It seems a regular occurrence the mis-understanding, or worse mis-representation, of companies involved in SEO of what is actually involved. In the past few weeks I have seen a number of proposals from so-called SEO experts to partner and client companies of Xebidy’s for Search Engine Optimisation programmes. Most of these seem to amount to little over $99 per month.

This is simply ridiculous! SEO involves the preparation of your website for indexing by search engines. In essence this invovles keyword research, competitor analysis and the reworking of onsite elements such as the code, image names, links, heading titles and meta-data. Sure you can probably do this for $99 per month, but is questionable whether it is being done well, and certainly very questionable if it is going to make that much of a difference to your search engine rankings. There might be a short term boast, but it is certainly not going to lead to exceptional, sustainable results. What’s more, it strikes me that companies that are charging so little are in fact doing their keyword research properly. Even using the exhaustive list of free (and not so free) tools available on the Internet it takes us days to narrow down the best list of “right” keywords for your business. Keywords to target vary by country, target customers and exactly the goals of your website (that is, what you are selling). Discovering the keywords that drive not just traffic but qualified buying customers to your business is not simply a stab in the dark once off task.

Then there are other SEO steps that are integral such as submitting your domain name to search engine and industry directories. Many companies will offer this through an automated service - this is bad!! Most search engine submission forms expressly say, don’t use an automated service. Automated services do not examine the rules carefully, they do not give due consideration to which category or sub-directory your website should be in. In fact, they amount to little more than spamming the search engines. Search engine and submission directory is laborious as one of our favourite clients Aventure Linguistique in Geneva found out recently. We researched a host of Swiss industry and search engine directories with Denis and he went about examining each one, researching the appropriate listings for each directory and submitting. About 60 submissions took about 3 days - certainly makes a charge $99 per month hard to get a meal ticket.

I have discussed before the distinction between Search Engine Optimistation and Internet Marketing, but they can not be considered mutually exclusive. Internet marketing can probably best be described as the going out and getting customers to your website. At the very heart of Internet marketing is getting quality links back to your website from other reputable and highly ranked websites on complementary topics. The easiest way to achieve this is to provide good quality content that others want to link to. But usually this alone is not enough and a good SEO and Internet marketing company should work with you to identify an extensive list of potential links and go out and actively pursue them. I have talked about this before, particularly in my articles, there is then a plethora of parallel marketing opportunities that will raise the numbr of high quality links and traffic to your website. Such tools might include setting up Squidoo Lenses, article syndication, press releases, setting up You Tube channels or videos on OE.TV etc, hosting company images on Flickr and Photobucket, getting involved in social networking sites (see some of my earlier posts on the success of Oz Experience on Facebook), and getting involved in forums and discussion sites. These are just some of the myriad of steps that a “real” SEO company would tackle to achieve top search engine rankings for you - and that is, search engine rankings that are sustainable over time, not just a flash in the pan short term rise.

Unfortunately, companies continue to get burned choosing the cheap option over the laborious expensive route; but those that do see the light are dominating the search engine rankings and increasing the chasm that others will struggle to cross. The ongoing investment being made by the knowledgeable ones is delivering search engine and financial rewards.

Tags: SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 7:23 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.