If you'll allow me to stretch an analogy; SEO promotion is like a car. Although it has neither wheels nor a distributor cap, SEO aims to get you where you want to be whilst providing a striking public image of you on the journey.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I buy a car I have a pretty clear idea about what I'm looking for. I may not know the size of engine, colour of paint job or even the manufacturer I'm looking for; but I know what I need that car to do for me and what would be a nice extra.
Above all, I need a car which will get me to my destination, reliably, repeatably and keep doing so for long into the future. Offer me a cheap car which is going to have to go in for repairs every couple of weeks, and may not even be roadworthy next year and the brilliant price doesn't matter - I really and truely don't want it.
Aesthetically, I need a car which won't embarass me. A car which looks clean and presentable so that it does not reflect badly upon my abilities or my business. Sure, it may not be an accurate reflection - but it's one that a lot of people make. Are you going to hire the lawyer who turns up in a rust-bucket, or the one in a well maintained volvo?
On top of this, I have the things which would be desirable. Cost comes in here; I don't want to spend more than I have to in order to comfortably meet my needs - but this means lifetime cost of ownership not just initial costs. Safety of the model and inbuilt safety features are desirable. So too is ease of maintainance - I don't want to have to drive for hours to find a mechanic able to understand the brand-new fancy and foreign engine.
Now; switching back to websites - choosing your SEO strategy is just like choosing a car. You need to choose a strategy which which is going to work reliably, repeatably, and long into the future. You need to be sure your strategy won't mean getting slapped by algorithm changes, spam filters or similar and having to keep adapting. Most of all, you need to be sure your strategy won't get a serious penalty applied to your site, not now, and not in five years either.
So far it seems logical; you need to get good quality work built upon solid techniques that are not likely to break down in the future. Now, the presentational aspects of SEO are played down by many SEO consultants. "Nobody will ever go to your links page", "these automatically generated blogs aren't on your domain, it's OK", "nobody will notice you have links from all our other clients, to whom you also link". Bullshit. Presentation does matter - and things off-site or hidden in corners matter just as much as those on the front page. I'm sure you've ended up on spam blogs, search pages and been presented with blocks of unrelated manipulative links. If it's hit you, it's hit Joe Public, your customer. What did you think of the site where you found those things? Third rate? Outdated? Spammy? All three, most probably - and that's something your business needs to avoid at all costs. And that's not to mention the opinion the search engines form of you...
Now, when you choose your SEO technique, don't choose the one which offers fast results at the expense of long term reliable performance. Don't choose the cheap option which will mean having to revisit your SEO regularly to strip out whichever abuse has been detected and replace it with another newer 'trick'. And finally, don't allow your SEO consultant to do anything you wouldn't happily do in the middle of your homepage.
SEO, ladies and gentlemen, is not about tricks to get your pages to rank well. It's about making your pages into pages which deserve to rank well. When you see it that way, the con-artists of the SEO world with their alluring black-hat tricks are easy to filter out.
Alloyfish
