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It's sometimes challenging to know what exactly to do when you're trying to get your site ranked in the search engines. You'll hear a lot of advice, some of it actually good, but how do you know what to listen to and what not?
Unfortunately there's no easy answer. Most of the SEO advice you see comes with a price tag, that is, someone wishing to sell you something. SEO is one of those things that morph as time passes, and there's no certainty that what worked a year ago has any chance of doing anything for you now. Worse, it could hurt you.
So instead of raise the white flag of surrender, let's look at 5 SEO services we know no longer work, so you aren't tempted to spend any of your precious marketing budget on them.
5 SEO Services to Skip
1. Anything starting with Y – Specifically, Yelp, Yext and the YellowPages. We'll give Yahoo a pass for the time being. These companies all wish to help you get a more robust presence in local search, but the reality is they are having a tough time remaining legitimate themselves. Get listings and reviews the old fashioned way – earn them!
2. Avoid search engine submission services – You can do this on your own, and the thing is is you really don't need to. The search engines, especially Google, prefer to find your pages by themselves. Just focus on creating great content, and announcing it via your social media platforms, and the hard work is done. Not so hard, right, and it was free.
3. Don't spin your content and shoot it out all over the web – One time someone thought that since a little content was good, a lot would be better. Doesn't work that way. This was the basis for the recent Google Penguin update that purged the internet of many sites containing duplicate and spun content.
4. Don't build link farms – Farms are great, for food. Thinking you will game Google by building linkwheels and site pyramids is a fools game. This did work for a time, but that was a long time ago.
5. Don't buy links – Google knows if you purchase links, and the best you will achieve from that is that they won't do you any good; the worst, well, you won't be able to find your site in Google. Enough reason? Thought so.