About 18 months ago, I had a call with a fairly well known company about their search engine optimization plans. They were in talks with several SEO vendors, and we had made their short list. One of the participants of the call on the client end was a woman who remained silent throughout most of the call. She suddenly sprung the question that she thought would lead to our doom on this call. “Why are you not #1 for search engine optimization?”

This is a question that we hear from time to time. We respond with the best answer we can, the truth. Search engine optimization is a highly competitive term, and some companies are willing to do anything to get that top position. USWeb chose long ago to be an online marketing firm. And that is what we correctly identify our company as on our home page. If you search for the terms, “online marketing firm”, “Internet Marketing firm”, “Web marketing firm, “Interactive marketing firm”, and “search engine marketing firm”, you’ll see we rank very competitively. There is no doubt that when you scan the USWeb.com site, and you look for the terms we chose to rank for (they are easy to spot from the titles of our pages), you will see that we are without a doubt the best ranked search marketing firm in the world.

This answer was not cutting it with the client. “We are in talks with the company that is #1 for this term.” She replied. I explained to her that to those of us in the search space, there are very few mysteries as to how a company ranks for certain terms. There is no such thing as anonymity in search optimization. Every piece of code, and every link to your site is easily found through Google. We were very familiar with the tactics this competitor used to get their rankings, and we chose to not operate in the same fashion.

This competitor’s tactics were to have the client create a “links” page on their site, and then send out thousands of spam emails asking other sites to link back to them. To make this even better, our competitor was not even doing this themselves, but had hired an Indian firm to do all the work.

I explained this to the prospect, but their response clearly implied that they thought my response was just sour grapes. “So, you’re saying you can’t beat them without cheating?” she replied. Obviously we lost that prospect to the competitor.

A few weeks later I got an update from one of our engineering staff that the competition had finally been busted for their spam efforts and had been knocked down almost zero visibility in Google’s results. This is a shame for them, especially because their tradeshow booths actually had their search rankings printed on them. So, bad news for them, great news from some tradeshow booth vendor who gets to make them a new booth!

Out of curiosity, we tracked that prospects rankings for a while. The results were less than stellar.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that your search vendor’s rankings are not important. We point our these problems with competitors all the time. The fact is, “What terms do you rank for?” should be one of the first questions you ask a firm. But listen to their reasoning. Part of what you’re hiring a firm for is keyword analysis. Let them explain why they chose the terms they did. Also ask what terms do they purchase. This is an excellent question because you know the search traffic is valuable to them for that term, why do they now rank for it.

When you get references, make sure to ask both the firm, and the reference about terms they rank for.

Remember that in one sense, search marketing firms are like doctors. We should first do no harm. That means we make sure that you don’t lose rankings you currently enjoy, and that we don’t do anything that can get you penalized by the search engines.

Proper link building should not be done through reciprocal linking or site wide links. I know there are going to be people who argue this and show their great rankings from these efforts. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work. I’m saying that you are living through a loophole in a system run by one of the smartest companies on the planet. Google gets better and better everyday at detecting Spam or artificial results.

The thing I always tell clients who are interested in learning how to get better results in search engines is this; make sure you have plenty of good, unique, relevant, and visible copy. And make sure you have plenty of good, unique, relevant and visible links to the page. If you do this, you will be successful.

search engine optimization, linking, spam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.