Anyone who has spent any reasonable amount of time performing Search Engine Optimisation on a website, be it their own or that of someone else, knows that the practice has a nasty tendency to be a long, arduous process which requires a decent amount of analytical thought. SEO work necessitates a rolling effort over an extended period of time, with an always present prospect that the work you performed yesterday to aid SEO efforts can become detrimental overnight due to the ever changing rules that Google sets out. While ‘cheap’ SEO might exist, in practice it’s about as useful as buying grapes from Greenland.
All to often, web developers will proudly proclaim that they are ‘SEO experts’, and as such they feel confident in making guarantees about #1 rankings, with little extra cost to the client. In practice, their SEO credentials rarely (if ever) make a lasting impact in the websites traffic. Such developers will often resort to spamming inbound links to your homepage, flooding directories and link farms with outbound links to your page, and although Google may take short notice of this, one will quickly find their page rank fall in light of rule changes Google introduces, with little or no prospect to recover. Suddenly, the ‘cheap’ SEO doesn’t seem so cost effective. And those #1 search results? While it is possible, it’s hardly an achievement if only a very small handful of people will ever enter the search term which you’re being guaranteed a #1 result for.
Many web designers, while well intentioned, won’t be willing to conduct the rolling SEO duties that the ever changing landscape of Search Engine Optimisation necessitates. Just in the past year, Google has re-written the rules of the game several times, with an ever greater emphasis being placed on quality, not quantity, meaning that the directories and link farms that have been relied upon by webmasters in the past, are in fact hurting SEO efforts. ‘Proper’ SEO, in contrast, requires near constant vigilance; keeping track of changes in Google’s algorithm and adapting the SEO strategy accordingly. Its safe to assume that few, if any, web developers will provide such attention to detail, especially when you have to consider that they would probably have several other former clients who are in the same boat.
So what can you do? Short of sinking in many (many) hours into research and hard grind, the only viable option to make a good Return on Investment (ROI) on the cost of setting up and maintaining a website, is to get true professionals to perform SEO work. Although it will almost certainly cost more then ‘cheap’ SEO, the results will almost certainly be better, and more importantly, they’ll be longer lasting. The decent and long lasting SEO work performed by companies such as ours (and other professional SEO firms) is done with longevity and Return on Investment in mind. SEO is only worthwhile if its done properly, and ‘cheap’ SEO simply doesn’t deliver.
