 Directory Submissions Per Month!” are wasting your time.

The old days of blasting out articles or directory links are long gone, and can actually hurt your rankings now. For directories, you should pick under 20 that focus on your specific industry along with a handful of nationally recognized company directories. I’m not going to give specific ones other than Yahoo and Open Source Directory, but you can find them with a quick Google search.  Articles are most helpful if they are distributed ‘organically’, meaning that they are interesting enough that others want to share them or post them on their own blogs or websites. The more helpful information that you can provide, the more Google considers you and ‘authority’, and the higher you’ll rank.

After making mistakes and learning the hard way, I think we have hit our stride in SEO and marketing. We are corresponding with social media outlets, sending press releases for newsworthy items, providing information via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and updating our websites with fresh content. The fresh content will show Google that it needs to keep indexing your site (sending robots to visit your site) so that you are visible to Google more often.

Google is now smart enough to see when they are being ‘played’ and the old techniques don’t work any more. It is important that you don’t just send one or two thousand dollars to an SEO company and sit back waiting for a page one rank in Google. You have to follow up on those links closely if someone else is doing them for you. You might be surprised to find that your links are going to worthless link farms that are actually doing you harm.  And those articles that are being written for you? They are probably writing one article based on other articles, then re-wording (or ‘spinning’) the same article to make it ‘look’ fresh to Google. I know it is time consuming to do it yourself, but maybe you should seriously consider hiring someone dedicated to your company that you can trust to look out for your best interests. Good luck!