seo guarantees Archives by Mark Murnahan

Bashing SEO and Social Media Experts: Humor or Hazard?

I had to ask myself whether this is humor or hazard for me to give a swing at our ever-increasing population of SEO and social media “experts”. I guess the idea gave me just a little guilt pang at first, because I always heard that I should treat people the way I want to be treated. Who am I to tell anybody they don’t have what it takes?

Then I grinned from ear to ear, tucked my sweet love-everybody nature back in my shorts, and put my middle finger in the air. After all, this is not “biting the hand that feeds me” … this is harsh and very real truth. This is about educating, and saving a few lucky others from huge disappointments. This is about shining a spotlight on liars. This is a glimpse of reality! In fact, it is a reality that I intend to illustrate for you very clearly.

Are All SEO Liars?

No, not all search engine optimizers are liars. There truly is an enormous value in the trade, but because of that, it has attracted a lot of liars. Any good SEO knows that there is no reason to lie about the service. They may even help you to understand the most common lies of the industry. For example, here are a couple useful articles: “7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying” or Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference. Each of these include objective means to weed out the liars and cheats.

On the other hand, many self-proclaimed SEO will make claims like the one I found on Twitter pictured below. I am only listing one, but not because I have a problem with this one in particular. I just picked this one at random, but I actually dislike all of the squillion others out there lying to people about SEO. I just don’t want to waste more time making a huge list of them.

The Classic 2000 Website Visitors Per Hour Pitch

Khubah Jogja offers the opportunity to “make money online” and “get 2k visitor per hour”. That’s great, right?! I guess it may sound great, but then I checked out this Twitter user’s website and imagine what I found … some reality! The funny thing is that they actually have their website statistics viewable to the public using a service called “whos.amung.us”.

The biggest hour I found was three visitors, and the maximum visitors in a day was sixteen. In the image shown here, the one visitor represented was me. That is kind of a stretch from 2,000 per hour.

I don’t want to leave this up for too much confusion, so I checked with Alexa, Open Site Explorer, and others. Two thousand visitors per hour was not to be found. Then again I knew that already when I saw the article claiming that keyword meta tags make a big influence in search ranking. Not just that it was total crap, the article was not dated 1998 … it was from this year! If you think that old meta tags pitch is true, it will serve you well to read “SEO Meta Tags: Oh, You Must Be Another SEO Expert!”

Social Media Expert / Cattle Farmer

Perhaps not every instance is so extreme as the social media strategist / cattle farmer depicted here, but I really need to share this with you, because it almost made me pee myself with laughter and sob at the same time!

It is funny, but actually sad when you think of how widely accepted total confusion has become in social media.

I know that farming and ranching is hard work. It is really tough to get ahead in that industry, so why not augment the income and work as a social media strategist? That may just be the perfect fit!

Social Media Strategy ... or Cows ... We Have it All!

Yes, you can call me a jackass for singling this poor dear out. I mean, after all, at least she didn’t use a picture of some young hot chick in her profile, the way so many others do. In fact, she looks downright sweet, and wholesome. She is probably a really nice person, too … but she is also lying to herself and others. Her appearance would absolutely not turn me away if I was in the market for cows and chickens. Social media strategy, on the other hand, requires something other than just being sweet.

According to her website at “Lynda’s Social Media Strategy“ she is suggesting to “Use Social Media to Promote Your Business”. She even has descriptions and very low prices for her services. It includes pricing for a service that I pointed out as an absurdity and largely a rip-off a while back when I wrote “Hourly Rate for Setting Up Social Media Profiles?!”

How We Do it Down on the Social Media Strategy Farm

Contrary to her own advice and service offerings, when I clicked on the social media links on the right side of her page where it says “Follow”, I found a non-existent Blogger profile, the link to edit a LinkedIn account, links to Digg and Delicious (but not to a specific profile), an incorrect Feedburner link, a Facebook personal profile with 28 friends, a MySpace account, and a Twitter account.

