Archive for the ‘Richard's Ramblings’ Category
SEO Results after 8 weeks
March 9th, 2009 | 
Author: Just a short note. After eight weeks my site is showing on page 4 of Google for the keywords ” Calgary Internet marketing” and “Internet marketing Calgary” . This is up from page 8 when I started. Proves that a few simple changes when you understand what you can do to improve your postion.
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Search Engine Optimization Scams
I am always amazed by how often experts, or people who claim to be experts, will use their knowledge to take advantage of a situation when dealing with clients or potential clients. This is especially true in the IT industry. I suspect I may not be making friends after that statement, but I became a Certified Programmer Analyst in 2000 specifically for that reason. I got tired of bringing quality Internet based solutions to business owners or managers only to have the “resident expert” start rattling off in IT jargon about how they could offer a better solution than my company in a language that the manager and I could not understand nor question.
I have been involved in sales and marketing for over 30 years. I always believed it was my job to find people with problems and provide them with solutions to those problems at an affordable price. Ultimately they would get the results they were looking for and I would get paid and possibly a referral or testimonial to boot. Many salespeople in the SEO industry don’t seem to get that. I encountered two situations today that inspired me to write this post.
The first one involves an email I received from one of my recently acquired clients who is struggling right now with a poorly designed website. It is not performing well on the search engines. While he does have some access to update his content, he has no access to the navigation, meta-data or page titles on his site and that can greatly impact its performance. I am mentoring him on SEO and he is realizing his choice of website developer, web host and domain name provider (he paid an “expert” to do all these things for him) was not the best.
He contacted a professional SEO company to get a second opinion about what I was telling him. The “expert” in this organization suggested he get another web development company, one that he recommended, to build him another industry based website. After that he suggested my client hire him for $400 to $1000 per month to optimize the site promising to have him on page one of Google in about 4 months. So why am I upset? Because every SEO company I encounter uses this technique to take a drowning man out of the water, and then throw him right back in after emptying his pockets.
What should an SEO company do in this case?
- Help the client determine what keywords will be most effective in getting qualified visitors to the website through in depth research.
- Make certain that the client is getting a website that is designed to be SEO friendly.
- Suggest a web developer who builds Content Managed Systems (CMS) that allow the client to modify the site including adding new pages with effective page titles, meta tags, navigation and content development instead of templates designed for only one industry.
- Assist the client in researching competitor sites that perform well in the search engines in selected key word searches.
- Assist the client developing search engine friendly content.
Situation two was similar but it involved an “expert” SEM company whose focus was Pay Per Click ( sponsored) website marketing. I spoke directly with their representative who contacted me via spam. He claimed his company had a special affiliation with Google and Yahoo and that they could guarantee their clients the first 3 positions in the sponsored ads for Google, Yahoo and MSN.
When I asked him the price for this he said it would depend on the keywords I wanted to be searched and that prices would be set by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Hmmm…isn’t that what happens when you register for a Pay Per Click program? Only this company wanted to set a monthly rate …say $1000 to $2000 per month to keep me in the top spot.
Seems to me if I just bid higher than all my competition, I could get into the number one spot, and if nobody clicked on my ads, I could stay there for free. Of course that isn’t the goal but you get my point.
You see, it isn’t about guarantes and set fees. It about trial and error, test and measure, educate yourself and learn the game.
These guys are not treating the people who are baffled by all the internet and IT jargon like good customers who deserve the best service possible. They are treating them like suckers that need to be taken advantage of.
Tags: Calgary Internet Marketing on Google
Five weeks have passed since I optimized my website – www.mmwebmarketing.com – and began writing about it in this blog. Within 2 weeks of making changes to some of my content, my meta tags, some page titles and the menu, I began to see the impact. Ironically, as is often the case with Google, my site actually lost position in some of the searches I was using before. The keywords “Calgary Internet Marketing” and “Internet Marketing Calgary” were less effective and I dropped from page 8 to page 12 and beyond.
Today marks the beginning of what I suspect will be a journey to page 1 before I am finished. The reason I say this is that several positive things have happened and I have not made any additional changes in the interim. Now that I have proven to myself that my efforts did not in fact get me blacklisted, I am happy to say I will proceed with some other search engine optimization techniques in my attempt improve my position.
What happened to suggest things are working? Well, the site reappeared on page 8 of Google for both of these search terms. In case you missed it in a prior post, the search for “Calgary Internet Consulting” and “Internet Consulting Calgary” found the site on pages 1 and 3 of Google, while ” Calgary Internet Consultant” and ” Internet Consultant Calgary” have the site showing up on pages 2 and 3. So the results are not too shabby so far.
Another thing that happened was my first request from another website marketer to add their link to my site. They want to provide a reciprocal link on their site (which recently Google began to frown upon) so I will have to consider the options.
By the way I currently own 3 websites and will be happy to place quality links on those sites if anyone fits the category. You can check them out at www.realestate-canada.com and www.calgaryupdate.com . Just send me an e-mail and I’ll have look.
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