Guide to getting your business online

A topic that has arisen personally over the last few months concerns so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Companies.

Concern arose when I received an email from a client who had been approached by an SEO company promising (yes you guessed it… sound familiar?) top 10 placement in Google for their company.

They had already parted with their hard-earned cash and were paying a monthly fee with what appears to be a binding contract. Now, if someone needs to sign you up to a binding contract the alarm bells should already be ringing… shouldn’t they?

They were pleased, because this company had also told them it had got them top 10 rankings for 2 seperate keyphrases (neither of which were chosen by my client!), which sounds great and I hear you say “well what’s the problem then?”

The problem lies in the method of gaining these top 10 rankings, and how useful these ranked pages actually are. Let me explain how they did it and you can decide if your business would want to follow suit.

1. The ‘SEO company’ sets up 2 (very) cheap looking template websites each with a domain name made up of the keywords similar to but not the same as my client had wanted to be ranked for. i.e. “big-red-boxes.com” & “big-blue-boxes.co.uk”.
2. In turn these two sites are then packed full of keywords and keyphrases using every possible combination of the word big, red, blue and box.
3. There is a link from these sites to their main site.

So now, anyone searching for “big blue boxes” on the web will find a top 10 ranked page. Great. Hmmm, hang on a bit, the page looks a bit cheap doesnt it? The people who find the page arent actually looking for my clients products (due to the keywords being different). The keywords are obscure enough to rank highly but also so obscure that they won’t get searched for anyway (unless told to by the SEO of course!). The sites are packed full of keywords and no real content which will most likely get it banned from Google for spamming. And more than likely, the visitors who are looking for products my client doesnt sell will just see a page of keywords, nothing useful and just navigate elsewhere thinking they had just wasted their time. All that for a monthly fee. Doesn’t sound like such a good deal now does it?

The title of this blog entry is a generalism, of course some SEO companies (if not most SEO companies) can be trusted. But this experience is proof that some can’t be, some will take your money and don’t care that what they do might see you banned from Google. They don’t care that in the long term it makes no difference to the amount of visitors you get to your site.

If in doubt, ask. Ask them what methods they are going to employ to get you higher rankings. If they won’t tell you, give them a wide berth. If they tell you they will use ‘doorway pages’ or other methods frowned upon by the search engines, again - give them a wide berth.

If you need further proof that there are unethical SEO companies operating and information on ways of spotting the good from the bad, please see Googles own report on this subject here.