Search engine optimization can send you a load of free traffic, but if it is not done correctly, it could end up destroying your website. As such, you need to educate yourself, and have a basic idea of what to ask the SEO company you want to employ.
Most People approaching a search engine optimization company are completely oblivious to the dangers of "bad SEO". All they care about is the number of free visitors they hope to attract to their websites. As such, they are completely at the mercy of the people they choose to work with. Unfortunately, a multitude of unscrupulous, uneducated and incompetent service providers are standing ready to take your hard earned cash, regardless of whether their optimization results will stand the test of time.
"Bad SEO" refers to techniques going against Google's rules. These include massive link building campaigns using automated means, and indiscriminate link building . In fact, Google already decided to penalize webmasters for "low quality backlinks" some time ago. At the time, many companies who engaged in bad optimization practices ended up sending out thousands of emails asking people to remove links.
Unfortunately, penalizing you in terms of search results placement is not the worst that can happen. Many webmasters have, over the years, found their websites de-indexed, and suffered substantial financial losses. In fact, many of them who chose to rely solely on search engine traffic, lost all of their income overnight when their websites suddenly "died".
Bad optimization practices tend to produce results for a while, but once Google figures out how those results were achieved, the punishment is usually swift and severe. Unfortunately, by the time the problems arrive, your unscrupulous SEO providers will be long gone, and you will face the consequences alone.
As such, you need to do some reading on the subject before you interview any search engine optimization company. Familiarize yourself with some of the basic concepts such as on-page and off-page SEO, and what constitutes "bad SEO". When you do the interview, ask about their methods. From Google's point of view, the generation of links pointing back to your website has to be natural, and whoever works for you to accelerate your backlink profile will have to take a number of factors into account - including the type of website, the type of industry, the content on the website, the number of people searching online for websites similar to yours, etc.
What you may also want to keep in mind is that Google is paying more and more attention to your website itself. As such, you may want to ask about their techniques for on-page optimization as well.
At the end of the day, search engine optimization can bring you a lot of new customers. Since these people are already looking for whatever you offer, these are high quality prospects. However, if you don't do it "by the book", so to speak, your website can disappear from the search engine results completely - forever.
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