What can you promise when providing search engine optimization (SEO)

If you finally have found out that you need to search engine optimize your website, I suppose that you want to use a service that is “white hat”, or “ethic”, or “following the Google webmaster guidelines“, right? So, you get in touch with someone that can optimize your website, and they says:

We, unlike others, are following the guidlines
We, unlike others, can promise results
We, unlike others, promise that you will be in top still in two years..
and so on…

A lot of search engine optimizers will tell you this. I wish I would like to be able to say the same. But I do not want to lie, so I do not say that.

Let’s break the seo promise down step by step

We, unlike others, are following the guidlines: NOBODY is following the guidlines. If you haven’t read the guidelines, I can tell you that they says this:

Build a site that works, with all onpage seo-rules in mind. This is the easy part.
Do not have viruses or spyware on your site. This is even easier.
Do not build unnatural links to your site, instead create such great content that attracts people to naturally link to your site. This is the difficult part. If everybody else is building unnatural links AND making a great content, how could you then win them with JUST making a great content? Google is not either defining what is unnatural link building, so it is very hard to know if you are breaking this rule or not. The simple answer is that EVERYONE is braking this rule.

We, unlike others, can promise results: This is kind of true. If you have a bad site and someone optimizes it, it will get higher rankings. You will see results.

We, unlike others, promise that you will be in top still in two years: No one can promise this. Google changes their ranking algorithm 400 times a year. Maybe the things you do won’t matter anything anymore next year? Fortunately there are a few things that will never change, so by following these you will not be kicked out of the Google result pages.

So what would I promise when optimizing a customer’s webpage?

You will see results. Most of the websites out there are so badly made that it is almost impossible not to make them better. But they may have to change quite a lot on their pages.
I am not doing “Black hat” optimization. (Black hat is to break the guidelines too much.) Black hat sites often get banned from googles searchresults.
By ongoing work, your website will still be very good optimized in two years. If we can write a long-term contract and constantly keep working with the site, the site will keep being awesome all the time . I like to build for the future, search engine optimization is not a product that you buy and install once. Of course, making the page on-page optimized need to be done only once, and it will probably show results, but for GREAT results you need to keep working a little every month.

So do not just go with the first one that promises you a lot and will deliver it all in one day.

At my company Genero I work with search engine optimization, and we always try to stay ethic in our search engine optimization processes, we would never do anything that could get our customers sites penalized.