Some web companies offer SEO services that are pointless or harmful to your site.

Submitting to the Engines

Paying to have your website submitted to major search engines is pointless, especially if it is already in the search index. Search engines will naturally find and index your site when they follow links. If you have no links to your site, you’d most likely not get any rankings even if your site did end up in a search engine’s index. In addition if your site is already in the search index, resubmitting it will make no difference in your rankings. It is easy to get a site indexed by the search engines.

Making Dynamic Pages into Static Pages

Dynamic pages take longer to get indexed than static pages; however, search engines will index dynamic pages – contrary to the beliefs of some major SEO companies. This is obvious. Dynamic pages show up in search results all the time. If your site has dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters, more than three, it can be useful to have those URLs changed into static URLs. But for most sites, the time and money spent to transform dynamic pages into static pages is not worth it – especially if your dynamic pages are already in the search index. It is best to include some static pages and wait for the rest of your pages to get spidered.

“Black Hat”

Mirror sites, gateway pages, keyword stuffing, and excessive cross-linking are not effective SEO strategies. They have moderate success in Yahoo! but they don’t work well in Google, and search engines are continuously working to filter out pages using these tactics.

Keyword Rich Domains

Buying a keyword rich domain is not totally useless, but its effect is overrated. Search engines probably put very little weight on keyphrases in a domain name, although there may be some indirect benefits to having a keyword rich domain name.