There are no Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guarantees, only good practice. There is no silver bullet or shady tricks that will shoot your site to the top of the search engine rankings. It's as simple as that. I would advise caution if any company or freelancer guarantees SEO success, unless of course they come with a 6 or 12 month plan.
SEO used to mean putting a few bits of text, key-words or phrases in place on your site, getting a few links to your site and the rest would fall into place, with no further effort and no further thought.
But since search engines continually update and refined their ranking algorithms, that all changed. Search engines now rank sites a lot differently, and add weight to the type of links you have to your site, and the quality and relevancy of the content on your site. So called "black hat" techniques will kill your site and rightly so. Why should a site without decent content go to the top of the rankings ahead of a site that has?
Remember, search engine sites are companies like any other. Even massive companies need satisfied customers. Search engines need the best, most relevant sites at the top of their search results, otherwise their users will look elsewhere. So those terrible, irrelevant, content-light sites get punished. It just makes sense!
So what is the new “formula” for SEO success? Substance + Relevance + Shares = Success!
Today your website, blogs, and social media presence have an actual chance of out-ranking your competition under multiple searches, and this is where the new SEO practices will have their day.
Substance: Substance means a complete base of a few things: Content, content and, oh, more content. Part of the new formula is content creation, and yes, this means content that is relevant to your business and your potential customers.
Relevance: Without relevance, your SEO efforts are dead in the water. We cannot manipulate rankings no matter how hard we try, our business is not that of ranking, but of being relevant to those who search for the answers they want or need.
Shares: Today’s link building is not as serious a struggle as some SEO “experts” would have you believe. Forever it was link to this persons high traffic page and if they linked back even better, not so today. Social sharing and citations are the cause for serious linking success.
Sharing content not only promotes successful linking, but also creates a couple things that are far better, trust and credibility.
Sharing content that others will in turn share themselves, creates trust. When people do click a link and follow you through to your website, blog, or your social media page, it is all about the trust and credibility you are building with them and the search engines.