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This an absolutely wonderful thing to see,
as in the past in our industry, not enough
of our consumers were questioning what they
were purchasing. It is a sign that
accountability is on its way and the bad
guys will be weeded out.
While this is a good sign, it does cause my
having to answer the same questions over and
over again. The consumers in the SEO world
are being fed out and out lies by some of
the people who call themselves experts in
the area of Search Engine Optimization. They
hear these lies and, while comparing prices,
contact us at Audette Internet Solutions.
They then proceed to tell us everything that
all of these other companies have promised them
and I am utterly astonished. Below are some
of the most ridiculous claims I have heard
through the grapevine.
Lie #1
"We Can Guarantee Your Rankings"
Don't be fooled! Immediately ask the company what you
will be ranking for! 9 times
out of 10, a company that guarantees you
rankings, is guaranteeing that you will rank
for your own company name, which means
people on Google or MSN or Yahoo! would have
to know your company name before searching.
How does this produce new customers and
visitors to your site? Chances are, as soon
as these search engines index your site, you
will rank within the top ten for your
company name, if not first, because it is
unique. So you are paying someone to get
something that is already going to happen,
anyway!
Guaranteeing rankings is highly unethical.
It is impossible to guarantee rankings
unless you have access to Google's database
itself, and even then I'm not sure it's
possible. Keep in mind, you the customer and
we the SEO company are working with a 3rd
party. A highly guarded 3rd party that
doesn't, under any circumstances, reveal
it's secrets. No one outside of the
companies that run these search engines
knows what it is exactly that makes search
engines rank sites high. Especially because
of the fact that these search engines and
the rigorous ranking filters they use to
spit out search results change almost
monthly! Even a former Google employee
doesn't know how to guarantee rankings! If
someone is telling you they'll guarantee top
rankings, run away from them as fast as you
can! Those are some very shady claims.
A Google representative has said:
"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on
Google - Beware of SEO' s that claim to
guarantee rankings, or that claim a "special
relationship" with Google, or that claim to
have a "priority submit" to Google. There
is no priority submit for Google. In
fact, the only way to submit a site to
Google directly is by using the page at
http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
You can do this yourself at no cost
whatsoever."
An ethical SEO company will not guarantee
rankings. They will guarantee that their
methods follow search engine guidelines, and
they will guarantee customer satisfaction,
but at no point in time will any SEO company
with a conscience guarantee your rankings.
Lie #2
"Your Site Needs to Be Continually
Resubmitted to Get On and Stay On the Search
Engines"
When will this one end? How old is this
method now? 5 years? 10 years? (The World
Wide Web is only 11 years old!) We're
talking about the days when Webcrawler was
the biggest search engine and all computers
were beige! This claim is so fully untrue,
had Pinocchio uttered it, his nose would
have stretched from Boston to San Diego. And
the good folks at Google will once again
back me up on this one:
"Submission is not necessary and does not
guarantee inclusion in Google. Given the
large number of sites submitting URLs, it's
likely your pages will be found in an
automatic crawl before they make it into our
index through the URL submission form. We DO
NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and
cannot predict when or if they will appear."
Lie #3
"Meta Tags Are Not Important Anymore"
That is true if you don't want a decent
ranking on MSN and Yahoo. The new MSN search places a
lot of value on the keywords and description
meta tags. Without these tags in your site's
code, your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just
as importantly, if your keywords and
description meta tags don't use proper
language, your rankings will suffer. The
description tag is also what MSN uses as the
visible description for a site in the search
results. And of course, to prove I'm not the
one blowing hot air, this is what MSN
themselves say about it:
"Site descriptions are extracted from the
content of your page each time MSNBot crawls
your site and indexes its pages... the best
way to affect your site description is to
ensure that your web pages effectively
deliver the information you want to see in
search results." Ignoring MSN search
means ignoring approximately 72 million
searchers every day.
Lie #4
"Your Web Site Has Been Sabotaged"
This one is truly unreal. I can't believe
it's even been used as an excuse for why an
SEO company hasn't achieved decent rankings
for you. But alas, more than one SEO company
has told potential clients of ours that the
reason they are not ranking well, or why
their search engine optimization campaign is
not effective, is because someone else has
been sabotaging the site. Some of the
clients who have been told this are small
businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet
sitters. Now in order for someone to even
have the initial idea to sabotage a web
site, the site in question would have to be
a fairly large one, and the target of a lot
of hatred. Why? Because sabotaging a web
site's rankings takes a massive amount of
time and energy. We're talking months, maybe
even years of hard, hard work. Why would
anyone devote months or years of their life
to taking down a pet sitting site? Or a bed
and breakfast?
Once again, these are some hefty claims and
it is a clear sign that the company who is
running your SEO campaign is unwilling to be
held accountable for their actions... or lack
thereof.
What should you do? DON'T PUT UP
WITH IT.
The bottom line is, your search engine
optimization company works for you. You
are paying them. Hold them accountable as
you would any other vendor. Keep reading
articles in the paper and on the Internet,
read the info at the search engines, educate
yourself and if something your SEO says
smells a little rotten or seems
questionable, don't be afraid to call them
on it.
Is being taken advantage of an inevitability
in the SEO world? Maybe. But thanks to the
increasing interest of our consumers in
self-education and their increased
questioning, our industry will slowly climb
out of the gutter and someday down the line,
send an article like this one into
antiquity. In spite of my of the work it
took to put this online, I'd be overjoyed to
see that day come when I can delete this
page because it is no longer needed.
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