Being a social media strategist, you may think she would use social media a lot. She was pretty scarce across the board, but I enjoyed this example. Within the Twitter account, the last five updates included a lot of weather change as follows:

“Snow outside. Good time to do some ghostwriting.” (on 20 January)

Then, five tweets and six months later …

“It’s hot no rain pasture’s drying up feed bill going up everything’s going up except my pay. Oh well…could be worse.” (on 19 July … earlier today)

I thought to myself that maybe she is actually doing what she says, and using her social media strategies for her own business down on the ranch. No, there was not a single social media instance of anything whatsoever at the Belle Manor Farms website. Go ahead … see how Lynda’s social media strategy is working out for her. Check out the Lynda’s Social Media Strategy Facebook Page that I only found after looking it up on her personal Facebook profile (not on her website). Maybe you could give it a “Like” for sympathy, since nobody else has.

Perhaps I’m just not clear on this yet, but it seems that Lynda, like so many others, is struggling with confusion of the difference between social media strategy and social media tactics.

Now Let’s Bash Murnahan

I know I may seem to be a real jackass when I ask questions like “Why Do You Want to Become an SEO and Social Media Expert?”

Maybe I’m just jealous of them for having a lack of a conscience. Maybe I’m bitter with them for becoming experts without actually having to spend decades to learn about marketing. Maybe I’m pissed because they get to have fun jobs outside of the Internet, while I am stuck here all day as CEO of a decade-old Internet company.

Sure, if I could have done it so easily, I would have a lot less gray hair today. Let me explain something for you, though, before you start calling me names.

Just because a person has a new computin’ machine does not mean they have an equal shot at this mythical money generator that people make the Internet out to be.

Just because “everybody” said you will miss huge opportunities by not being on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the many other social metworks, it does not mean those “huge opportunities” are what they told you, or that they will come to you without equally huge effort.

Maybe “everybody” was exaggerating just a tiny bit when they said you would “earn millions online … easy … in your pajamas!” Maybe “everybody” was not lying to you, but just made it a little easier to lie to yourself.

There are a lot of damn liars out there on the Internet! Worse yet, the online marketing fields of SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing have them breeding like cockroaches. I think that an astonishing number of them are lying to themselves.

I hope you don’t let them lie to you, too. There are no “innocent victims” in these cases, because we each have the same opportunities to gather due diligence. The victims are better described as “ignorant victims”.

So, was it humor or hazard that I chose to share this with you? In my opinion, the humor is that anybody could actually be fooled by such absurdities. The hazard is that such absurdities even exist.

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7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying

I was taught that it is not nice to call somebody a liar, but if you hear these things from a search engine optimizer, there is a good chance they are lying to you. They are either lying about the facts, or lying that they know the job of SEO. In either case, it is unreliable information that can cost companies a lot of money and can have some disastrous results.

Let’s have some fun and review these common lies told by SEO. If you have stories to tell, please add your experience in the comments of this blog post.

SEO Lie Number One: Meta Tags

One of the most common lies I have ever heard is when the SEO says, “You just need some keyword meta tags to improve your ranking.” The truth is that meta descriptions are important, but the keywords tag is mostly meaningless. Meta tags are a minor part of SEO and if somebody tells you that adding meta tags is your answer, they are lying to you. Here is some more information on the topic: “SEO Meta Tags: Oh, You Must Be Another SEO Expert!”

SEO Lie Number Two: Search Engine Submissions

Here is one of my favorite SEO lies. The SEO says something like “We will submit your website to 40,000 search engines and directories.” This is not only an ineffective thing to do, it can also be very damaging when your website links are in a bunch of penalized websites called “link farms”. The same thing goes for other methods of reciprocal link exchange.

If you just must submit your website somewhere to make you feel productive, submit it to DMOZ. Otherwise, leave it to the search engines. They will find you if you have something that other people believe is worth linking to.

Never trust the SEO who sells directory submissions and pink ponies. REF: SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies For Sale

SEO Lie Number Three: Guaranteed Search Engine Ranking

Here is a lie I see a lot, and I often wonder how many people actually fall for it. The SEO lie sounds like this: “We guarantee number one results in Google.” The big problems here are often twofold. First, the “top ranking” they offer is for weak search phrases which do not convert to more business. Secondly, the guarantee is worthless because it came from a liar.

