One of our clients who has a medical practice in Windsor, CT has received a solicitation from one of those bogus SEO companies. They sent me information about that company’s “review” of my client’s SEO, and I couldn’t help but comment frankly. Here’s the story:

I did this website SEO overview for $10 with another company just to see things from a different perspective.  I have no intention of using them beyond the report attached.  It seems that my home page is lacking a bit.  I know that you made recommendations regarding my home page.  They ran the report just on my home page so that was what we focused on.  These are my questions that came up as a result:
1.  They said that the title tag was weak and that it should be a description of what I do rather than my business name and town.
[My reply] We’re optimizing that page for just your business name and town on purpose. If someone recommends you to a friend or relative, we want you to show up when they search for your business name. “What you do” covers too many things (and too many keywords) to cover on your home page; that’s why we optimized other pages for those keywords.
2.  They mentioned optimization maintenance of meta tags, which is I think what they were selling.  Not sure what was wrong regarding that.
[My reply] Meta tags are almost worthless for rankings, particularly the keywords meta tag. And the last thing they need is maintenance. You should only change well-written meta tags if the nature of your business changes and your keywords along with it. See this recent article about this sort of thing: … and this.
3.  They suggested that I had bad links or links that were draining energy from my resources page, although she could not give me an example of a broken link.
[My reply] Links do not drain energy from your pages. They share your linking page’s PageRank with the targets of those links, so if you have lots of outbound links each one you link to gets less value from the link than if you had fewer links on the page. But outbound links don’t hurt your “energy” one iota.
4.  Should I be doing some updating of either the content or meta tags as part of a regular maintenance?
[My reply] NO! That’s a scam perpetrated by sleazy SEO practitioners. You should update content on your site when it deserves to be updated — when you incorporate new techniques into your practice; when you react to new medical research, when you expand to treating other conditions … never just for the search engines. Please do this: go to Google and do a search for tutoring in New Jersey — see what comes up at the top of the organic results. Do you find A+ Home Tutoring? That’s my wife’s website, and it’s the first one I ever optimized. Back in 2000. Other than adding a single page for a new learning game she patented, this website hasn’t been touched in 11 years.

Sorry, I am sure that you roll your eyes about these companies just like I do when people go and get mall health screenings.  Thanks for your input.

[My reply] PS — I can’t believe they thought people would look for you by searching for the keyword “Windsor”. What are they? Stoopid? (Windsor is the town this client has an office in.)

And they make a big deal of your Keyword Efficiency Index? We abandoned using the KEI years ago.

Sorry to be so nasty about these guys, but these are the folks that give SEO a bad name and cause people to think it’s an unethical racket. They really push my buttons.

If you think your SEO consultant can work independently and work magic on your rankings without your help, you’re mistaken.

I know. You’re too busy running your business to spend time and effort on SEO. That’s why you hired an SEO consultant in the first place.

And we’d love to create an SEO strategy for you, choose keywords, make structural changes to make your website search engine friendly, write compelling marketing copy for your website and your blog, post updates to your Facebook Fan Page, tweet about your business, and earn you massive link popularity without you having to lift a finger.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

• You don’t want to delegate keyword selection. Sure, we can help, but selecting the best keywords requires an intimate knowledge of your business — something no SEO consultant has.
• Your webmaster needs to be the one to make your site search engine friendly. We can advise and suggest, but you don’t want any SEO consultant getting in between you and your webmaster. First, coordination and synchronization issues are inevitable. Second, it was an SEO company  making changes to the client’s website that got Ricoh and BMW websites completely banned from Google for more than six months a few years ago. You need your webmaster’s eyes on any changes proposed by an SEO consultant to prevent just that sort of thing.
• SEO consultants are almost never professional copywriters. We work with those folks all the time, and their skills are invaluable. Even if you don’t engage a copywriter, you can’t delegate the writing of marketing copy about your business to someone who isn’t intimately familiar with it. (That’s right — even with a professional copywriter, you’re going to have to be closely involved.)
• Blog posts don’t have to be the size of a short story, but they do need to be posted at least a couple of times a month. SEO consultants don’t know what to write about your business; that’s your area of expertise.
• Twitter activity is the same. Tweets need to come from you or someone knowledgeable on your staff.
• We can do link building for you, but when a potential reciprocal link partner requests a link, you need to be the one to decide if that link is acceptable. And links from clients and vendors might make great links for you, but your SEO  consultant can’t know who those people are.

