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Recently our company was
approached by one of our clients who held in his hand a printout of a form
letter he had been spammed with that read as follows:
Hi,
I recently visited your website, “www.abc123xyz.com”,
during a routine
survey of sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance
through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Efficient SEO brings
an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of
use to you, if not then I
So, here's a summary of my findings on your site:
So, here's a summary of my findings on your site:
- Your Google Page
rank is 0/10
- You have 0/10back-links
- Your website has 0/15 pages indexed
I'm going somewhere with all this... I wanted to do my homework and research your website because I want to show you that I have applied some research to your website before contacting you with my proposal. We are in the business of offering 3 benefits for your website:
1) Diagnosing and fixing all issues with your website
- You have 0/10
- Your website has 0/15 pages indexed
I'm going somewhere with all this... I wanted to do my homework and research your website because I want to show you that I have applied some research to your website before contacting you with my proposal. We are in the business of offering 3 benefits for your website:
1) Diagnosing and fixing all issues with your website
2) Ranking your site
to the top of the search results
3) Significantly
increasing your online revenue levels.
Let me know if you would like to further information by email or we could schedule a call.
Let me know if you would like to further information by email or we could schedule a call.
I look forward to your feedback
Now we provide positioning
reports to our clients on a monthly basis and we meet with them frequently to
discuss what is working and what challenges we have. We try very hard to
educate our clients, but despite our efforts, we find clients can still be
deceived.
A case in point is our client's
reaction to this spam letter. They asked
us if there was any validity to their
We went on to point out that
not only was the email a form letter, it failed to point out the following very
important items:
1. The
2. The message did not mention any “keywords” that you would be ranked for.
3. Any reference to where the firm that sent the message was located.
4. The method or methods they intended to employ to rectify the situation.
5. What they discussed was on page SEO and did not mention off page Search Engine Marketing.
6. They also did not mention that SEO only accounts for 25% of the search ranking and that Search Engine Marketing thru blogs and the Social Nets account for the other 75%.
7. In this instant, the spam letter just used a bunch of lies to make the client question reality! Their website was listed at the top of Page One
Here's what Google has to say about hiring & SEO vendor.
The crux of the matter was
that whoever sent the spam that caused our client to go into a panic attack did
not care that their message was not only inflammatory, but that it was entirely
a lie. They were simply Phishing for a
response, any response from which to gain a toehold in order to try to get a
prospect to fork over a credit card number.
And far from being surprised at these tactics, I myself am routinely
bombarded with email and phone calls from sales reps purportedly from Google
who want to make me aware that my site is not on page one. Does
this scenario sound familiar to you?
Google Does Not Have a Sales Force
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| Google Search Coupon: 1 FREE Google Search (Photo credit: Bramus!) |
What Every Business Needs to Know About Search Engine Optimization
If you go back to the year
2000, all that the search engines looked at in order to tell how sites ranked
was contained on-site. Face it, back in
2000 there were no such things as blogs, social networks and streaming
video. Heck, it could take a minute or
more to get graphics to load properly if you were using a dial-up account. So all the search engine spiders had to look
at was your website. Well, we’ve come a
long way baby. Today, only 25% of what the search engines look at is contained
on-site. The majority of SEO criteria
consist of such things as backlinks, blog posts, social posts, and videos. Not only do the spiders look to see whether
these items are present, they also determine the relevance and the quality of
posts. This along with frequency, whether or not the posts have been commented on and if they have been
re-posted to the social sites. These make up the bulk of the important factors
in. What this means is that it isn’t
enough to sport the logos for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ on your site, you
also need to feed them on a regular basis.
What SEO Means Today
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| Google search page on the 40th anniversary of ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
·
Content is
king. The days of “Set it and forget it”
are over. If you want to get into the
game, you need to blog on at least a weekly basis and you need to post to the
social networks on at least a daily basis.
·
The Internet has
become a multimedia broadcast network.
If the only thing your website has to offer is prose, you aren’t going
to be taken seriously by either the Google Bots or your intended audience. You need to add podcasts and/or videos to
your site on at least a monthly basis.
( Weekly is even better.)
·
Your blogs need
to be more than extended tweets. If you
don’t provide the readers with valuable articles to engage them, why would they
read your blog at all, much less tweet or re-post it?
·
You also must
ally yourself with other bloggers and social media publishers if you hope to
generate any kind of audience online.
The last thing you want to wind up doing is spending time and money
building a billboard in the desert.
In short, if you want to get
off the bench and into the game, you need to make online content creation a
priority. This means either feeding the
system yourself, or hiring either an individual or an agency to do the work for
you. Just bear in mind that outsourcing
a job that requires weekly blogging, daily social posts, monthly backlink
building and video/podcast production is not going to come cheap. Anyone telling you they can get you on Google
page 1 for $99.95 per month is just going to take your hundred bucks a month
for as long as you would care to pay it.
A minimum of $1,000.00 per month is a more realistic figure, unless you
are going to do at least some of the work yourself.
Top 10 Questions to Ask Any SEO Firm
Even spending a $1,000 a
month doesn’t mean that you are going to jump onto page one overnight … if
ever. If you are considering hiring the
task out, here are ten questions you need to ask.
1. Where is your company located and how long have you
been doing SEO? ( Ask for their phone
number and business address.)
2. What are your fees and what will I get for the money?
3. Does this fee include copywriting of blogs and social
posts? What else does it include? (backlinks , videos)
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| English: |
4. Can you provide me with references for current
clients? (Do you have any video testimonials?)
5. What kind of performance guarantees do you offer and
can I get them in writing?
6. How long is the contract and how long will it take to
get my business on page one?
7. What happens if you fail to deliver results? What is
your guarantee!
8. How do you determine the best keywords for my
business?
9. What kind of reports will I receive and how often will
I receive them?
10. Whom do I call if I have any questions or needs during
the time you are in my employ?
If any company that wants to
work to optimize your site can’t tell you precisely what it is that you will be
getting for your money and they can’t provide you with the phone numbers and
address for at least 5 satisfied current clients, then they do not deserve your
consideration. Also, be wary of offshore
firms since it is nearly impossible to get any kind of refund should they fail
to deliver the goods. Also, beware of
long term contracts of one year or more. Many
automatically renew and they put the onus on you to continue paying without any
appreciable quid pro quo in terms of results with the SEO provider.
The bottom line is that if
you are serious about maximizing your online results then you only have three
possible options. Number one: you
are willing to invest the time to get the job done right on your own. This means
spending lots of time creating and posting lots of content. This will take a huge amount of time and
effort on your part. Number two: You
are willing to do part of the work yourself and outsource the rest. Or number three: you outsource all the
work to a reputable firm that has all the tools necessary to complete the task.
All three will allow you too can reap the rewards that come with having organic
page one search engine visibility. If
you’re outsourcing, just remember this. You are hiring a technician, not a
magician and results won’t be instantaneous, it should take one to three months
for your pages to show up. If they aren’t,
then you need to choose a different firm.
So the next time you get a
call or an email from someone purportedly associated with Google, hit them with
the first few questions in the list above and see how often you get a
legitimate response. I’ll bet that 99 times out of 100 they will either say we
don’t work for Google or they will just hang up. Either way, you are now armed
with the necessary knowledge to find a legitimate firm that can help you get
the job done right.
That's my opinion, I look forward to reading yours.
That's my opinion, I look forward to reading yours.
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Hector Cisneros is the CEO or Working the Web to win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web To Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”
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