If you want to know about reasonable guarantees the SEO can make, read “7 SEO Guarantees: Yes, Guaranteed SEO Can Be Legitimate!”

SEO Lie Number Four: It Will Be Cheap

Inexperienced search engine optimizers will often tell this lie: “Sure, we can get you ranked high in search engines for under $300.” This one is absurd, because if it was true, don’t you think every one of your competitors would have done it, too? This is a sign of the SEO who really does not want a long-term relationship with you, but rather prefers to just agree with you and take your $300 instead of telling you the truth.

SEO Lie Number Five: Technology vs. Marketing

One of the worst lies is when the SEO will lead you to believe that SEO is mostly about a bunch of high-tech stuff that you would not understand. Yes, there are a lot of technical and mathematical aspects to SEO, but that is far from the whole truth. The truth is that if you give people what they are looking for, you will be found. Delivering something awesome is what really matters. You must stop trying to sell jumbo jets to jelly bean customers. Good SEO requires good marketing, and not just good technology. If they told you otherwise, I strongly suggest reading “Search Engine Optimization is Not a Technology Job!”

SEO Lie Number Six: The SEO Doesn’t Rank

Any SEO who does not have a highly ranked website of their very own is almost surely lying. There is no good excuse that a qualified SEO can provide that their own website is not ranked highly and receives a substantial amount of traffic. I have heard them try to lie their way around this and say, “Oh, but we have a whole bunch of websites, and our traffic does not all just come from one or two websites.” My question is this: With all of those websites, why are none of them ranking in search engines? The answer is that they actually do not know how to do the job without being penalized in search engines. Count on it!

There are some reliable ways to know the difference between a good SEO and a bad SEO. Their website is a big indicator. I suggest reading this article: “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference”

SEO Lie Number Seven: Cold Calling / Emailing SEO

If the SEO is cold calling you on the phone or emailing you offers to provide you with top listings, look out for the worst. Doesn’t it make sense that if the SEO was good at what they do, they would catch your eye in the same way they propose to help people find you? I do not mean to knock every SEO who ever called a prospect for business, but if they are doing their job well, plenty of people are finding them every day. I wrote more about this in the article titled “Find Good SEO: Why Good SEO Don’t Seek Your Business”

Note: If you want to avoid the lies of an SEO, you should spend some time reading and researching. I’ll give you a good head start on your higher education. If you think I’m lying, just search Google for “SEO lessons” and see where you find the link I just gave you about avoiding lies. 😉

For your enjoyment, I have included a video to better understand the SEO liar.

What do you think? Have you heard any interesting lies from search engine optimizers / Internet marketers?

When I Go to Hell, They Will Have Me Selling SEO

When I think about the worst things in the whole world, I have this mental list of things like cruel people, wars, child abuse, murder, and all of that awful stuff. Ranking right up there is selling SEO and Internet marketing services. That is why I say that when I go to hell, they will probably strap me down to a flaming chair in front of a smoldering desk to answer a fire telephone and respond to burning questions about SEO services. Really, I have nightmares about this!

How Selling SEO is Like Hell on Earth

I said that Hell would have me selling SEO, but probably because it is the one thing I despise more than almost any other thing on Earth. I will explain this to you, but first, you must wonder how I can possibly love my job? I love my work as a search engine optimizer, probably more than what you would consider “natural”. If all jobs paid the same, I would have two jobs … SEO and racing cars. There are only a few things I love more than my work as SEO, and those are my family, racing cars, and riding motorcycles. So, it may seem strange that I hate to sell SEO, but I will tell you why.

Most People Only Know Enough About SEO to Be Annoying

It seems common that when people will set out to find good SEO, they have no concept that the best SEO have something more than basic geeky programming skills. I hear things all the time which make me believe that people view SEO and Internet marketing services as commodities. People often think what the SEO does is all about things like properly SEO’d meta tags, page titles, h1 tags and other things that really are a miniscule piece of the overall objective.

