10 Web Professionals You Should NEVER Hire

June 12, 2012

by Hadassah Levy

  1. SEO marketers who promise too much. Find someone who actually understands the complexity of the industry and doesn’t promise unrealistic results.
  2. The over-optimizers. These are the SEO pros who stuff keywords, put way too much code on your site and worry about the anchor text of every inbound link. If your website is over-optimized, Google is targeting YOU in its newest Penguin update.
  3. Inbound marketers who think it’s a good idea to buy links. Google spends a lot of resources trying to eliminate the link building industry and you don’t want to be penalized when they catch you.
  4. Marketers who want you to compete against Coke (or whoever the biggest brand is in your market). You need to define your competition correctly before you can start marketing. Compete against similar sized businesses and focus on your exact niche so you can be seen and heard.
  5. Social media “experts” who are only concerned with follower counts. Social media is about branding, conversation and community. A Twitter account being followed by hundreds of bots is pretty useless.
  6. Marketers who give you a list of what you need without researching your organization and niche. There are tons of online marketing channels out there, and your consultant should choose the best ways for you to get your message across. Marketing is about defining your message, finding your audience and communicating with that audience. It has to be individually tailored to each organization.
  7. Social media professionals who talk to themselves. They post updates about their company or organization but never engage, only retweet/re-share  content or spew a feed. Or they use so many hashtags that nobody can actually read their tweets.
  8. Web designers who create logins and passwords on your site and don’t share the info with you. You should always be able to control your own website. You should never have to walk away from a domain name because you want to switch designers.
  9. Web designers who are stuck in a time-warp. They design entirely in Flash or try to cover every inch of white space.
  10. Secretive people. Any web professional who doesn’t explain to you exactly what you are paying for should not be trusted. You should have a written agreement stating what services you are paying for before you shell out a dime.

Working in the internet marketing world since 2004, Hadassah Levy is a principal at i-Point Media Group. She has experience working on platforms such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Joomla and Drupal. At i-Point, she specializes in social media, content writing and SEO.