Earlier today, Barry wrote on a thread over at Cre8asite that details the balance between good user centered design and the ability to maintain rankings. When it came down to it you will ultimately have to sacrifice somewhere and often its hard to reach the right balance of both. Ideally we would all like balance for our sites, we want both the usability of a well planned site to assist in high conversions and we also want high rankings. Not just any rankings, we want a #1 ranking in Google. The most coveted position, and even without any pre-conceived knowledge about SEO you may know that that is the spot to be. Getting to this position might be your goal when contacting an SEO company to do work for your site. I decided today to write an article on some trends that I have seen in the industry that I am not happy about. I have never written openly about such topics but I do feel a need to document some of it. I have started to receive a good deal of emails from people looking for SEO services that were previously burned by past SEO companies. They are confused and want to know the real truth about what is capable for them. They also feel used for the fact they have been paying for services they never received. I run into this so much I kinda expect it now. I see this trend moving towards the turning of larger SEO companies turning into sales organizations who sell just a pre-packaged SEO product. I call these companies, sales effciency organizations. They may or may not charge a lot for these services but they not are ultimately living up to their end of the bargain.
I wrote the article looking at past examples of companies set up to take orders, those that are doing it now, and things that you should watch out for when looking for SEO services. I also wanted to examine some of the tricks of the trade in order to gain new clients. The money that has flowed in the SEO industry and what it's doing to things. Why companies want to obtain big clients to gain smaller clients and the problems with this. I base a lot of this from personal experience talking with people, my own opinions, trends on the forums, and the influx of people I have talked to getting "burned" by SEO companies for one thing or another. Hopefully you might enjoy it.
