Any small business with a website will no doubt have come across SEO experts who make several claims, in fact I even get emails from these people several times a week.

Before you spend your hard earned cash on an SEO service it’s worth bearing in mind the 6 points below, what ever you do if the “expert” matches two or more of the points below we would strongly suggest that you walk away.

It is important to note that all of these points are based on the Google guidelines that you may or may not have heard of and that can be read here.

1. We guarantee first place rankings 

   No one can guarantee this, at least for any phrase that is even slightly competive (actually gets searched for). There are many reasons for this including the fact that Google updates their ranking criteria at least once a day on average (back in 2012 there were over 500 changes, not all of these were major changes of course) and the fact that your competitors are more than likely to be working on SEO themselves.
   
   I don’t, and never will, promise any client 1st place in the search engine results. I promise to do my best but will not guarantee any particular rankings. 

2. We submit your site to 100’s of search engines 

   Yes, there are probably 100’s of search engines but if you are based in the UK you know that the market is divided effectively into three – Google is by far the largest with around 87% of all searches made with the rest made up of Bing and Yahoo.If you think of it, which search engine do you use? Which engines do your family and friends use?In fact, there is not even any real need to submit a site to Google, they are more than capable of finding your site from links to it (and there are other methods that can be used if you need to that any decent SEO professional would be able to tell you – for example you can visit the site with the Google Chrome browser and as long you have the right settings Google will track the visit and log it so that it looks at the site later).

   I will use my experience to get Google to read the pages of your site as quickly as possible and often manage to get this done within a few hours.

3. We know someone working at Google. 

   While it is possible that an SEO firm might know someone working at Google it is extremely unlikely and even if they did, would the Google employee risk losing their job just to get your website a better ranking?
   
   Sadly, this is not something I can claim, although I do follow the announcements from several senior Google employees and try to work out what it is that they are actually meaning. 

4. We are Google algorithm experts 

   Google has over 200 factors that they use in their algorithm and as mentioned above the weighting of these factors changes frequently. While experienced SEO professionals may know which of the factors have historically played a large part in web pages ranking there is the possibilty of this changing in the future – a good example of this is the so called “meta keyword tag” which until 2005 was a big factor until Google announced overnight that they were ignoring the tag.I don’t claim to be an expert but with an experience of over years in the SEO field I like to feel that U understand the most important elements of the algorithm.

5. We will work for free

   If you are running your own business do you work for free?

   If you decide to use me for your SEO I may offer an initial consultation for free or even a short period of SEO at a reduced rate. Please do not expect me to work for hours and hours on your site for no cost.

6. We have a secret method There is nothing really secret in SEO, it’s down to understanding the rules and working to them. If anyone claims that they have a secret method the chances are that they are doing something shady that could end up with your website being penalised in the results.

   
   I promise that I follow the Google guidelines and will not do anything “black-hat” that might damage your site.

Please note that I will only work on the optimisation of websites where I honestly believe that I can make a difference to both the rankings and, more importantly to the business that the website belongs to.  You should also realise that optimisation is not an overnight process and that it can that weeks, if not more to get decent results.