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When researching search engine optimisation (SEO) companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature-people love a guarantee.
This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing SEO as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing “guaranteed SEO.” Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill placed.
A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a “leprechaun repellent” guarantee. In other words, it’s a guarantee that is easily attainable-if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain? The truth is that SEO companies do not control the major search engines, and any firm that claims to have a “special relationship” that gives it sway over the natural search engine results is simply counting on your ignorance. Fortunately, this does not mean that guaranteed SEO is impossible, especially when the guarantee has to do with aggregate results and the methods used to achieve them.
What follows is a partial list of some of the more popular types of guaranteed SEO out there-some of them roughly as useful as leprechaun repellent, and some of them actually meaningful.
Questionable Guarantees
The ‘Leprechaun Repellent’ Key Phrases Guarantee
Many SEO companies boast that they will achieve a certain number of top rankings in the organic results of major search engines. This type of guaranteed SEO can be tempting, especially to those who are investigating SEO companies for the first time. After all, high rankings are what it’s all about, right? Isn’t that the goal?
The answer is an emphatic “No.” Quality SEO companies will point out that the real goal is to bring high quality traffic to your site. It’s quite simple to guarantee top positions if you choose noncompetitive or obscure phrases-for example, “leprechaun repellent.”
Want proof? Enter “leprechaun repellent” into your favorite search engine. You will almost certainly find this article dominating the results (caveat-if you are reading this article immediately after its release, the search engines may not have indexed it yet. Wait a week and try again.).
It is extremely easy for SEO companies to achieve high search engine positions for phrases that nobody uses. Such rankings might impress your friends and neighbors, but they won’t send you quality traffic. They likely won’t send you any traffic at all.
It’s important to note that the phrase “leprechaun repellent” is used only for demonstrative purposes. Many unpopular phrases may not sound absurd. There are surely countless phrases that sound extremely relevant to your business that are never typed into search engines. Good SEO companies will avoid such phrases. “Leprechaun repellent” practitioners will embrace them-it allows them to attain their worthless guarantees.
There is also another aspect of this type of guaranteed SEO in which SEO companies will guarantee you first place positions on unspecified search engines for more competitive phrases. Unfortunately, this type of guaranteed SEO often involves obscure engines that have very little market share and are not sophisticated enough to quickly eliminate Web pages that use spam tactics. In a few documented cases, the guarantees involved search engines that the SEO companies actually owned and operated!
There are really only three major search engines at present-Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are a handful of minor engines that are also worth mentioning, including Ask Jeeves and AOL Search. Any guaranteed SEO should involve prominent engines, not obscure ones.
The ‘Company Name’ Guarantee ,
There is also a common guarantee that shady SEO companies will use that guarantees that a company will show up for a search on its company name. This, much like the “leprechaun repellent” flavor of guaranteed SEO, offers no real value.
Sure, if your company name is “Acme,” it may actually be competitive. But chances are that if your Web site does not already show up near the top of the search engine results for a search on your company name, there is an easily fixed technical glitch that will resolve the issue. Quality SEO companies will address this area immediately.
Moreover, ranking highly for your company name, while obviously desirable, provides only a tiny fraction of the potential value of search engine marketing. The real benefit for most companies is that search engine marketing attracts potential buyers who are not already familiar with the company name. Unless your company is a household name, it is unlikely that having your company name figure prominently in the results is going to have a huge impact on your business.
The Pay-per-Click Guarantee
Some SEO companies will offer guaranteed SEO services that promise top positions for certain key phrases on popular engines, but they are counting on dealing with prospects who do not understand the difference between natural search engine results and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
With PPC, it is very easy to guarantee a number-one result, but this result will appear in the “paid” or “sponsored” results of the engine. Say, for example, that your company installs custom swimming pools. While a competitive phrase like “custom pools” might be difficult to achieve in organic results, the SEO company is not concerned with organic results. All it has to do is outbid the current highest bidder (using your money, of course), and your site will show up as number one in the “sponsored” results.
Studies have indicated that sponsored results are held in a lower regard than natural results by savvy Web searchers who recognize them as advertising. Also, as soon as you stop paying, your ranking disappears.
The ‘Submit Your Site to 50,000 Search Engines’ Guarantee
There are many variations on this offer, primarily involving the number of engines promised. Regardless of the number, this is probably the most pervasive and persistent type of “guaranteed SEO,” and it is basically a scam that preys on ignorance.
Companies that believe that they have high quality Web sites are predisposed to believe that the only thing holding them back from search engine success is that the search engines do not yet know that their sites exist. However, search engines measure quality in a much different way from a Web site owner. A properly optimized site does not need to be submitted to search engines at all. (I refer to actual “spider-based” search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN, not human-edited directories such as Business.com, the Yahoo Directory, and the Open Directory Project). Engines prefer to find sites on their own.
This “solution” offers no real value, except of course to the SEO companies offering the service. Also, as previously mentioned, there are not 50,000 search engines-or at least 50,000 search engines worth worrying about.
