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May 25, 2005

A Guaranteed Top Ten Ranking And Other Myths

Here's a nice artice that covers a few things I've been
telling clients for years...

Screwed: Is This an Inevitability in the SEO World?
By Courtney Heard (c) 2005

By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a
good handful of clients and potential clients who have been
speaking with other SEO firms. This an absolutely wonderful
thing to see, as in the past in our industry, not enough of our
consumers were questioning what they were purchasing. It is a
sign that accountability will come and the bad guys will be
weeded out.

While this is a good sign, it's the cause of my having to answer
the same questions over and over. The consumers in the SEO world
are being fed out and out lies by some of the people who call
themselves experts in the area of Search Engine Optimization.
They hear these lies and while comparing prices, contact us at
Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that
all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly
astonished. Here are some of the most asinine claims I hear
through the grapevine.

"We Can Guarantee Your Rankings"

Don't be fooled! Ask the company what you will be ranking for,
immediately! 9 times out of 10, a company that guarantees you
rankings, is guaranteeing that you will rank for your own
company name, which means people on Google or MSN or Yahoo!
would have to know your company name before searching. How does
this produce new customers and visitors to your site? Chances
are, as soon as these search engines index your site, you will
rank within the top ten for your company name, if not first,
because it is unique. Why bother paying someone for something
that is already going to happen, anyway?

Guaranteeing rankings is highly unethical. It is impossible to
guarantee rankings unless you have access to Google's database
itself, and even then I'm not sure it's possible. Keep in mind,
we are working with a 3rd party, here. A highly guarded 3rd
party that doesn't, under any circumstances, reveal it's
secrets. No one outside of the companies that run these search
engines knows what it is exactly that makes search engines rank
sites high. Especially due to the fact that these search engines
and the rigorous ranking filters they use to spit out search
results change almost monthly. Even a former Google employee
doesn't know how to guarantee rankings! If someone is telling
you they'll guarantee top rankings, run fast! Those are some
shady, shady claims. Google themselves have said:

"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google - Beware of SEO's
that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a "special
relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority
submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In
fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is by
using the page at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do
this yourself at no cost whatsoever." -
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html

An ethical SEO company will not guarantee rankings. They will
guarantee that their methods follow search engine guidelines,
and they will guarantee customer satisfaction, but at no point
in time will any SEO company with a conscience guarantee your
rankings.

"Your Site Needs to Be Continually Resubmitted to Get On and
Stay On the Search Engines"
When will I see the end of this one? How old is this method
now? 5 years? 10 years? We're talking about the days when
Webcrawler was the biggest search engine and all computers were
beige! This claim is so fully untrue, had Pinocchio uttered it,
his nose would have stretched from Rome to Poughkeepsie. And the
good folks at Google will once again back me up on this one:

"Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion
in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs,
it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl
before they make it into our index through the URL submission
form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot
predict when or if they will appear." -
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2

"Meta Tags Are Not Important Anymore"

Sure they aren't. If you don't want a decent ranking on MSN. The
new MSN search places a lot of value on the keywords and
description meta tags. Without these tags in your site's code,
your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just as importantly, if your
keywords and description meta tags don't use proper language,
your rankings will suffer. The description tag is also what MSN
uses as the visible description for a site in the search
results. And of course, to prove I'm not the one blowing hot
air, here is what MSN themselves say about it:

"Site descriptions are extracted from the content of your page
each time MSNBot crawls your site and indexes its pages...

...the best way to affect your site description is to ensure
that your web pages effectively deliver the information you want
to see in search results." - Click here to see the page this is
found on. ((http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=
SEARCH_WEBMASTER_CONC_AboutYourSiteDescription.htm)

"Your Web Site Has Been Sabotaged"

This one is truly unreal. I can't believe it's even been used
as an excuse for why an SEO company hasn't achieved decent
rankings for you. But alas, more than one SEO company has told
potential clients of ours that the reason they are not ranking
well, or why their search engine optimization campaign is not
effective, is because someone else has been sabotaging the site.
Some of the clients who have been told this are small
businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet sitters. We always
explain to these potential clients that the likelihood of
someone even having the initial idea to sabotage a web site, the
site in question would have to be a fairly large one, and the
target of a lot of hatred. Why? Because sabotaging a web site's
rankings takes a massive amount of time and energy. We're
talking months, maybe even years of hard, hard work. Why would
anyone devote months or years of their life to taking down a pet
sitting site? Or a bed and breakfast?

Once again, these are some hefty claims and it is a clear sign
that the company who is running your SEO campaign is unwilling
to be held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.

Don't Put Up With It.

The bottom line is, your search engine optimization company
works for you. You are paying them. Hold them accountable as you
would any other vendor. Keep reading these articles, read info
at the search engines, educate yourself and if something your
SEO says smells a little rotten, don't be afraid to call them on
it.

Is being screwed an inevitability in the SEO world? Damn near.
But thanks to the increasing interest of our consumers in
self-education and their increased questioning, our industry
will slowly climb out of the gutter and someday down the line,
send this article into antiquity. In spite of my pride, I'd be
overjoyed to see that day come.

================================================================
Courtney Heard is the founder of Abalone Designs, a search
engine optimization company http://www.abalone.ca in
Vancouver, Canada. She has been involved in web development and
marketing since 1995 and has helped start several businesses
since then in the Vancouver area. More of Courtney's articles
are available at http://www.abalone.ca/resources/
================================================================

Posted by Willie Crawford at May 25, 2005 08:09 AM

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