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Screwed:
Is this an
Inevitability in the SEO World?
by Courtney Heard
By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a good handful of
clients and potential clients who have been speaking with other SEO firms.
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 will come and the bad guys will be weeded out.
While this is a good sign, it's the cause of my having to answer the same
questļons over and over. 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 Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that
all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly astonished. Below
are some of the most asinine claims I hear through the grapevine.
"We Can Guarantee Your Rankings"
Don't be fooled! Ask the company what you will be ranking for, immediately! 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. Why bother paying someone
for something that is already going to happen, anyway?
Guaranteeing rankings is highly unethical. It is impossible to guarantėe
rankings unless you have access to Google's database itself, and even then I'm
not sure it's possible. Keep in mind, we 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 due
to 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 guarantėe rankings! If someone is telling you
they'll guarantėe top rankings, run fast! Those are some shady, shady claims.
Google themselves have said:
"No one can guarantėe a -#1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO's that claim to
guarantėe 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." - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
An ethical SEO company will not guarantėe rankings. They will guarantėe that
their methods follow search engine guidelines, and they will guarantėe
customer satisfaction, but at no point in time will any SEO company with a
conscience guarantėe your rankings.
"Your Site Needs to Be Continually Resubmitted to Get On and Stay On the
Search Engines"
When will I see the end of this one? How old is this method now? 5 years? 10
years? 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 Rome to Poughkeepsie.
And the good folks at Google will once again back me up on this one:
"Submission is not necessary and does not guarantėe inclusion in our index.
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." - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2
"Meta Tags Are Not Important Anymore"
Sure they aren't. If you don't want a decent ranking on MSN. 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."
"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. We always explain to these potential clients that the
likelihood of someone even having 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.
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 these articles, read info at the search engines, educate yourself and
if something your SEO says smells a little rotten, don't be afraid to call
them on it.
Is being screwed an inevitability in the SEO world? Damn near. 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 this article into antiquity. In spite of my pride, I'd be
overjoyed to see that day come.
About The Author
Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs,
a search engine optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. She has been
involved in web development and marketing since 1995 and has helped start
several businesses since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney's
articles are available at
http://www.abalone.ca/resources/ .