If you have a website, there is a good chance you’ve gotten “The SEO Sell”. This is usually a random email that claims your site does not rank for a term, and (coincidentally), the person who sent you the email can correct that. This information can often send CEOs or CMOs into a frenzy.
Even as the President of a Search Engine Marketing firm, I still receive them:
Dear Website Owner,
75% of WEB SURFERS searching the Internet will never find your site unless you’re located on the first page of Yahoo, Google and MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 7 times more WEB traffic to your online business by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?
Our company is on the first page when you Google our primary search term “SEO Company.” How would you like us to do the same for your web site so you can come up for your primary keyword search phrases as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical Search Engine Optimization processes that will not get your site penalized in any way.
This special SEO program includes:
No setup fees
No long term contracts
Guaranteed increase in traffic
Please reply to my email and I will be delighted to supply you further information.
This email may look familiar to many of you, and I have seen the same one many times. I hope if you are reading this site, you know not to fall for this scam. There are some red flags in this email, and potentially others that come into your inbox.
1) Generic “Website Owner” intro Personally, my bio is on my website. Any human that goes to my site can find my bio. This “person” is clearly a spider who crawled the site, found an email address and sent an automated email.
2) Generic First Paragraph It claims 75% of web surfers will never find my site unless i’m on the first page. This is an arbitrary percentage, but a claim of increasing traffic sevenfold is very specific. Other than this baseless claim, there are no other specific. So if I have 1 visitor, will they increase it to 7? Big deal…
3) No Transparency They claim to rank on the first page for “SEO Company”, but never say what their company is!! In fact, the company name is nowhere in the email.
4) No Set Up Fees For most sites, the set up is a long processes with a foundation in business goals, competitive research, reverse engineering rankings and creating page by page recommendations based on the findings. For a big site, this can take weeks. If there is no set up fee, that speaks volumes about the amount of work going into your site.
5) No Long Term Contracts An optimization program is about long-term success. An annual contract is usually necessary to maintain top results. 6) Guarantees Finally, and I’ll scream this from the rooftops, RESULTS SHOULD NEVER BE GUARANTEED. I’ll say it again: results should never be guaranteed. There are too many variables outside of the website owner’s hands to control. The only thing that should be guaranteed is your Search Partner’s experience, past results & methodology.
In conclusion, look for two big red flags that let you know something shady is going down:
1) Guarantees
2) Lack of Transparency
If you see these two, delete the email immediately. Don’t let the spammers win.
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Good seo management post. Definately a looooong term strategy
Nice blog.
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Hi there!
I’ve been doing a lot of research online lately regarding traffic and Search Engine Optimization since I just opened up an website with a couple of buddies.
The content of your WordPress blog is awesome and I’d really love to exchange links with your website. Have a look at our website if you want, we put a lot of work and effort into it and are dedicated to improve it constantly.
We receive a lot of hits already (contact me for visitor stats) and I think both our sites can benefit from one another. Anyway, just thought I’d share my thoughts with you – keep up the good work and contact me if interested!
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Thank you to get sharing this information. But it will be truly great to get some more details!
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What kind of details would you like Jackelyn? I’d be happy to answer specifics.
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I personally think that as time goes on, the way of on-page and off-page SEO are going to differ as we think it. I think we will see a transition to client factors in deciding ranking results. That combined with advanced personal results and we’ll be seeing a huge transformation of the searchers experience with Bing and the other search engines. Each search result will not be made alike, take a look at things like user interaction, bounce rate, bounce time, etc… Focus on a better user experience all around, and I think you’ll see better results in 2010.
been following your blog for 3 days now and i should say i am starting to like your post. and now how do i subscribe to your blog?
Can we get some more comments from guys reading through this post….I Do like the article,but i have had various views on the subject and i would love to know what others think
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Thanks!
Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!
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Your expert
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I’m probably dumb, but I can’t seem to find your RSS button to subscribe to? Or is there even one? Sorry kinda new at this stuff
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Good points
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Personally I’m a huge fan of blog networks like SEOLinkvine. They offer a tremendous amount of backlinks that really produce some excellent results when used properly. Now non-SEO experts have the tools necessary to make some tremendous results for their websites and keywords. This is a new influx that is creating difficulties for old SEOers to rank against these massively effective tools.
I actually made a little video about this. Would you mind checking it out and maybe leave a comment on it? (I put the link in the “website” field hopefully you can get to it. thank you!
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SEOAide.com is also a good place to boost seo and pagerank.
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