[Hidden-tech] 'SEO Marketing sales pitches': scams or what?

[Maria Korolov]

You can improve traffic to your website two ways:

1. Improve your website. Give you potential customers things they would
find useful. Advice, how-to articles. Check to see what your direct
competitors have, and do just a little bit extra. Learn how to use social
networks to stay closer to your customers.

2. Cheat. Pay for fake in-bound links, run "keyword-stuffed" "content"
articles that are useless to actual human beings, etc... If you go the
cheating route, Google will punish your site for cheating. Then you will
have to pay even more to get back from that. It's going to be an endless
battle -- except that instead of staying a little bit ahead -- or no more
than a little behind, at least -- of your direct competitors, you have to
stay ahead of Google.

Anybody who reaches out to you unsolicited probably doesn't know your
industry, doesn't know your customers, and is going to fall into option 2.

They send out mass emails to everybody on the planet who owns a website.
Every website could use *some* improvement -- they're trying to wear down
people's confidence.

If you do need to improve your website, hire someone local who works per
hour and has actual marketing experience -- and stay away from anyone who
uses the word "SEO".

Don't optimize for search engines. Optimize for PEOPLE -- search engines
will follow.

-- Maria

____________________________________________________
Maria Korolov •  508-443-1130 • maria at tromblyinternational.com
President, *Trombly International <http://www.tromblyinternational.com/> *
• *"We know the emerging markets."*


On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 5:44 PM, Bram Moreinis <bram at gamefacewebdesign.com>
wrote:

>    ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>    ** If you did, we all thank you.
>
>
>
>  Hey, Robert.
>
> Well....it's not a scam, IF you want to have your listing show up higher
> on Google.  The white hat way of doing that is negotiating good backlinks
> on reputable places (e.g. generating articles, adding listings) and having
> a clear strategy about anchor text, landing pages, on-page SEO, etc. etc.
>
> The black hat way is to hijack a bunch of sites and build pages on them
> that link to the client's site.  For example, one of my Drupal clients
> (Drupal 5, from way back) turned his User settings to allow other people to
> create accounts without telling me.  As a result, there were over 1000
> users, each with their own "profile page" upon which they could write
> anything, and which would be indexed by Google robots.
>
> There were no links to these profile pages from the public site, so no way
> for my client to discover it was happening, unless he Googled himself: site:
> redhookcurryhouse.com
>
> I deleted all users, deleted all profile content, turned back to change
> the user settings (I know, that was in the wrong order), and discovered
> that in 2 minutes 5 new users with profiles had been created.  All done
> with automation.  Very clever!
>
> I'm punishing him by making it a flat HTML site (if he wants it to be
> Drupal again, he has to pay for a Drupal 7 upgrade.
>
> So, my short answer:  Black Hat SEO works fine, and is worth the money if
> you need to go that route.
>
> -Bram
>
> On 8/23/2014 10:43 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
>
>    ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>    ** If you did, we all thank you.
>
>
> I've been getting sales pitches from SEO Marketing companies, both via
> telephone (Robot calls mostly) and via E-Mail (and via my contact page on my
> website). All with more or less the same basic pitch: "We can place you the
> first page of Google searches..." or some variation on that theme.
>
> These companies charge something like $300-$500 / month (which is way outside
> what I could afford).
>
> What *exactly* are these companies really doing (other than looking to pocket
> a pile of *my* cash)?  Some claim to be using a propriatory system -- whatever
> that means.
>
> Note if I do a search for "Linux Administration North Quabbin" *my* website
> shows up as the first and second results (at least with duckduckgo), so my
> website can't be that bad as it is. I do get some business, maybe not vast
> amounts, but I am not sure I could handle vast amounts of work anyway -- I am
> a one-man operation and there are only so many hours in the day.  I would need
> to get more work than I could handle to cover the $300-$500 / month anyway --
> that is I would end up becoming a cash cow *for the SEO Marketing company* and
> my net income would not be much more than it currently is!  What would be the
> point of that?
>
> Most of the pitches say that my website is not findable, but somehow these SEO
> Marketing companies have found my website (is it a chicken or an egg?). What
> are they doing: doing a search and then working backwards from the *last* page
> of results? Or are they really finding my site easily enough and thinking
> 'this might be an easy mark', since I might not be at the top of all of the
> search results (or the search results for the searches they are doing).  I
> wonder: maybe my website is really good in that it looks like a bigger company
> than I really am?
>
> Is this some sort of scam or what?  It has all of the look and feel of a scam,
> much like the credit card robot calls, which start with "This is your final
> wanring about your credit card..." (and I *don't* have a credit card!).
>
>
>
> --
>   [image: GF Logo]
>  Bram Moreinis, Principal
> http://www.gamefacewebdesign.com
> (845)-750-2412
>
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