Planning to out source

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I am planning to out source my SEO and one company has caught our attention, they propose this:

Article submissions

Directory submimssions

Blog post comments

Social bookmark submissions

Press Release submissions

The above sounds a bit spammy, however the success they have had with such activity with other websites has been fantastic.

Please let me know your thoughts

[EGOL]

The above sounds a bit spammy,

I agree.... I hope that my competitors are signing up for this.  I hope that they all buy six-packs.

however the success they have had with such activity with other websites has been fantastic.

lol.... Right!  The penguins are loving it..  

[RyanKent]

Please let me know your thoughts

My thought is....MOVE FAST! More specifically, run as fast as you can AWAY from any site like that.

Here are some questions to consider:

1. What is the name of the person who will be working on your site? If a company cannot tell you, there is a good chance they do not know. Many companies advertise SEO and other services and then simply outsource the work to India, the Philippines or other areas for $3/hr.

2. Ask where the work will be done. What is the address of the office where you can stop by and visit? It is ok to work with a SEO consultant working out of his home, but you probably want to know that information up front. My main concern is outsourcing to foreign countries where the work is usually exceptionally low quality.

3. The services mentioned above...I would not accept them for free. They are far more likely to damage your site (i.e. penalize the site) then offer any benefit in the long term. In the short term you MAY receive a ranking boost but I don't care about varying anchor text or other such nonsense. These activities are black hat seo, they will get caught in time and will likely cost you tens of thousands of dollars to clean up, or force you to abandon your domain.

Focus on activities which build REAL value for your customers. A solid SEO plan is:

A) Focus on your website architecture. Ensure the site is built with best SEO, HTML and security practices. Provide single sign-on, valid code, automatic internal linking, a quality 404 page, etc etc.

B) Focus on creating BEST ON THE WEB content. Anything you write should be better then the top articles which focus the same keywords. Try to make the internet a better place for having your site in it.

C) EARN links. Collect links that cannot be "built" but must be earned.

It sounds like you are looking for a cheap way out and you are about to quickly find out just how painful it is trying to steal rankings from others with black hat tactics.

[RobertMackey]

The methods you are quoting above do not add something to any particular campaign, i would prefer you added them to something value of some sort.

Blog post comments within industry settings can always be usefull along with article submissions but all of this needs to be controlled rather than spammed so you can have an overall reach with the methods that you are using.

Press release Submissions are valuable but again need to give the user added value to what your actually talking about. I,m hesistant to think the kind of press releases you can spam weekly, that will get you what u desire as opposed to an industry related release that might somehow give someone added knowledge that may induce a lead, a sale or otherwise

Strategy is key to the above campaign and i hope you plan accordingly either way

Cheers ROb

[matbennett]

Oh, I bet you are going to get some good replies to the above here:)

All of those things can actually be quality. However if the proposal is based around those then they are unlikely to be - as they are all cheap, easy "bulk" methods. Exactly the sort of thing that has cause many people to come unstuck this year.

I'd be wary of any claims of success based just on those methods to be honest. Sites using those methods can rank for competitive terms. However in the current climate they are often ranking despite those methods not thanks to them.

[Matt-Williamson]

No mention of any on-page optimisation or strategies and the use of blog post comments I would be very careful if I were you....