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January 2003 Search Engine Tips
Beware the Experts You probably get spammed
all the time with promises of "Guaranteed #1 Placement" or "We'll beat
the search engines for you." Well if a company is willing
to spam you to get your money in the first place, how ethical do you
think their claims are? Yes, there are legitimate firms
who can optimize your pages for search engines with varying degrees of
success and I certainly don't begrudge a company from making a
legitimate living giving a legitimate service. I just want you to know
the real score on what you can expect if you hire a company like this
and what scams to watch out for. Scam # 1 -- The company
gets you a high ranking on an extremely obscure keyword that no one that
is looking for your service is typing. For instance I could have a
number one ranking tomorrow on the keyword phrase, "presentation skills
for bulemic pygmies." Scam # 2 -- The company simply gets
your deposit and disappears. Scam # 3 -- The company is
fairly sophisticated and pulls tricks that get you a temporarily high
ranking and then you get banned from the search engine.
There are probably many more out there. The old adage applies. "If it
looks too good to be true, it probably is." How about
legitimate companies
This is where the real problem lies because it's relatively easy to
simply refuse to do business with the scammers and go your merry way.
The problem with legitimate companies is for you to understand the
costs, time involved and potential return on investment to hire this
work done professionally. If you're independently
wealthy, or run a relatively large small business, then you can probably
afford to pay the fees charged by legitimate search engine optimization
companies. That doesn't mean your money was well spent.
ROI
I'm not much for buzzwords, but ROI means "return on investment" and is
an important key when deciding to hire a search engine optimization
company. Maybe a company can get you a very high ranking
on one or many of your webpages. That has nothing to do with whether the
people seeing your high ranking in a search engine buy anything, or if
it cost you more to have the optimization done than those extra people
could possibly spend with your company. So maybe you better prove your
pages can close deals with good copywriting before you spend a fortune
optimizing the pages for search engine traffic. You can send small
amounts of traffic with very inexpensive pay-per-click search engines to
do this testing. The next thing you must consider is that
the search engines change frequently. Something that got you a high
ranking one month may cause you to disappear totally the next month.
This means you have to spend more money to re-optimize the page never
knowing how long your investment will pay off.. My
solution
Learn to do the optimization yourself and/or hire low-fee college or
high school students to do the work after you or someone competent
trains them. This method, although dependent on finding reliable young
people at a reasonable rate, will most likely pay off just as well than
spending high rates over and over again with a professional firm.
The technique I find most effective and cheap in the long run is called
the side door technique
which I use very effectively on my websites. So beware
the scammer experts and beware the legitimate experts that might not be
able to give you a decent return on your investment with them.
Click: The Ultimate Guide to
Electronic Marketing for Speakers
http://www.antion.com/click.htm
Send me your suggestions for future Search Engine related articles for
this section. mailto:tom@antion.com
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