It’s not good enough to have a website - people must be able to FIND you online. Otherwise your site is wasted.

The main way your site is found is through search engines. Getting to the top of the search engine results is called “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO. It’s not unusual for a website owner to spend a lot of money on SEO. Often they’ll pay more than they paid for their original site! It’s that important.

However, most SEO people seem to have the same ethics as used car salesmen. The industry seems full of half-truths, superstition, and ignorance. I want you to be educated enough to know when you’re being sold a chocolate cow.

A chocolate cow?!?

See, when I was little, I LOVED chocolate milk. So one day on the way to my grandpa’s farm in central Illinois, we saw some brown cows. My dad told me, “Those are chocolate cows. That’s where chocolate milk comes from!”

I believed him. It sounded good.

Just like most SEO “experts” sound good. Over the weekend, an acupuncturist passed along a “proposal” from a SEO expert. Just about every single sentence in that proposal was a half-truth or a ripoff.

I wish I were exaggerating.

About once a week, someone tells me that they talked to “their SEO person.” It makes me cringe, because I have to wonder what kind of advice they’re getting, and if they’re being ripped off. At the same time, I can’t really warn them off without seeing the proposal.

So let me run through what the proposal offered. This is pretty common to what you’ll see from SEO experts:

“Because Google are changing their ranking systems at the moment, I’d imagine everything in the industry is shying off offering low-level optimisation packages because there’s no longer any solid guarnatee that your site will make the top pages.”

This is a cop-out. Google is ALWAYS changing/tweaking their ranking system.

It’s an ongoing game. For example, at one point, some people figured out that you could put white text on a white background, and fool the search engines into seeing keywords that a human wouldn’t see. Google simply added a rule that penalized this.

Or, as mentioned below, there’s a tendency to get listed in a lot of worthless directories. How long until Google counteracts this?

“We’ll submit your site to 100 search engines”
“We’ll submit your site to 100 search engines or directories a month”

Two problems with this. First, there’s only about 4-5 search engines that really matter. (The rest have a teeny-tiny percent of search traffic.) Once your site is in them, it almost never need to be submitted to them again. Second, the “directories” and “search engines” they mention are probably like this one.

Junk. Pure junk. They’re not related to your site, so why would any search engine use it to determine your site is popular?

To be fair, I have had 400 links like that created just to see what would happen. It may have helped me pass NewAcupuncturePatients.com in the search engine listings, but I’m not sure. However, there’s no way I would pay £180 a year to do this. The SEO guy almost certainly has an automated tool that does the work. It doesn’t cost him much time or money to do this, but he’ll certainly charge you a lot for it.

A better approach is to submit your site to directories like Acufinder.com, and healthprofs.net. (A more complete listing is available in “The Faucet”.)

“We’ll get your site listed within 8 weeks”
“Guaranteed Google Listing”

You can get your site listed on Google and most search engines within a week or two by:

1. Having a blog. (Blogs “ping” certain update services that automatically notify the search engines.)
2. Submitting a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo’s tools.
3. Submitting your site to various directories. Google’s spider will follow the directory links.

(In all my experience running websites, I’ve only had one client that couldn’t get listed quickly using one ore more of the above methods. He’s getting a refund because of this, until we get the problem solved. I won’t let clients have “imaginary” sites.)

“Guaranteed inclusion for 12 months - your site listed for a year, guaranteed”

Like I said, one your site is in a search engine, you stay there. You almost never need to have it submitted to them again. This is doubletalk.

“We’ll create your meta tags automatically”

You don’t want to do that. Your meta description tags in particular is VERY important, you need to do this manually. See, the meta description can be used to determine EXACTLY what the searcher sees in Google results. Would you trust a computer to generate a nice, inviting summary of the page contents?

I didn’t think so.

I hope me tearing the above “promises” apart doesn’t make you think I’m a negative person. It’s just that SEO isn’t especially complicated, but the SEO experts would like you to think it is. It allows them to extract more money from you.

The simple fact is, search engines look at three things when determining your web pages rankings for a given keyword/search term:

• On page factors
• Off page factors
• Website factors (i.e. The sitemap, and the website address, such as acupunctureclinicmarketing.com)

I’m going to talk more about these three areas in future articles. In the meantime, have you had experience (good/bad) with an SEO person? Or do you have questions about something they told you? Please leave a comment.