SEO & Social Media Marketing

If anyone tells you that they can manipulate Google or other major search engine rankings – don’t believe them.  Miracle SEO services are right up there with offers to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.  The fact is that Google’s ranking algorithms are a closely guarded secret and change constantly. There are plenty of ways to game the system but Google will always catch them and impose severe penalties – up to and including de-listing.

One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content

The right approach to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to follow the rules and adhere to good design principles.  In Google’s world “content is king”. There is no substitute for well designed, error free pages of useful and unique content. Most of your site’s placement in Google is based on INBOUND links to your site, not some  magic formula on yours.

The Round Mountain Group follows the Google Webmasters Guidelines building every site to be “search engine friendly.” We employ a suite of automated tools to monitor listings, generate coded sitemaps for search engines and to keep the right search engines coming.  We also take steps to keep hundreds of unwanted search engines away.  There is no good that can come from being listed in directories in Russia or China, for example.

We will design and manage social media campaigns for you and integrate them with SEO tactics and PPC advertising.

We are also experts at designing and targeting “landing pages” to support specific campaigns.  In addition we offer sophisticated A/B analysis of homepage and landing page content to support marketing decision making.

We’re not in the business of offering bridges, but we will work with you to make search engines a valuable asset.