Something too many people fail to understand is that SEO is not a technology job! Too many people also struggle painfully to understand that there is a vast difference between good SEO and bad SEO. The difference is huge!

The objective is to earn the highest return on investment for the client. Technical issues, high search engine rankings, and even more website traffic will not achieve the objective without the rest of the assets a good SEO brings. These are the things the client often does not care to hear nor understand.

Good SEO (search engine optimizers) also have marketing talent that goes far beyond what the client is prepared to recognize (or pay for). They mostly just have a handful of common SEO questions that somebody who knew nothing of SEO suggested that they ask. Then they are shocked when the search engine optimizer will give an honest answer instead of just what they wanted to hear. It is almost as if the truth offends them, and they will keep shopping until they find somebody willing to tell them the right lie. Good for them. The one who will lie to them will also show them the lowest upfront price. So as long as they just want to live for today and not consider lost profit tomorrow, that will work great for them.

A lot of people come to me each day hoping to optimize their websites for particular search keywords. They usually don’t have a clue which search words will actually bring them results, and they think it is just some basic tasks that an SEO can do to optimize the existing terrible website content they already have that is already not working.

This kind of shopper does not want to hear that their brand image sucks, or that their website marketing reflects a company that cares more about shortcuts than doing something well. They think of only their landing pages, instead of factors like whether those people actually care what they have to say. They don’t look at whether people spend a lot of time on their site, click on the links in their text, and follow their call to action. They think of more in terms of more clicks equating to more money, but remain clueless how the two things actually relate. To tell you the truth about why I consider selling SEO to be hell, it is because this is the norm, and not the exception. This is the way the majority of SEO shoppers see the SEO industry, and it is why most companies fail to reach their online marketing objectives. I have plenty of numbers to back up this statement, and I live in it every day.

Just yesterday, a man asked me for any keywords that I am particularly proud of for ranking well. I guess that should not shock me too much, because a few prized words ranking well on search engines is what a lot of people think will bring success. I told him that I was proud to have each of the hundreds of thousands of search terms people use to find my work, and to narrow it down meant to narrow down my success in this industry. I gave him a few words, but there is not a small list of prized keywords that make up my big nest egg.

Drag Me to SEO Hell

I guess perhaps it is my attitude alone that makes it feel like Hell to explain things that people do not care to really understand. They set out to compare SEO without realizing that there is no apples-to-apples comparison. SEO is an art and a science, and no two minds will produce identical results.

Too many people come to me with a set of questions, but they already have the wrong answers strongly embedded in their head. If you want to ask me questions about how and why SEO and better Internet marketing works, you must first dismiss all of your previous false conceptions.

The fact is that I am probably the worst guy in the world to sell SEO, but I sure as hell can rank for the term.

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7 SEO Guarantees: Yes, Guaranteed SEO Can Be Legitimate!

The search engine optimization (SEO) industry has attracted a lot of bad search engine optimizers. For a good SEO, there is a lot of money involved. Wherever there is a lot of money, there is usually a lot of fraud, too. It can be really hard for the average person to know the difference between good seo and bad seo.

I know it is not only me who gets the offers in my email each day offering guaranteed top ten results at Google. I manage a lot of websites, and nearly each of them will receive offers for guaranteed SEO results. I even get these offers for sites that I intentionally exclude from search engine indexing, which makes it pretty clear these guys don’t know much about targeting their market … they just have an email address. They claim to guarantee top ten results, but top ten for what search? I guess that would be pretty easy for keyword phrases like “unicorn hunting expedition”, but what about the stuff that really pays off? What about the things that create more business for the client, and not just a buck for the SEO?

SEO Guarantees Should Be Objective

A guarantee without an objective measurement, that is reasonably guaranteed to be achievable, and is guaranteed to be of value, is no guarantee at all. However, that is the type of guarantee people get suckered into all the time with SEO. It is a good reminder that it is really easy for people without integrity to make false claims. It is a constant challenge for me to try and understand why people so often believe lies more than they believe the truth about Internet marketing. They only see the bold print with great claims, but their eyes glaze over when it comes to the fine print or when common sense is necessary. You know, like the common sense that kicks in and tells you “it sounds too good to be true.”

