MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

SEO is technically still considered as a rather new niche market. This has resulted in many scammers trying their hardest to pocket as much cash as they can while SEO is still crawling its way through infancy. Unfortunately, because it’s quite a young market, the public are largely unaware that it exists, let alone what it can do for websites. Its relative youth and inexperience also make it difficult to determine which agency’s promises are actually reasonable, or at least believable.

Josh Garner, a practicing SEO professional, explains some of the most common SEO scams that are on the market today, and clarifies why SEO “requires a lot of experience, research, and patience to effectively get a website to rank highly.” The SEO scam artists are spoiling it for the industry by making promises to clients that they then fail to deliver, because they are either quick fixes, outright thumb sucks, or just plain sneaky and impractical.

One of the promises made by these scammers is that they can rank your site in 48 hours! According to Garner these people are raking you for your cash because, as he says, “it takes hours to find the right search terms; depending on the size of a website, it can take days to implement changes; it takes weeks to see the initial effects, and it can take months to get things going in the right direction”.

Another promise they make is that they will submit your site to 1000 search engines. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many search engines you are appearing on, because if the market you are targeting doesn’t ever use those engines, they are rather useless. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the main search engines that you need to list your site on, as Google alone can bring in more traffic than 500 of the lesser known, hardly used engines would be able to produce.

Promising that they can get thousands of links to your site is also rather useless, as Google only takes notice of QUALITY links. If there is no value to the links they will not benefit your site in any way. Hiding their tactical processes from you is another sign that you should run in the other direction. If the agency tries to hide their means of making your site a success, it is likely that they don’t know what they are doing. Experience is the key to success in this game, and not trade secrets.

But the worst scam of the lot has got to be promising first page 1 rankings to clients. It is impossible to guarantee your client that they will appear on the first page of Google, or another search engine, for a particular search term. No- one can do this, as there are no guarantees in this industry. One day you may rank 40th, four months later you may be 3rd, and another month down the line and you may have slipped back down to the second page. This is due to fluctuations in the search engines, which are not uncommon. As Garner states, “Good SEOs are good SEOs because they have spent years learning and testing, and know of the measures most often needed to produce results.”

There are many scams out there on the SEO forefront today, which many industry specialists are trying to dispel. Sometimes people need to learn from experience before they are willing to believe any warnings and take measures to protect themselves from danger, usually to their own dismay.