Expect to be involved with your SEO campaign. You need to stay in touch with your SEO consultant frequently.

If you can’t make the time to be closely involved with your SEO campaign, you’re probably dooming it to failure. Much as it pains me to say this, you might as well not hire that SEO consultant in the first place.

It seems to be almost universally true that someone who is good at web design is lousy at Search Engine Optimization. And anyone (like us) who is good at SEO is a lousy web designer.

Why should that be?

Enter a little psychology to explain the difference between right-brain dominance and left-brain dominance. This is related (but not identical) to whether a person is right-handed or left-handed, but is far more pervasive than just handedness. We all have, of course, two sides to our brain, but just as righties have much better fine control over their right hands than their left, we are each much stronger in either the right or the left hemisphere of our brains.

Left brain dominant people tend to be

• text-oriented rather than visually-oriented
• content focused rather than presentation focused
• work from the details to the whole instead of the other way around
• tend to be sequential thinkers as opposed to conceptual thinkers.

Right brain dominated people are just the opposite in all those things.

Very few of us are equally dominant in both sides of the brain. It takes a strongly right-brained person to make an excellent web designer. That doesn’t mean they have to be left-handed, although you’ll probably find a larger proportion of lefties among web designers than you will among SEO consultants. And it takes a strongly left-brained dominant person to be a good SEO consultant. Just review the characteristics listed above, and you’ll see how strongly split they are between characteristics needed for visual design versus those needed for a disciplined, step by step approach to SEO.

Increasingly, web designers are beginning to appreciate the need for SEO to allow their websites to be most productive for their clients. That’s a good thing, but some of them decide to try and do the SEO on the websites they design. That’s almost always a mistake. We see the results every day. Clients tell us their web designer has already “done their SEO” and wonder why they still have no visibility in the search engines.

You need to have different people do your web design and SEO.

You don’t necessarily need different companies to get the results you need. A web design company may employ both right-brained web designers and left-brained SEO consultants, and if they work well together that can be a terrific solution. But if your web designer is in a small design-only company, you’ll find much greater success working with an independent SEO. Check us out and see if we’re a better fit for what you need.

Or just drop us a question and we’ll be happy to talk with you.

A few words of wisdom from the ePower Marketing blog.

Believe me; we understand you need proof that the budget you got approved for a Search Engine Optimization program is or will deliver results, especially in these economic times. However, that is not done with a snap of the fingers. Search Engine Optimization is an ever changing, interactive field, and when an SEO campaign begins, it takes time to really take effect for a Web site.

We find that, starting from scratch with keyword research, it usually takes at least three months to see measurable results in all of the search engines.

From a well-known and respected SEO company in the northeast, comes this quote:

We’ve listened to our clients, the economic climate, and what we like doing as a company and have decided to offer a Small-Business SEO package that starts at $749/month. We believe this is a reasonable price that is affordable to any small business that is serious about optimizing their website.

Many of our clients achieve long-term high rankings (many months and even years) for about the equivalent of only four months of their service. If you’d like to learn more, ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

Jill Whalen , CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter, and she wrote this article in her newsletter recently. I find I agree with it almost completely, and am happy to share it with you.

A lot of companies get so confused when attempting to hire an SEO firm that they simply give up altogether and don’t hire anyone. Part of the problem is that they simply don’t know whom to trust for this service.Trust is always a tricky issue, and one that is emotionally charged based on our individual experiences with others as we navigate through the maze we call life. In SEO, trust issues are further magnified by the fact that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, nor one method that all SEOs use to bring targeted traffic to their client’s websites.

Where does this leave the person or company who wants to hire an SEO firm, but doesn’t know whom to trust? SEO A tells them one thing, SEO B another, and SEOs C, D, E, and F completely different things altogether! Who is right? Who is wrong? Whom should they hire? Whom should they beware of?