I want to share seven legitimate SEO guarantees that are based on objective third party measurements that are very achievable by any SEO worth the water their body is made of. These are guarantees that actually have meaning, because they are measurable and not subject to individual interpretation, and they place specific responsibility on the SEO.

SEO Guarantee Number One: Website SEO Readiness

Measuring website readiness for SEO can be performed in many ways. It seems that a lot of non-SEO people do not realize how objective this can be. There are a lot of very specific deal-breakers that can preclude a website from high search ranking, and they can be measured very objectively. I will give you just a couple of examples.

Website Grader by HubSpot: HubSpot is a company that provides tools to help companies measure and improve their website and social media reach. As a side note, it is actually kind of funny that if you search Google for HubSpot SEO or HubSpot social media, or a bunch of other terms related to their services, you can find my thorn in their side. I have given HubSpot a hard time in the past, but they really do have some good products to measure a website’s preparedness for SEO.

Website Grader analyzes a website based on preparedness for SEO mixed with its traffic level. A legitimate SEO guarantee based on a set ranking on Website Grader is something achievable to the SEO, because it will provide details of what to improve, and it is objective data from a third party. If the SEO guarantees a HubSpot Website Grader score of 98 within 60 days, it is something that is both measurable and readily achievable to even an average SEO. Try it for yourself and see where your site ranks. If you want to improve it to 98+ within 60 days, your SEO should be able to make a legitimate guarantee. This particular site is presently ranked at 99.7, and it did not require any rocket surgery. Click the badge to see a sample report for my blog.

Google Webmaster Tools: I have previously pointed out that Google wants to index your website. Providing relevant listings for searches has everything to do with how Google makes money. They provide a lot of help for making websites more search engine ready, because it helps them meet their business objectives.

Google Webmaster Tools provides objective information to help website owners measure and maintain the SEO preparedness of their website. This provides a measurement that any SEO should be able to guarantee, legitimately. I will include a couple screenshots to show SEO standards that any SEO should be able to achieve, maintain, and guarantee.

The appropriate SEO guarantee in the instance of Google Webmaster Tools is clear and very simple to track. It is also very achievable to any SEO that has been in the business more than three weeks.

SEO Guarantee Number Two: Traffic Measurement

There are a lot of ways to measure website traffic. There are many different value metrics such as number of unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, traffic sources (keywords, referring websites, etcetera), new vs. returning website visitors, and more. If a guarantee is to count, it must be well defined and based on historical data compared to new data.

A legitimate guarantee that the SEO can make in traffic measurement could include ongoing work in specific increments until certain goals have been met. For example, if the goal was to increase search traffic by 300 percent and keep the time on page above four minutes, the SEO will provide (and log) no less than ten hours per week in services until that goal is reached. That would be a reasonable guarantee. If the SEO wants to get to work on other projects, he or she will probably work pretty hard to be sure the goal is met without delay.

SEO Guarantee Number Three: Alexa, Quantcast, Etc.

Ranking at Alexa, Quantcast, Nielsen, and etcetera is another form of traffic measurement that is more important to websites focused on selling advertising than their own products or services. These rankings have often been contentious, and many people will argue their validity due to possibilities for falsified or fraudulent results. However, it is hard to argue that the SEO has not done a good job if a website’s ranking in two or more of these services has made significant improvements, especially if they each produce results that are in agreement.

If the SEO chooses to guarantee increases in these rankings, it can be beneficial to measure more than one of them simultaneously. A guarantee of ranking in the top “X” sites on each of these services could mean the SEO will provide the amount of increase at a specific cost and continually log efforts until the goals are reached. If the SEO priced it too low, their guarantee is to keep providing work, and proof of that work, until your objective is reached. An incentive to the SEO for higher than promised results is often an additional guarantee of another sort. It guarantees the SEO will be excited to work on your project.

