I currently have my (SEO/PPC/Web Design) outsourced to (India/China/Phillipines). Isn’t that good enough?

Outsourcing is a great concept, and one that I have employed many times (and will continue to do) for certain tasks. However, trusting your livelihood to someone uninvested in your success can be a danger, especially since the American consumer is unlike any other shopper elsewhere in the world. Many people use outsourcing because it is cheaper, and provides a service they do need. Unfortunately, you do get what you pay for in the way of untargeted, foreign, and unprofitable traffic, banning from search engines for ancient SEO techniques that are now considered spammy, and high PPC bids because the landing pages are not optimized correctly.

PPC? SEO? What the heck does that mean?

PPC – Pay Per Click advertising. If you’ve EVER searched for anything on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or nearly any search provider in the past 10 years, you’ve undoubtedly seen the “Sponsored Links” at the top of your search results page. Sometimes, these are an excellent source of quality sites, and other times, they can be a disappointing list of questionable spam traps. It’s my job to make sure that you stand out as a reputable, valuable site in those Sponsored Links.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. Up until the past couple of years, it was relatively easy to “game the system” by using known techniques to trick search engines into believing that your page was better suited for recommendation when a certain keyword was searched for. Fortunately, this no longer applies. Search engines are becoming less like machines and more like people when they index and crawl web pages. Black hat techniques like camouflaging text, keyword stuffing, and doorway pages are things of the past. User experience is king in the SEO world, and if your current SEO company suggests otherwise, please run as far away as possible. The old techniques are not only invalid, but will quickly result in a ban from the major search engines, spelling death for your website (and, likely, your business).

Okay, so, I used one of those self-proclaimed “SEO Experts”, and now my site is banned. What happens now? Is there any hope?

In recent times, Google has seen fit to give site operators a second chance, and allow a banned site to be reinstated. It will, however, take a LOT of triage work to get your site back in Google’s good favor. Content must be updated, offending SEO work should be removed, and an extensive overhaul is probably the best bet. The quicker these issues are fixed after the initial ban, the more likely you are to be reinstated.