Author : Thomson Chemmanoor
SEO Coordinator

As an SEO specialist, I interact with several people in our field from time to time. Some of them seem to have mastered effective SEO practice, but most show no interest in understanding safe optimization techniques that will stand the test of time. I’m completely baffled that such mediocrity can exist and it makes me angry that the average person may not be able to uncover it. Well, not anymore.

If you’re paying an SEO firm for quality service, you deserve nothing less. Here are 10 signs that you may be dealing with a bad SEO company.

1) Doing SEO after the site is designed - Most website owners think the site needs the web design finished first and then you do the SEO later on. But, actually it should be the opposite. Before building the website, SEO should be done first.

2) Does your site have a custom “404 error” page? A “404″ is an error message you get when you follow a link to a web page that doesn’t exist. This is especially important from the search engines point of view.

3) Does your site have a robots.txt file? A robots.txt file provides restrictions to crawlers or search engine bots that crawl the website. Since these bots are automated, and before they check the pages of a website, they check to see if a robots.txt file exists that prevents them from accessing certain pages which you restrict from indexing.

4) Duplicate content - If your site has duplicate content within the site like duplicate Meta tags in the title and description, then whoever did your SEO - wasn’t optimizing properly.

5) XML Sitemap installation - Sitemap protocol is a way to allow and inform search engines that your website URLs is ready for crawling. This XML site map file includes a list of URLs of your site. It is also a way to include information about your website pages when it was updated and any changes that have been made.

6) Using Paid Links - Links should be natural and should stand the test of time. Paid links are temporary and once you stop paying for it, the links are gone. A good link is one which is gained naturally when a website editor puts the link on the site. So if the company that is doing SEO buys links to gain immediate search ranking, they are not doing a good job.

7) Doing Reciprocal Link Exchange programs - If you find your website has a link exchange program with a page full of links pointing to other websites, then the person doing your SEO did not do proper link-building.

8 ) Sneaky Redirects or Doorway Pages - This is a black hat technique where the idea is to create a single page for the user and a different version of the page to the user. If your SEO partner is using this technique on your site it is going to get your site banned on search engines since they dislike these techniques.

9) Text Link - Each page of your site should be reachable through a text link. If it is not done, the person who did SEO on your site doesn’t have any idea of what he is doing. This helps search engine bots to crawl through those text links easily and index those pages. Change the link buttons or JS into text links.

10) Over Optimization - If your site is over optimized like repeating the keywords more than two to three times inside the Meta tags H1 Tags, and having a high keyword density instead of a moderate density and not using the long tail keywords inside the content. Also Spamming the ALT tags for images with keyword stuffing is considered a bad SEO technique.

The bottom-line is that if your site has the above signs, it is not going to help your ranking very well and chances are that it won’t even come up on search engine results.

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