SEO Rants - Myths and Facts about SEO
As a self-proclaimed SEO expert, one thing that really upsets me is when I see people taking advantage of individual and businesses by promising them to do SEO work that is either bogus or using a method that no longer works.
In fact, bogus SEO services ads are making it tougher for the SEO industry in convincing clients that SEO actually does work and can be a very effective way to market your business.
Along with that, it also creates the perception that SEO is cheap while on the contrary it is not cheap in terms of cost but it is cheap when compared to other means of advertising like in print ads, radio spots and so on...
And last, these people are selling their rip-off products based on old perception about SEO
To help out other businesses thinking about hiring an SEO consultant or a reliable Quality SEO Service company, here are the facts and the myths about SEO:
1. If a company offers to do your SEO for $300 or less per month(or straight up fee), it is probably a rip off because:
- a. They will place your website in the top 10 for 1-3 keywords that is useless and that no one searches for.
- b. They will probably take your money and run
- c. If you are lucky, they will put your website on a keyword that ranks ok but in the wrong country that is outside of your demographic.
- In terms of cost, it is impossible to charge this little for SEO as SEO is very time consuming and for a medium competitive keyword like "online marketing services" it would take around 1200 hours to 1800 of work to achieve a top 10 ranking on a global level and about 800-1000 hours to achieve on a local level.
2. Promises to create 1,000 or 5,000 backlinks by posting on blog comments for only $50!
- a. 90% of all blogs are no follow which means that these links are uselss in terms of SEO.
- b. This is often done by a robot/software which means that the message they put on the blog comment section will not make any sense, thus not even helping you in getting traffic to your site.
- c. When people use blog comments as a way to advertise their business, it has to be done the right way, meaning it has to be a personalized message and the blog post has to relate to your product
3. Google Page Rank Myth
The Google Page Rank tool was created back in 1997 to let people know about the popularity of a page based on backlinks. Since then, many people have been mislead or confusd about this tool as it is in no way related to how well your website will rank for a keyword search.
- a. Here is an example, if you do a search for the keyword, "football handicapper" the #1 site in most countries is www.pigskingenius.com with a PR rank of 1. If you check out the sites that rank below them, like, www.marasoft.com which ranks #2 in most cases has a PR of 4.
- b. The fact is that PR ranking is good for two things, helps you determine how trustworthy the website is and how good of a backlink it can be for you if they havce a link to your site.
4. I'll Submit your Website to 100 search engines for only $50
This one is a pretty funny one that people still fall for on a regular basis.
- a. The major search engines will find your website on their own
- b. Do you really need to be found on a search engine in China?
- c. They are only about 10 search engines you should be worried about, the rest are irrelevant in terms of traffic so keep your $50.
5. I'll Submit your Website to 5,000 Directories for $100
This is one of my favoritesas my company does use that method in moderation and we actually have a list of directories that gets updated all of the time.
Our list however, is mostly used to weed out directories that either have "nofollow" links, "redirects", "paid" or "reciprocal links". (if you want the list, PM me and I'll send you our latest copy)
Now, there is actually nothing wrong with using a dirctory as a backlink source but only a few directories are actually worth having a direct backlink to your website.
In most cases, SEO experts use directories to help rank surface pages and rarely link directories to the actual website they are working on.
6. SEO is not cheap
I am restating myself here but here are more facts about the cost of SEO:
- a first class SEO company charges around $500 an hour just for consulting work.
- a second rate company will charge around $100-$300 an hour for consulting work
- a good seo company will charge around $1,000-$3,000 a month for 5 competitive keywords.
I hope this little article will help businesses looking to do some SEO work on their website!
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Comments (9)
Don Smith2
Public Relations Specialist
Great article about SEO fred.
Fred St. John6
Online Marketing Specialist
It really depends on the price,what kind of backlinks they offer and how you use them. If they just create backlinks using dofollow forum posts, social media book marks and directories it then depends on the pr ranking of the sites they create a backlink from. Its best to get details from them first as to how they create the backlinks for you, what kind of keyword you can target, and to show you examples of the work they will do for you. Usually, these types of services should be very cheap l
Philippe Moisan16
Tutorial videos, sci-fi writer
Would you say that sites offering to get tons of backlinks like socialmonkee are any good ?
Fred St. John6
Online Marketing Specialist
The next step is to make that blog popular by creating backlinks to it which is where submiting that website to directories come in! After a week or so, that blog you created will get a PR ranking and create a quality backlink to your main website. Remember that the more backlinks and higher pr your blog has, the better quality backlink your main website will get.
Fred St. John6
Online Marketing Specialist
wow, gonna have to write about it, but here is one way to create a good backlink to your website, create a blog on wordpress.com and blogspot.com. Name the blog about what you are selling or your services. Make sure it is specific to the keyword you are targetting like for example, one of my clients is target, "list of registered nurses" as a keyword, so you create a blog with that title. and then start blogging. When you blog, create backlinks to your website by linking your keyword to your
Fred St. John6
Online Marketing Specialist
backlinks. So start by doing some keyword research by going to this site, https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none and start researching
You need to choose about 20 keywords, where 10 will be low competition, 5 medium competition and 5 high competition. and decide where on your website you want to target these keywords and insert them in the text(it doesnt have to be all in one word it could be spaced out with ot
Fred St. John6
Online Marketing Specialist
he he he, didnt mean to burst everyone's bubble but here are some tips to help you out:
Meta tags are still important. Even though Google may not place any importance to them, other search engines us them.
For the h1, h2, h3 tags, You should use them but don't confuse the SE robots by using 3 h1 tags. Also, the title really needs to reflect the text content on the page. For the location, the h1 tag is meant obe used to say that this is what the page is about. So it needs to be at the t
Paula van Dun16
Retired
To hire a good SEO company is out of reach for most people. However it is possible to do some SEO your self. There are services that provide SEO reports that give detailed info on what you need to do. But also there are big differences in the quality of the reports. Do-it-your-self SEO is a good option if you are on a budget. It is better than doing no SEO at all.
Philippe Moisan16
Tutorial videos, sci-fi writer
You are such a party breaker, Fred LOL
Question: is it really important to use good keywords in the headline, to put the same keywords on the first and the last line of an article, and to put the first line in an h1 tag ?