Of all the questions I get, this has to be one of the most common. The answer is a fairly straightforward no. Saying no to this question tends to immediately be followed with a “Really?!” or a “Why not?!”. Plainly and simply, SEO is not spam. The reason it has this sullied and festering reputation is down to the constant battle between those offering knowledgeable and valid search engine marketing service and those “selling snake oil” as Google’s Matt Cutts says.
An SEO expert’s job isn’t a cut and dry case of doing the work and leaving; it’s a matter of regularly working with your client to adapt to their organically changing needs. Search engine marketing – and this is true in London and all around the world – is a toe-to-toe game of wits between the black hats and the white hats, that clichéd trope of Hollywood westerns.
When I describe someone as a white hat, I mean that they are legitimate search engine marketers. When they offer an SEO service, they deliver. They are people with years of experience that want to help companies to market themselves more successfully on the Internet. White hats are the good guys and they are offering a real service with real results. But wherever there are real SEO experts, there are the scammers and the spammers and those are the black hats.
The black hats have no real understanding of search engine marketing and how to market a company successfully. They peddle false hopes and lies, opting to fool companies into thinking that they are getting a comprehensive service. In reality, they’re getting a lot of hot air and carbon dioxide. They have companies spending hours on end needlessly cramming the meta-keywords on the promise that it will boost the company’s ranking; they encourage the business to create hidden text boxes on the website that are crammed with repetitive keywords. All of these sly and underhanded methods are what has created this bad reputation for real search engine optimisers.
So many businesses and brands out there are being duped by these people that the real experts are being treated as shady underworld kings sat on mountains of ill-gotten cash. The reality is much different. There are certainly a fair number of snake oil salesmen out there. But these people are not SEO experts; they’re selling spam. These people sell false hopes to businesses and they manipulate them into thinking that they’re getting an expert solution to their search engine ranking requirements.
Search engine marketers help search engines to find pages naturally. They do this using organic keywords, semantics and their experience in SEM. Finding a true SEO expert can be a challenge, but the end results can pay huge dividends. I have years of experience in helping businesses to strengthen their rankings in the search engines, both inside London and beyond. To get an honest consultation on how I can help your business, you can contact me here.
Paul