SEO Guarantee Number Four: Increased Incoming Links

Incoming links pointing to your website is the most desirable and effective way to achieve higher search engine rankings. Because of its importance, it is also one of the most abused areas of SEO. The most common scams I see are from crooked SEO selling useless links. Many SEO will promise you a squillion new incoming links to your website, but what they do not tell you is they are largely links from domains that are penalized by all major search engines for being “link farms” and can actually do more harm than good. It is why this kind of search engine optimizer will generally have their own website penalized and cannot produce a single example of a website where they have created a large number of useful incoming links.

If any SEO guarantees to produce “X” number of incoming links, you should see it as a big red flag. On the other hand, if they guarantee a given MozRank increase based on high quality links, it had better come with some pretty serious content production. That means producing the kind of website content that will attract people to share your article in social media, reference it in their blog, or submit it to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and others. Any SEO promising links simply by adding your web address to blog comments, forum posts, and link farms is likely to hurt your business in other ways, too. If you want to know how to create incoming links, read this article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

Links are not created equally, and some are not only worthless but even harmful. Any SEO guarantee including link building should be based on measurements of link value and not just link volume. A reputable measure of link value may be found using SEOmoz Linkscape or Open Site Explorer (example report). Of course, there is also Google PageRank, but a good SEO knows that PageRank is not a good measurement tool, and it is old and unreliable data.

A reasonable guarantee for the SEO to offer is to produce and promote useful content on your website and continue until it reaches your set goal. This is another example of an SEO guarantee that places responsibility on the SEO to work for their money.

SEO Guarantee Number Five: Increased Search Phrases

The number of unique search phrases that bring you traffic can be a useful measure of overall performance. I do not mean measuring the number of search phrases where you appear in results, but rather the number of search phrases that actually brought visitors to your website. It can indicate that your site is being more thoroughly indexed, and that its overall search engine health is improving. If your site was visited as a result of only 500 unique search terms in one month but then visited as a result of 5,000 search terms the next month and 10,000 the following month, it is a pretty good indicator that things are going well.

This is a very measurable metric that has meaning, but for the purpose of a solid guarantee, it should be measured alongside the number of unique visitors to your website. You know, for the skeptic to be sure the SEO is not running a script to falsify the results.

A good SEO guarantee based on the increase in search phrases could be something such as additional increments of services being logged by the SEO until “X” percent increase in unique search phrases and “Y” percent associated increase in unique visitors.

SEO Guarantee Number Six: Solid Marketing Plan

This is a preemptive guarantee that is a hard one for a lot of people to really grasp as a truly measurable guarantee … but it is! Many people will look at SEO as a commodity that is produced the same by every search engine optimizer, and is just a set of basic tasks we perform the same for each client. This is not how it actually works, but it is why I receive many visitors searching for SEO hourly rates (google it for yourself).

I recently wrote about the relationship of marketing cost vs. marketing value, and the truth is that if you want all the pieces to fit just right, you should plan to make a sizable investment. This is because a good SEO will be making a sizable investment of time and knowledge to help you achieve your business objectives. As you can perhaps see here and throughout my blog, there are a lot of tasks to perform in reaching good search engine results. The specific work of my industry is not the same for any two companies, which is why a properly outlined plan can be the greatest SEO guarantee of all.

The lack of a solid marketing plan is a guarantee to fail. If the SEO provides a well-formed contract outlining the discovery process, proposed execution of tasks, and reporting of outcomes, it is likely the best guarantee that you will get what you pay for. When it is carefully planned out, high quality SEO can become the greatest asset to a company, topping the chart for online success tools. It can take a company to a whole new level and send their profitability and market share through the roof.

SEO Guarantee Number Seven: Inaction Guarantee

Number seven is the SEO guarantee grandfather of them all. I guarantee that there are a lot of websites returned in a search for what you offer. If you do not take action to optimize your position, or you lack the proper actions, you will miss a lot of potential business. That is a guarantee worth betting on. If the SEO has a strong track record and will make specific guarantees like the ones suggested here, you will risk a lot more lost money by inaction than if the SEO took your money and split for a country without extradition.