SEO Company Scams

Unfortunately as the internet has expanded so have the number of companies out there that will try to make a quick buck from the ignorance of many business people who rely on their web site to find custom or sell their product and often will lie and put the seed of doubt into a persons mind that they are actually losing money by not having a propely designed web site.

THESE COMPANIES TRADE ON YOUR FEAR OF LOSING MONEY OR NOT MAKING THE MONEY YOU THINK YOU SHOULD THROUGH THE INTERNET

Whilst there are some reliable and genuine SEO companies out there there are from our experience and those of many of our customers, more so that trade unethically, sell a poor product and actually lie to try and make as much money from their clients for little or no work. DONT BE TAKEN IN BY IT!

This is the usual method of sale usually by a telesales person or automated email:

1. "We will guarantee you number 1 result on Google for ..."

This is almost always never acheived. Especially in some very saturated markets like the hotel trade. It is actually impossible for a number of reasons:

1. There is no way to gurantee a ranking, until it is actually visted by the search engines and indexed, so what they 'guarantee' they cannot know without having done the work.

2. There are many directories, a directory will always rank higher than a single site as it has many backlinks or incoming links back to itself , also it is more content rich, and has hundreds sometimes thousands of  pages loaded with the phrases or keywords a user would search for.

2. "We will give you £50/£75 worth of Google adwords free of charge".

A sales ploy, they are giving away a free promotion which costs them nothing, you can get thisdirectly from Google themselves, it is a ploy to got you to then sign up to further products or services.

3. "Hello Its xxxxx calling from/on behalf of Google/Yahoo..." "We work for Google" etc

A Lie - The truth is this will never happen if you are a small business. The reason it won't happen is because Google etc have no interest in small paying clients, they have an advertising department at Google HQ Dublin who will work with large corporate clients and contracts with massive advertising budgets, they do not need to sell to small companies as they will get the money anyhow, Why? Because the company that is selling adwords etc has to buy them through the search engine anyway.

The people contacting you use names you have heard of to try to sell their product. They are reselling a product of the Serach Engine that you can actually buy and manage yourself very easily directly from the search engine themself in your own account control panel, but inflating the cost many times.

4. "Your web site does not have any "metatags"/''keytwords""

Sounds technical, not at all, again said to confuse and put fear into a client that what they have is losing them money.

We will add metatags to all our sites so if a company rings you to claim the above and you have had a site designed by us please contact us and help shame the cowboys.

5. "You dont appear on Google"

A Blatant Lie and of the worst kind - we actually had a company cold call us one time to claim this when ion fact we are number one on Google for many im[portant keyphrases.

So what is a metatag?

Metatags are small pieces of code which exist at the top (head portion) of a web sites source code and their function is to tell the serach engine what the website is about and to define its content document type etc. There are three metatags commonly mentioned and these are seen as the most important for web site SEO.

Title Metatag: Appears in the blue bar of your web browser. This defines the title of the page, it is the most important metatag, it heavily influences page ranking and can be used advantageously to gain rank for various phrases.

Description Metatag: Appears as the short text a web site will show in a search (the black text on Google).

Keywords Metatag: A list of words or phrases separated by commas and present in your website source code. You dont see any reference to this on your Google listings, In fact most modern search engines take little or no notice of this at all, it is largely deprecated due to people filling this tag with irrelevant spam keywords in the past. Which makes it all the more hilarious when many 'SEO Experts' place such a large emphasis on this. We still add the tag to your source code just to be on the safe side for other web crawlers, but it is largely irrelevant nowadays.

It is a fact that a website will still be found and may still even rank well without metatags as THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF GOOD WEB RANKING IS GOOD CONTENT (The words on your web site pages which is what the serach engine was originally built to read). A search engine will still read the text of your webpage and pick up keyphrases from that, but filling out the im[portant metatags is still very much advised especially page title.

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So what are 'Keywords'?

The SEO cowboys will always prattle on about 'keywords'. So what are they?...

We prefer to use the word keyphrases as the content of your website should be loaded with the words or keyphrases you wish to be found for when a user types a search query into a search engine

Google and the other search engines  uses an algorithm or mathematical formula to work out their ranking for various keyphrases. It is  a closely guarded secret and very advanced, so much so that it can recognise spammy content based on a pattern and may even penalise ranking for this, it can recognise natural and meaningful content which is naturally written SO IT IS NOT AS SIMPLE AS JUST LITERALLY REPEATING A KEYWORD MANY TIMES TO GAIN A NUMBER ONE RANK.

Keyword Density or frequncy a word will appear in text is important but the way in which this is appears must be in structured and well written informative and coherent content.

Many other factors come into play:

Link Popularity: If your site has many links from other sites to it it is seen as being a popular and relevant site, often companies will request a 'Reciprocal Link' or 'Backlink' where they will link to you in return for a link back to them, these can be benificial but not as beneficial as having a site link only to you without you linking back.

Saturation Level: If there are many sites with similar content and keywords the search terms become saturated, it is much harder to appear high when this happens. Eg 'Blackpool Hotels' in such a case it is sensible to try and target other less saturated keyphrases.

Please if you would like further information contact us we would be glad to assist and offer free advice. Also plese let us know of specific comapnies who you may have been cheated by or whi usethe above sales tactics so we can warn others.

TOGETHER WE CAN BEAT THE COWBOYS AND DEFEAT THE CON MERCHANTS TO CLEAN UP OUR MUCH LOVED WEB DESIGN AND INTERNET INDUSTRY

 

 

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