It’s common knowledge these days that getting found online and Search Engine Optimization are important keys to expanding your business. Almost every company, whether B2B or B2C, is trying to find their place in the new online communities. There seem to be endless opinions on what to do and how you should do it, but how do you avoid scams that penalize you with the search engines?

The only guaranteed way to get to the very top of search engine results is to pay for those positions. Following the best practices of search engine optimization and investing the time and care needed, you can get to those top positions organically. One of the most widely agreed on contributing factors is link building. This means cultivating connections and building links from other websites going to yours.

This is where it gets tricky. There are many, many websites that advertise that they will provide a link to your site if you simply submit your url to them. It seems easy right? Submit the url to several of these sites and gain the benefits of the incoming links. But this is where it goes wrong. While this may seem like a simple solution to the problem of finding links, it can actually penalize you with the search engines. Many engines (including Google and Yahoo) see these “link farms” as a kind of SEO spam so to speak. If they mark you as part of this spam, it can actually hurt you a great deal in getting to the top of the results.

The truth is, when it comes to link building with SEO, there is no shortcut. Each link to your page has to be a legitimately earned link. This shows the search engine spiders (that crawl the web and rank websites) that you are a legitimate, trustworthy website. Tricks and shortcuts won’t help to get you to the top of search engine results, but can land you at the bottom.

So to really improve your website and get found online more easily, don’t fall for the tricks of websites advertising to make it so easy. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Build connections, create relevant content for your site and get involved with social media as it’s appropriate to your business. Be true to your company and your products and create content that is interesting to your customers. If you do those things you’re destined to rise to the top of the search engine results – no tricks or scams needed!

Written by: Kelsea L