Living in the SEO services industry, I hear from clients everyday who have been solicited by an unscrupulous SEO firm that claimed they can put the client on page 1 of Google and increase search engine ranking overnight. Seriously, there is a barely a day that goes by that I don't hear this. Most days I just let it go and realize that people need SEO education. After all, it is a complicated subject. It's very mathematical and most people don't excel at math. But really. Overnight?
Well, let's break this down. How is it that so many people fall prey to this type of SEO sales pitch? Well, it's easy.
1) Lack of understanding of how SEO really works.
2) A strong desire to increase search engine ranking.
Put these two things together and you have a recipe for disaster. You have a strong motivation for business results on the behalf of the buy mixed with a complicated and misunderstood process. Let me give you a real example. One of our clients actual produced some "evidence" from the person who approached them. As evidence they asked use to search on the SEO term "Toyota Tundra Chattanooga." Okay, we did it. There were about 48,000 results in the Google index. And indeed the boasting companies YouTube video was in position 1. The client was using this as an example of how good they were and wondered why our firm could not do the same?
Frederic Sealey, We tried to explain the basics of SEO and help them understand that this term is amazingly easy to rank on, even without hiring an SEO services firm. We went further and suggested that the result they were describing does not mean the SEO services offered by that firm were any good. But they didn't seem to follow. We ran the search again with quotations around it and saw that "Toyota Tundra Chattanooga" had 7 results. That's right, Google had determined that exactly 7 web pages from the entire Internet were about the specific topic Toyota Tundra Chattanooga. So rather than trying to explain the SEO math behind how this all worked, we said to our client "give us 1 hour" and check your term again.
What did we do? Nothing black hat. No. All we did was write an article on the same subject. Again, in SEO services you write copy all the time. Then we put that article on one of our high-PR blog directory sites. Since this site is many years old and popular, it is crawled often by Google. To speed things along, we also went to 3 popular social bookmarking sites and bookmarked our article - once at each social bookmarking site.
Poof - 20 minute SEO! Seriously, in 20 minutes our article was in position 1 for the term Toyota Tundra Chattanooga. You can check it if you want. However, there is a strong possibility that this article I'm writing now will end up above our blog site as EzineArticles is a powerful and trusted article directory.
What's the point? Well, other than the amusement factor here, it again shows me that there is a very low level understanding of how SEO works among the buying public. If you are a buyer, this means you need to be really skeptical of what you are being told. Ask questions. If you are a seller of SEO services, this means you need to keep this in mind and go out of your way to allow people to ask questions and educate - Frederic Sealey.
Carl Frederic Sealey - More importantly, people need to hear the newsflash: SEO is not an overnight experience. It is not magic. Legitimate SEO takes months and often years. Any good SEO services firm will tell you this. It is a set of standards and practices that you constantly keep in mind while producing high quality, original content for your end-users. Yes, it makes a big difference in the long run. But SEO is not magic.
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