Web start-ups face a daunting task of getting known. As of last count, over a billion pages literally litter the web. That’s a billion competing pieces of informtion swamping yours. Compound that with the short attention span of the average surfer. And the problem of ever shifting viewer loyalties. No wonder many netrepreneurs surrender and pack their bags in less than a month. Have you ever given up in despair?
Startups need web visibility. They crave keyword dominance that lead to online brand equity. This problem becomes a need that lends itself well to “expert SEO services”. So, it’s no wonder that enterprising entrepreneurs have begun launching SEO companies.
I’m confident that you may have received the occasional email to “increase your ranking” or “be the top ten in google”. Visit the webpage behind these emails and you’ll be treated to a glossy website that promises exotic services like directory submission, keyword optimization. Do these make you salivate? Think again. How many of these really make an impact to your online web presence? I’ve been into SEO for almost a decade now, and I’ve realized that many paid services simply do not work. The following are among the poorest SEO tactics you can buy:
- Submit to 10000 Directories. Nobody visits the HappyLuckyNine.com directory and its ilk. That goes for human vistors and search engine bots. These sites have negligible impact on your real world visibility and do little for keyword ranking. I find it odd, therefore, that SEOs offer the “premium service” of blasting your site to 10000 directories for a low price of $299.95. Listing in such directories may even be harmful as some search engines consider such sites link farms.
- Blog Spamming. Run a blog? Then you must be a master of patience. You probably receive hundreds of comments each day from people called “BuyViagraOnline” and “HoodiaWeightLoss Now”. I don’t know about them, but I’d sue my mom for giving me such a name. But seriously, blog spamming benefits no one. It irritates the blog owner and does zilch for search engine ranking. One reason is that search engines devalue most blog comments. Another is that blogs tend to infuse the NoFollow attribute to comments. Be wary, therefore, when an SEO offers to send your URL to thousands of blogs using an automated software. You’ll end up on the receiving end of very angry email.
- Article Submissions. “We send your articles to 1000 article repositories for $99 only.” Is that a good offer? It depends. If it were 2002, that would work to your advantage. Today, that’s no longer the case. Articles can give human readers a reason to visit your site if they like your information. However, it does not have favorable impact on search engine rankings because the engines hate duplicate content. The algorithms used by google filter out copy that look similar to another. If 90 documents look the same, expect that they’ll be consigned to the supplemental search results- or worse- to the sandbox. That means your $99 for thousands of duplicate articles just ended up in smoke.
- .Edu Spamming. Some SEOs think that edu domains hold a mystique for the search engines and offer to send your links to .edu blogs. Alternatively, they offer to broker off the sale of your links on .edu sites. This arrangement benefits only the SEO and the edu site that receives your “charity donation”. True, the search engines accord great respect for educational sites- but if it sees an external link to your poker site on Harvard University, it gets suspicious. Nothing screams “paid link” louder than unrelated sites on the footer of educational webs. We all know how worthless paid links are.
Whoops. I think I just eliminated 80% of most paid SEO services. So what else can you buy from them? I’ll cover that in the next article. Meanwhile, hold on to your cash!
