It’s oftentimes challenging to know what exactly to do when you’re trying to get your site ranked in the search engines. You’ll hear a lot of advice, some of it actually good, but how do you know what to listen to and what not?
Unfortunately there’s no easy answer. Most of the SEO advice you see comes with a price tag, that is, someone wanting to sell you something. SEO is one of those things that morph over time, and there’s no guarantee that what worked a year ago has any chance of doing anything for you now. Even worse, it could hurt you.
While it’s true it can be almost impossible to keep up with SEO unless you’re working in it, there are several SEO services that have outlived their usefulness. Let’s look at 5 of them.
5 SEO Services to No Longer Buy
- Anything starting with Y – Specifically, Yelp, Yext and the YellowPages. We’ll give Yahoo a pass for now. These companies all want to help you get a more robust presence in local search, but the reality is they are having a hard time remaining relevant themselves. Get listings and reviews the old fashioned way – earn them!
- Avoid search engine submission services – You can do this yourself, and the good news is you really don’t even need to. The search engines, especially Google, prefer to find your pages by themselves. Just concentrate on creating great content, and announcing it via your social media platforms, and the hard work is done. Not so hard, right, and it was free.
- Don’t spin your content and shoot it out all over the web – One time someone thought that since a little content was great, a lot would be greater. Doesn’t work that way. This was the basis for the recent Google Penguin update that purged the internet of a lot of sites containing duplicate and spun content.
- Don’t build link farms – Farms are great, for food. Thinking you will game Google by building linkwheels and site pyramids is a fools wager. This did work for a while, but that was a long time ago.
- Don’t buy links – Google can tell if you purchase links, and the best you will realize from that is that they won’t do you any good; the worst, well, you won’t be able to find your site in Google. Enough reason? Thought so.
