Watch out for SEO scams

If you’ve got a website or you’re thinking about building one, watch out for SEO scam artists. Search engine optimization — a process of building your website to do well for certain search engine searches — is a business fraught with scams and half-truths. There are plenty of people willing to take your money and give you little in return.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the group of web designers who think search engine optimization simply involves putting a few words into meta tags. They tell their clients that they’ve SEO’d the client’s site, when they’ve barely scratched the surface. Other web designers simply pick their own words for your keyword terms without doing any research.

Before you shell out money for a website or SEO, make sure the person you’ve hiring actually understands what SEO is. Ask them how they research terms and what sorts of things they include in SEO. If they can’t provide a good answer, run away.