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How to Get Your Fair Share of the Search Engine Lovin’
(while avoiding falling prey to the scammers)
By Judy Schaefer & Mona Pennypacker
You’ve received the unsolicited emails, and maybe even the telemarketing calls, offering to put your website at the top of the search engines with their SEO services. You want people to find your website, but who are these yahoos, and can they help you?
Conning small business owners out of significant monthly fees for search engine marketing has become a popular racket. And because few people understand how the search engines decide who to rank on page one, it’s hard for business owners to know if the service is worth paying for or not.
First off, the telemarketing and unsolicited email campaigns are almost always scams. A search engine optimization "specialist" who pressures you is not legitimate. Anyone who says they can put you at the top of the search engines in a very short time is also not reputable.
Why? Let me explain.
The search engines all want to provide their users with the most useful results they possibly can so that people will keep coming back. The conundrum is how to determine which are the very best websites on a particular topic. Search engines judge the relevancy and importance of a website based on two main factors: what the site says about itself (on-page factors), and what other sites on the web say about it (off-page factors).
The search engines reward websites that provide lots of good content to users and that are well regarded by other websites. And they mercilessly punish websites that try to artificially manipulate them to achieve better rankings. The truth is that it takes time and effort to build a website that will be seen as valuable to search engines and users. So any search engine marketing services promising a quick fix is likely to spell trouble.
Any SEO marketing firm soliciting your business must be willing and able to explain their techniques to you – how they accomplish their results. The on-site work that needs to be done includes adding lots of valuable content, and optimizing pages for the keywords that have been identified as popular for your topic. Basic search engine optimazation marketing includes using the keywords in the text on the pages, in the header tags, the title tags, text links, and the meta keyword and description tags.
The other half of the search engine equation is the off-site work, getting other websites to “vote” for yours by linking to it, thus recommending it to their customers. One of the standard ways to do this is to submit your websites to directories that index useful resources for their readers. There are many general-purpose directories, like the Yahoo Directory (www.yahoo.com) or the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), and there are also many business directories and even some specific to your industry. Some a free and some charge one-time or annual fees. Another common way to acquire links is to contact other websites that are related to your own and offer to exchange links with them – in essence, each recommending the other to its readers.
If a search engine marketing company does not explain their methodology to you in a form that resembles some of these techniques, be very wary. If they start talking about JavaScripts, redirects, cloaking, doorway pages, keyword “stuffing,” or anything that doesn’t sound like a routine thing for businesses to do to make their websites more useful to actual human visitors, then do not do business with them. If they avoid your questions and do not clearly explain what they do, also do not consider hiring them. Walk away.
You see, the risk involved with using unscrupulous techniques to manipulate the search engines is not just wasting your money and failing to see the results you’d hoped for. The Google gods are punitive (and the other search engines too, that just had a good ring to it). If they catch you trying to manipulate them they will actually ban your site from their listings altogether, permanently.
It does take a concerted effort to get top search engine rankings, and getting help from a profesisonal firm is the easiest way to go. So when looking for a reputable search engine marketing firm keep in mind that they:
- will be willing and able to explain their techniques to you;
- will show you examples of their accomplishments;
- will not pressure you;
- will not offer search engine submissions as the solution;
- will only use techniques that will offer value to your customers or subscribers, nothing “black hat”
Mona Pennypacker and Judy Schaefer are partners in Interactive Studios, www.i-stuff.com, a Fort Collins, Colorado internet marketing firm, where they’ve been helping businesses cultivate their online and print identities for 8 years. They can be reached at 970-221-1269 or 877-767-2203, or info@i-stuff.com. Please send us your Internet questions and ideas for future articles. |