Do SEO companies that offer this service meet this guarantee? Certainly-they use automated programs to do the submissions. Is this type of guaranteed SEO worthwhile? Not for search engine positions, but it may keep leprechauns at bay.
Meaningful Guarantees
Given the preponderance of “guaranteed SEO” that is meaningless, the seemingly Wild West nature of the industry and the reality that SEO companies do not control the results of any major engine, it may seem that guaranteed SEO can never be a worthwhile endeavor. However, that is not the case. If you note the abovementioned examples, they are primarily involved in specifics-top positions, a certain number of submissions, a certain number of engines. However, good SEO companies, understanding that they have no control over individual results, should be confident enough in the results of their work in aggregate and in the safety of the methodologies that they use to offer guaranteed SEO that lives up to its promise. The Targeted Traffic Guarantee
SEO companies dedicated to showing value to their clients will take a baseline reading of current search engine traffic at the outset of a campaign. While, as previously mentioned, SEO companies do not hold sway over search engine results, they should at least be confident enough in their overall skills to promise that their clients will see an increase in targeted search engine traffic based on popular phrases relevant to the business.
If the firm offering this type of guaranteed SEO charges on a monthly basis, any month of the engagement where traffic for targeted phrases does not exceed the baseline should not be charged. After all, you are paying on a monthly basis to protect and improve your positions. While major algorithm shifts that make results on individual results unstable can and do happen, they rarely happen on all engines at once. You should feel confident that the firm you are paying has a very vested interest in making sure it adapts to the changing nature of search engine algorithms, and few things inspire such confidence as knowing that it will not get paid otherwise.
If your prospective firm is unwilling to guarantee that it will send increased traffic to your Web site from targeted phrases, every month, it may be time to look elsewhere.
The ‘White Hat’ Guarantee
SEO companies are commonly broken up into two camps-”white hats” (practitioners who remain solidly within the search engines’ stated terms of service) and “black hats” (practitioners who work to unravel the latest search engine algorithms and base their optimization techniques largely on technology, regardless of an engine’s terms of service). Both approaches are legitimate-in that there is nothing illegal about exploiting a technical loophole for results.
However, black hat SEO companies put their clients at risk of penalization, including outright banishment from the major engines. Getting back in can be a long process, and sometimes it is not possible at all. If you are concerned about potential penalization, get a guarantee from your firm that it adheres to the stated terms of service of all major search engines. If you can (and this is rare), get a guarantee that your site will not be penalized through any action of the SEO firm.
This is harder for a company to offer, since the major engines frequently update their terms of service, and techniques that are acceptable today can be deemed unacceptable tomorrow. However, a confident firm that always errs on the side of caution when optimizing client Web sites will offer this type of guaranteed SEO services, since it will not use techniques that have a potential for penalization in the future.
Abusing the Metaphor (Beating a Dead Leprechaun)
Guarantees have been around for at least as long as leprechauns have been hoarding breakfast cereal and starring in bad horror films. So have guarantees that are essentially meaningless but sound respectable.
A good guarantee should not only appeal to the base emotion of a potential purchaser but also afford some real protection that the purchase he or she is making will provide meaningful results. Many of the most popular types of guaranteed SEO do not, and that’s a shame. The industry already has a questionable reputation due to “leprechaun repellent” practitioners-make sure you don’t go chasing their rainbow. After all, it’s your pot of gold they are after.
by Scott Buresh
Website Design vs Optimisation
Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines?
Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.
How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?
DESIGN CAN’T BE IGNORED
If you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.
The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimisation leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimisation.
And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought–If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!
There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.
Lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimiser, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.
DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB
That’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.
Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.
CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO
sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Let’s look at a simplified example of this. Let’s say you are optimising a page for the keyword phrase, “Burnt Toast”
From a design standpoint “Burnt Toast” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font, in a colour that suits the topic.
There are many ways to create that simple, coloured heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Burnt Toast” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).
To a viewer, the following text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of an image of the burnt toast on a small plate next to drink of sometype.
SEO needs to read the text related to the burnt toast. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the burnt toast text is indeed related to the optimized words - burnt toast.
Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.
Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organised would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral - Less code, more content.
SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO
In the previous burnt toast example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.
Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.
You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords “burnt toast”. Note why did I use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.
While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimise this simple page without redoing it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.
AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC
Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.
Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.
Ask yourself this - What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?
How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?
Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?
Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?
Chances are you won’t have any single answers. That’s ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.
REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY
If you sell diamonds solely online, you must have a catalogue of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of those diamonds.
If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive diamonds, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s low grade, poor quality diamonds, the site shouldn’t look low grade or poor quality.
However, as you have no store front, if the online community can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very optimised home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalogue pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimised layout.
I’d make the link to your catalogue very obvious and prominent. Note the catalogue is not the homepage. I’d also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalogue link very prominent. In doing so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.
The catalogue can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.
PLANNING YOUR SITE
If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.
However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under SEO & Online Marketing. 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.
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