When you set up your small business you put your heart and soul into an endeavor that you hope will bring you success on a level of which you had previously only dreamt. So it is understandable that when someone is there to offer help that you know you need they will be met with a sympathetic ear. Bearing in mind the service you know you need is costly and you have only just started up and are struggling to find your feet you could also be forgiven for having your head turned by the cut-price option. But be very careful, because in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) placing your trust in the wrong people can quite literally cost you your business.

The Fundamentals of SEO

Search Engine Optimization in a nutshell is the practice of optimizing your website in such a way as to maximize its exposure via the search engines, and thereby to bring it to the attention of as wide an audience as possible. Even those of us who are not exactly experts know broadly that this entails the correct use of keywords and the practice of accumulating inbound links from authoritative websites with high search engine rankings. There is an old adage which says a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but in the hands of a charlatan SEO expert it is positively lethal.

In SEO there are good companies offering optimization services, like Rex Originals, and there are bad companies. Most of the bad companies know a little about SEO, but they have little comprehension of the spirit which Google in particular is trying to embrace through the constant updating of its algorithms. To put it another way, they understand that having keywords placed on your website will help the search engines to notice your site, but they have no understanding of the requirement for those keywords to be used logically, sparingly, and in the correct context. So they will cram your homepage with invisible random keywords, blended into the background so that they cannot even be seen with the naked eye, and either not know or not care that Google will come down on you and your website like a ton of bricks for trying to get one over on them.

Another stunt the SEO cowboys attempt to pull is directing vast quantities of useless links to your website from their own useless websites, which usually contain nothing of any quality or value but rather just an unsightly sprawl of random low-grade links to completely unconnected sites. Google sees their link farms and associates them with the websites to which they are linked, such as yours, and penalizes both.

Pay for Quality, if Only in Increments

Without doubt you are better off paying for an SEO specialist of proven expertise, even if it costs a bit more. If you can’t afford the service, buy a reduced service if you must. Because in the final analysis half a service that is going to give you half the help you need is a better investment than a whole service that is going to destroy you and all your hard work.