If you are a business owner, you have almost certainly had your inbox slowly (or maybe quickly) filled with e-mails that offer you “guaranteed #1 search engine rankings” or other SEO-related services for a spectacularly low fee. For most people, those calls and e-mails rightly trigger the little voice in their head yelling “Too good to be true!”
So why write up this little warning article? Because even the most well-meaning individual can occasionally get sucked into some shady situation, agreeing to pay some third party to get their site “hundreds of one-way links!”, to “submit their site to hundreds of search engines!”, or even get “Guaranteed #1 ranking in Google and Yahoo!”. Don’t get me wrong – there is nothing wrong with hundreds of one-way links to your site, hundreds of search engines including your site, or #1 search rankings in Google and Yahoo. The problem is with the likely quality of “work” the propose combined with the fact that nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google or Yahoo.
If you have looked at my article on backlinks, you’ll recall that links from relevant, authority sites affect your rankings better than just any ol’ link. So when you are offered hundreds of one way backlinks, are those REALLY going to be hundreds of one-way links from authoritative sites related to your industry? Odds are that those links will be from entirely unrelated sites that carry no authority on any topic, let alone the ones you want to rank for. It is entirely possible that you could work on getting links from a handful of quality domains and be better off than with the hundred links.
“That might be true,” you may be asking yourself, “but what could it hurt? The more links the better, right?”. That is not entirely true. There are sites and groups of sites that Google deems to be “bad neighborhoods”. Google does not tell you which ones are bad, so it is left for webmasters and SEO-folk to weed out sites that seem fishy when they are link-building. These bad neighborhoods are often easy to get links on, so you might find that your “hundred links” are coming from shady sites. If Google sees that a solid majority of your backlinks are from bad naighborhoods, you run the risk of getting labeled as a bad neighborhood yourself and possibly getting penalized in search rankings as well. So to answer the earlier question – Dealing with shady SEO shops can hurt plenty by negatively impacting your search rankings.
What about the #1 Search Ranking guarantee? Due to the complexity of search engine algorithms today (not to mention any manual ranking that may go on by hand), no individual can read a Search Engine’s mind (so to speak) and guarantee that you will come out on the top of the pile. Even in the case where there is little competition and you ought to be a prime candidate for that top spot, things can go awry. Guaranteed #1 rankings should be the first indication that an SEO “Company” is trying to sell you snake-oil.
What are some other indicators to watch out for?
• E-mail that comes from a free e-mail domain (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com, etc) rather than a company domain (such as leapfrogseo.com). Most people with a legitiimate SEO service have their own website (and domain), so that is where communication should come from if they are legitimate.
• Initial communication that is vague and sounds more like a form-letter than a genuine message. Note the excerpt I give at the beginning – if somebody took the time to determine that I’m not showing up well in search engines, they could also take the time to send me a real e-mail.
• An initial e-mail that just says they can get you “hundreds of links” or submit you to “hundreds of search engines”. If I am going to help a company out, my primary concern is to drive meaningful traffic to their site – traffic that will either result in increased sales or increased corporate/product awareness. Getting links and submitting to search engines are often part of that but they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
This is all just a brief overview of what to look out for when you see ads or get e-mail concerning SEO or website promotion. I’m sure there are perfectly legitimate companies that will contact you out of the blue offering their services, but most legitimate ones will avoid setting off the red flags I’ve mentioned here. If you have any questions regarding SEO offers, you are always welcome to e-mail me or call!
Tags: Basic SEO
Perhaps one of the hardest things that an individual or small business needs to do when starting into the realm of website promotion is to find places to link their site. Recognizing opportunities for backlinks is something that can be hard at first but with practice can become second nature. So for somebody who has never done such a thing before, where do we begin?
For many companies, the answer to that question is right under their nose – many advertising outlets in radio and print give their advertisers a little blurb on their website as a bonus for advertising with them. In the world of traditional archery, for example, there is a bimonthly magazine called Primitive Archer. On their website,www.primitivearcher.com, they have a “Current Advertisers” page that lists each company name – for companies with websites, each one is a link. Should you happen to be an advertiser in this magazine but never mention your website to them, you are missing out on a link.
This same situation applies in the agriculture industry with (using another example) a publication calledFastline – if you advertise in their print version enough to meet their minimum requirements, you get unlimited equipment entries on their website. And while you can’t link to your website from each equipment entry (I’ve tried), each one DOES link to your Dealer profile page where you CAN have a link to your site. The ultimate result in this case does not give many links to your site, but it could lead to “foot traffic” as potential customers click through to your profile and head on to your site.
Keeping with that idea, there are similar sites in the ag industry that DO allow you to link home from each piece of equipment you list; some do so intentionally (very nice of them) while others either do not notice or do not care. In those instances, if your company happens to have 100 pieces of equipment to list you could potentially end up with 100 links to your site, pointing to whichever page you desire with whatever text you desire. Which sites are those? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. If you end up stumped you can e-mail me for clues 
Back to magazines! A good number of magazines nowadays have forums (message boards) where their readers can share their thoughts back and forth online. It helps foster a sense of community around the publication which is good for both reader and publisher. If you visit these forums, read their rules on posting messages, and follow a few of the longer conversations, what you will probably notice is that current advertisers in the print publication are the only ones allowed to post links to their own sites. At first this might not seem important (after all, who wants to just sit and talk about your own site all day to try and get links?), but fortunately there is more to it than that!
