Buyer Beware - Do You Know Who Your SEO Experts Are?

I’ve been doing SEO and SEM for over 7 years now and I dedicate A LOT of time keeping up to date on best practices. One of the aspects I am most passionate about is educating people on the capabilities of SEO and SEM as well as what they can expect an SEO/SEM strategy to deliver in terms of return on investment.

Each week, I have the opportunity to talk with many organizations and a lot of time they have already done their home work by researching other SEO/SEM providers. Yesterday was one of those days. I spent a few hours on the phone with someone who had already talked to an “SEO Expert” (not in the recruiting space) and was questioning some of the information they we’re given.

It never ceases to amaze me some of the completely inaccurate information these so called SEO experts are giving out to organizations. Today I wanted to share with you a few of these “untruths”

Two SEO Untruths

SEO Untruth - An SEO provider told me that I needed to completely redo my website because it was done in Dreamweaver. They said that Dreamweaver is not good for search engine visibility, is this true?

My response: This is completely untrue. The use of Dreamweaver in itself is not bad for SEO. In fact, Dreamweaver is a very popular web development tool. It also has some really great features.

SEO Untruth – An SEO provider told me that having my job content on my site was “confusing” the search engines, they suggested putting our jobs on a blog instead.

My Response: Not true, in fact, unless you have technical barriers that are preventing search engines from being able to get to your jobs content (which was NOT a factor in this instance) it would not make sense to move the jobs onto an entirely different URL/website. That other website will just be another online property that you’ll have to devote resources to. When it comes to SEO (Where possible) it’s better to concentrate your time and energy on building one awesome online property.

To Their Defense

Granted I did not talk to these experts directly so I don’t know exactly what they meant by "search engines being confused" or "Dreamweaver being bad for SEO". Maybe they were referring to a technical barrier such as the use of frames or drop down menus and didn’t know enough to explain what the real problem was.

In recruitment, SEO and SEM still remain the buzz and probably will for a while. A few weeks back I wrote a white paper entitled "What C level executives need to know about SEO"

This white paper will give you some important questions to ask potential SEO providers as well as what types of responses you should be hearing back. If ever unsure about what you’ve been told, email me. I am more than happy to provide input based on my experience. SEO in the wrong hands can be detrimental. Just read what happen to BMW Germany a few years back.

Happy Holidays!!!