A good many firms doing SEO work apply a marketing method that turns their SEO work into packages. This situation, which I meet often, unfortunately cannot find a place inside the inbound marketing strategy. Because a working strategy that moves along fixed patterns, and that reads SEO as something done off the site, will of course come to a halt at some point. The fundamental element is the human being, and the work has to be aimed at the human being. The system built by the cleverest people in the world over a rather long stretch of time is not so weak that a cheap monthly package could get past it.
Even where it can, a site that does not deserve it should not come up on a search it has not earned. No site has the right to seize a few minutes from somebody doing research.
Off-Site Work Matters a Great Deal, but It Must Not Be Read Wrongly
Activity outside the site of course matters a great deal, but artificial, manufactured gains will do the site more harm than good. You have to start from the very foundation, from the project and from developing it. Google has put a note like this on its own site about what SEO consultants work on:
- Review of your site content or structure
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
- Content development
- Management of online business development campaigns
- Keyword research
- SEO training
- Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
As you can tell from the points above, it really is a matter of starting the project from the foundation. Package arrangements run against SEO, and unfortunately they also give rise to penalties on the sites that buy them.
The SEO World in 2015
Google knows that SEO is being done through certain sites. The truth of it is this: it uses those sites to find the ones following the “wrong SEO” road. In other words, your site gets added as a link on some site inside the package you bought. Being added to that site is exactly what creates the damage. We run web pages that export, that are trying to win a position on the world's internet. For work like that our most serious advice is to be extremely careful while choosing an SEO consultant. Do not work with people who have no corporate identity, people you cannot go to whenever your site runs into trouble.
SEO Is Too Complex and Too Changeable to Fit a Mould
The strategy may have to change for every sector and every web page. Applying the same package to the same kind of sites, in the same sector, drops the work into trouble you cannot come back from. This package has these services, that package adds this many sites registered with Google News. That is exactly the point: acting on the SEO logic of 5 years ago. As somebody who has followed the development of SEO closely from the beginning, I have to admit I remember the periods when those things were effective. But today no package can deliver progress on a web page unless good work is being done.
When the word SEO was first given its name I objected, and I said it could be mixed up with CEO. In those days I had arguments about the name with the friends of that period on English language forums. On the Turkish internet, I remember saying “how much this sector has grown” when I saw the phrase “SEO consultant”. Back then, of course, everything was of the first order. These days it is far more complex. A good project, and reading “Google Analytics” data well, are both essential.