Here are 5 factors that all businesses should weigh when choosing their SEO firm:

1. Does the SEO firm set realistic expectations about what they can and can’t do, or do they simply promise the moon? Smart SEOs under-promise and over-deliver, so watch out for those that do the opposite (and there are many).
2. Does the SEO company have a proven record of success and not just for long-tail keywords? Be sure to check references to learn whether the SEO firm actually improved their clients’ bottom line in some way.
3. Does the SEO agency provide recommendations for making your site better than it currently is, or are they trying to do things to it that will actually make it worse for your users? This one sounds crazy, but a good portion of SEOs think that it’s all about the search engines and not the users, and make bad decisions accordingly. Never, ever, ever let an SEO company do something that you feel worsens your site’s overall usability or readability.
4. Does the SEO consultant tell you what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, or do they just want you to blindly trust them? This one should set off a major red flag if you ever encounter it. Sure, you don’t need to know every last detail or to micromanage your SEO campaign, but your SEO should be able to explain their reasoning for why they want to do the things they recommend. If they can’t, or if their answers don’t make sense, then run (don’t walk) to the nearest door!
5. Does the SEO company use only automated methods to achieve their goals? This isn’t necessarily bad; however, you need to be aware if this is what they’re doing. SEO is very much an art as well as a science, and because of this, creativity should always play a big part. It’s very difficult to be creative when everything you do is based on a numbers game. Just keep that in mind!

Like trusting a friend, a dentist, or anyone else, determining whom to trust as your SEO partner should not be taken lightly or rushed into. Educate yourself on SEO as much as you can before you decide.

Get to know the SEO vendors you’re thinking of hiring, ask them lots and lots of questions, and most of all use your gut and your own common sense to determine if you’ll be a good fit. If you are unsure, then keep on looking. There are plenty of SEO fish in the sea, and there should be a few who use the methods you believe in, who are within your budget, and who will work hard to help you accomplish your website goals!

There are deceptive SEO companies out there — we refer to them as “black hat” companies who use unethical techniques to get your site near the top of the rankings. Their techniques often work well in the short term, but they don’t produce long-term results and often they can get your web site banned from the search engines.

Small Business Trends has an article on 5 things that may reveal a black hat SEO company:

1 – keyword stuffing
2 – overuse of bold text and links
3 – hidden links
4 – complicated link schemes
5 -multiple domains or subdomains with essentially the same content

See the article for the complete skinny on these shady techniques.

We’re always interested by articles that tell people how to tell good SEO companies from bad ones. There are a number of reasons for that. For one, we’re very confident that these articles will demonstrate that Rank Magic is a good SEO company. For another, I find it disturbing that there are so many bad SEO companies out there — companies that over-promise and under-deliver (or worse). The more people know about how to identify those bad apples, the sooner they’ll disappear from the scene and I won’t have to feel like I’m in the same business as a bunch of hucksters.

Anyway, Site Reference recently published an article with the same title as this blog post. They highlight five sure-fire giveaways. If you’re considering hiring an SEO company, this article is worth reading. These are five things fake SEO companies may do:

1 - Guarantee you that they can place your website in the number one position on Google.
2 – Charge ridiculously low amount of money for a lot of services.
3 – Claim a Secret and Proprietary Technique that cannot be revealed.
4 - Recommend “Black Hat” techniques: (doorway pages, cloaking).
5 – Emphasize outdated techniques like keyword stuffing & meta tags.

In a May newsletter, noted SEO expert Jill Whalen wrote some sage advice on  hiring an SEO company.

Ultimately, the onus is on those who contract with SEOs.

If you’re a company who’s thinking of hiring an SEO consultant or agency, for goodness’ sake take a look at how long they’ve been in business! If they’ve been in the biz for at least 3 years and have some proof of results and satisfied customers, they probably have some clue about what they’re doing. Even then, be skeptical. If they’re asking you to make major changes to your website, be sure you understand exactly why. I’d even suggest getting a second opinion if it’s extensive and expensive.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an industry that has more than its share of charlatans. Small Business Trendsreports on five dead giveaways that you’re dealing with an SEO company that practices deceptive or “black hat” SEO.

Their descriptions of these telltale signs is worth reading. This is just a very quick listing of what they are. I encourage you to read the article to better understand the implications.

1. Keyword stuffing
2. Overuse of bold text and links
3. Hidden links
4. Complicated link schemes
5. Multiple domains or subdomains with essentially the same content