SEO is a growing industry, and it seems that every day there is a new Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore in the game. However, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable: staying abreast of the knowledge curve can be daunting, and getting up to speed even more daunting.
In addition, there is a wide variety of tactics, “safe” and “unsafe” practices (in terms of penalty risk), and other important business considerations that you should think about before choosing a Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore in particular.
The following is the first in a three part series that provides a list of questions to help you determine if the company you are considering deserves your trust. In this installment, we will focus on the tactics that search engine optimization companies could use to put your website at risk of penalizing or eliminating major search engines.
Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore
“Do you show the search engines something that a visitor does not see?”
There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called “cloaking”. In simple terms, these companies use technology that allows their website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and then feeds that specialized content designed to be ranked in the search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of all major search engines. The sites that are caught concealing are routinely removed from the engines. Therefore, depending on your risk tolerance, you may want to find a Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore that does not employ this tactic.
“Do you create pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not integrated into my site’s navigation?”
Another common technique used by some search engine optimization companies is the creation of “entry pages”. Since the term “entry page” now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names for such pages: “gateway pages”, “bridge pages”, “pages” specific input, specialized content pages, “and so on, however they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalty, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS Of all the major engines, if your potential Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore does not give a definite “no” to the previous question, you may want to look elsewhere.
“What is your link building methodology? Is it automated and is it directed to reciprocal links?”
Quality search engine optimization companies are concerned about obtaining quality inbound links to your website because the “popularity of links” is an important factor in rankings. If the main actors in a possible Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore tell you not to create links, it’s time to laugh, call them lazy and move on.
Because finding quality links on quality sites takes a long time, many search engine optimization companies have tried to automate the process. An undesirable approach to link building is the automated reciprocal link scheme, which often responds to ubiquitous emails that are sent to anyone with a website, looking for link exchanges to increase the popularity of a site’s links .
The danger here is that an outbound link from your site is counted as a “vote” for the site to which it is linked. If that site is penalized, your site may be penalized in turn. (Google refers to this type of relationship as a “bad neighborhood”). A good Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore will focus, instead, on obtaining inbound and quality links on your website, and will add the type of content that makes it worthy of non-reciprocal. Links from a variety of sites.
Do you use hidden text or hidden links?
Search engines, as a rule, do not like it when a website shows them content that is not designed for a visitor to see. However, there are search engine optimization companies that will use hidden text (text of the same color as the background color of a page or hidden text behind a graphic, for example) to try to increase the relevance of that page and, therefore, ranking of the page.
Other search engine optimization companies will use hidden links, which typically have a size of up to one pixel, leading to dozens, or even hundreds of pages that are not designed for visitors to see, known as inbound pages. This is another tactic that, if discovered, can remove a website from the search engines. If you are reluctant to this type of risk, make sure that the Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore you are considering gives you a definite “no” in response to the question.
Have you ever penalized a client’s site? If so, when was the last time?
Many quality search engine optimization companies, at one time or another, have penalized a customer’s site, either by a change in the TOS of an engine or by supervision of some kind. If the Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore you are talking to tells you that a site has been penalized, but that was many years ago, this may not be so important. But if the company tells you that it caused a site to be penalized last week, you should quickly get a cross and some garlic and run screaming in the opposite direction.
While these questions do not cover all potentially dangerous methodologies, according to my experience, search engine optimization companies do not usually use a single illegal trick, and one of the tricks in their arsenal is almost certainly mentioned above.
If a Search Engine Optimization Company in Lahore gives you many evasive answers to these questions, it can give you an idea of the type of company you are dealing with. Unless you are comfortable with the risks associated with previous tactics used by some search engine optimization companies, I suggest you look for another provider.