For those unfamiliar with forums, a standard feature is that you can have a signature automatically attach to every post you make. It can be something simple like your name or a quote, or something more complex – like a web URL. In our case, you will find that many magazine message boards only allow their advertisers to put links in their signatures. Advertisers then end up with a link back to their site every time they post or reply to a message, so the more you talk the more links you get. You’re basically getting “paid” to talk. (Note that this situation can apply to other, information forums as well. Many such community forums freely allow links in signatures so keep that in mind)
So back to our initial question – Where do we begin? Begin by checking out your existing advertising options. Do your magazine ads qualify you for a free spot (or spots) on their website? The same goes for radio stations, though it is not as common from what I’ve seen. Do your print classifieds qualify you for free online classifieds? Do you regularly contribute to discussions on forums that allow signature links? Hopefully by the time you finish checking out these link opportunities, you will have a better understanding of what to look for elsewhere. Before long, the possibility for links will become one of the first things you see when visiting a new site.
In simple terms, backlinks are links on other sites that point to yours. How do they relate to the search success of your site? They are responsible for bringing you traffic. Of the three types of traffic your site can receive (direct, referred, and search), they contribute to two: referrals and search traffic.
Traffic from referrals is an obvious one, when you think about it. It isn’t difficult to imagine somebody surfing another website, finding a link that points to your site, and then following that link to your page. Consequently, the more links you have the more referrals you are going to get. It also makes sense that backlinks on popular sites would send you more traffic than low-traffic sites due to the sheer number of people that will see those links.
It is the effect on search traffic that many people do not understand. As far as search engines are concerned, links are essentially votes that indicate your popularity. The NUMBER of links indicate how popular you are, the text of those links tells them WHAT you are popular for. Search engines use that information to determine what searches you are relevant for and they rank you accordingly. The more quality links your site has, the easier it becomes to rank for searches (and get traffic from those searches). You can think of this using a real-life (though probably imperfect) analogy. Think of a search engine spider as a new student at a strange high school. One of the first things every new student does is start working on the Who’s Who of their new school. As they meet different people they start to find out about them, as well as others in the school. Some guy in the hallway believes that Thomas is the best football player in the school. But according to actual members of the football team, Rich plays that role. A geeky looking fellow would have you believe that he is the resident chemistry genius, and he is able to back that up with in-depth conversation. And though you would not have known by just talking to him, you find out that almost the entire student body that Mr. Thompson is an amazing juggler.
Search engines gather data, catalog, and rank sites using a method that seems to mimic real-life social interaction. Links from relevant domains (the aforementioned football players) generally carry more weight than links from random sites (guy in the hallway). Content rich sites that do an excellent job covering their topic (chemistry geek) generally end up carrying some amount of authority for that topic in the eyes of search engines. And if a large number of websites continually indicate that a site relates to “XYZ”, search engines will begin to return that site as a result for “XYZ” searches. Keep in mind that these are just a few examples, and they are generalities – each will have exceptions.
So how does all of this apply to your website? If you want to help your website rank well, what you are looking for are backlinks from multiple sites that are related to your field (the more popular the better). Referrals you get from those links will constitute a more focused group of visitors than those from unrelated sites – which leaves you one step closer for converting those visits into sales. And after seeing numerous relevant links, search engines will begin to include your site in related search results.
This all begs the question, “How do I go about getting more backlinks?” That will require it’s own blog post…
Before starting any SEO work on your website, there are a number of planning issues that need to be taken care of first. Perhaps the most important choice to make is what keywords you want to focus on. What are keywords? Basically stated, keywords are what you want your website to be known for. This is likely different than what you want your COMPANY known for. Keywords for your website are a list of words and phrases that you want search engines to associate with you. They provide both the goal and the groundwork for the rest of your SEO work – they are our plan. If there is no keyword list to work from, there will not be any focus and any results will be too diluted to have any real effect.
When considering search results, the problem for most sites is that their general keywords are (initially) very difficult to rank for. If I start a new website and ultimately want to rank #1 for “John Deere” in search engines, I have a LOT of work to do before traffic starts finding my site for the search term “John Deere”. In the meantime my traffic may be very minimal. But if I start with specific keywords, it is relatively easy to start ranking well early on, even if it is only for a small subset of traffic, because there is less competition for specific keywords. If you start ranking for a HANDFUL of specific keywords, you soon end up with a respectable amount of overall traffic. Specific keyword phrases might be “John Deere 7630 tractor”, “John Deere 7030 Series tractors”, “John Deere tractor parts”, and so on. Each phrase contains something more specific than just “John Deere”. You’ll note that the specific keywords also contain general keywords you may want to rank for: “John Deere”, “7630 tractor”, etc. So as you are working on traffic for your specific keywords, you are also working on traffic for your general keywords. As time goes on, it becomes easier to rank for your general keywords, because part of the work is already done.
Once you have a list to work with, you need to make sure that those keywords are present on your website. Odds are that many of those words are used very little, or are absent entirely. Using your new keywords effectively is more complicated than just putting a big list of words on your site. Search engines nowadays are intelligent enough to know whether you are actually DISCUSSING something, or merely listing a bunch of words together. Usually this is the stage where we start to see what changes need to be made to existing pages, and what new pages need to be created. When you write, don’t just write for search engines. Write content for your customers.
Tags: Basic SEO