Search Engine Optimization Scams : How to Avoid Getting Burned by Unethical SEO Companies

Clay Butler, Founder Claytowne Branding and Indentity Design

A Simpler Time…or Perhaps a More Naive Time

Remember “back in the day” when you received perhaps three to five emails per day? They were always welcomed notes from friends or business related and you spent a considerable amount of time crafting the perfect response. Spam was almost non-existent, viruses were rare, and most people were not even thinking about their “rankings” in search engines. There was no Google, Alta Vista was the big boy on the block, and Yahoo was a free directory that was supplemented by results from Inktomi. None the less, the passion and interest in the web was very high.

Back in those days people understood that they “needed to get a website” or risk being left in dust by their competitors.

It was in this atmosphere of strong demand for web design services and general consumer ignorance about how websites were actually built and maintained, that a new industry was born. Thousands of people, armed with a few community college HTML courses and fueled by the promise of getting rich quick, could command thousands of dollars for substandard web . For a while, many of these new designers could convince naive clients to pony up a small fortune full a modest website full of poorly optimized graphics, broken links and free animated gifs and buttons.

The idea that a website should actually meet specific business goals, as in “make some money”, was just in it’s infancy and overshadowed by the mantra of “I need a website”

Reality Takes It’s Toll and a New Monster is Born

Fortunately the Dot Com crash and the rising sophistication of the average businessperson put an end to most of this nonsense. The Johnny -Come- Latelys found something else to do and the industry matured.

Alas, history is repeating itself, only this time it’s SEO. The mantra of “I gotta have a website” has been replaced with “I gotta be number one on Google”. It’s this demand that is currently fueling the explosion in SEO services available on the web. People of questionable talent and motives are flooding the field, making outlandish and completely false claims, and bullying clients into expensive monthly SEO maintenance programs of little value. They are counting on the public’s ignorance about search engines to turn a quick buck.

For someone who’s been optimizing websites for six years and had more than my share of gun shy clients who’ve been burned and bruised by these fly-by-night companies, it’s been a bit aggravating.

It is with this in mind that I present you my list of the Top SEO Scams

1.They state that you will continue to get top rankings as long as you continue to pay them a monthly fee.

Legitimate, proper SEO implementation is a thorough, site-wide venture involving real inbound links, great titles, and top notch page content. It cannot be taken away or held hostage for nonpayment of recurring fees. If they can take away your rankings…then it’s not real SEO.

Note: Don’t ever sign a contract that gives ownership of your title tags, meta tags or on page copy to anyone. It’s your website and you are entitled to own all work performed on it. If an SEO company has a problem with that, then find someone else.

2. You have to become part of their “network” of sites.

This is a nice way of referring to link farms. ( what is a link farm?)

3. Failure to fully disclose and explain everything that is being done to your site.

Run away from anyone who claims it’s too complicated to understand, these are trade secrets, they can’t discuss their proprietary technology, or speak in quasi-mystical jargon and non-specific terms.

Note: Experienced SEO experts have a real passion and interest in their field and enjoy educating their clients about the details. They are not secretive with their clients nor worried that their clients will leave them once they understand the process to successful SEO.

4. Sells keywords that when typed into the address bar of your browser will take web searchers directly to your site.

These are either some crappy browser plugin that no one would ever install or they are connected to a spyware/malware outfit.

5. Claims you must submit your site regularly to the search engines to get top rankings.

This is completely false. Search engines find you just fine by following inbound links and re indexing a page over and over has never done anything to improve rankings.

Note: Scam SEO companies tout this feature to give the illusion of credibility to their useless automated submission programs.

6. Claims to have a “special relationship” with Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and this allows them to guarantee you top placement or rankings.

False, Total lie. Nobody has a “special relationship” with the major search engines. They are probably reselling PPC ( Pay Per Click ) sponsored results at a considerable mark up.

7. Guarantees top 10 placements in the major search engines

If not referring to PPC campaigns, these guarantees usually only cover a handful of highly unique, low competition phrases that you’d probable do well with under any circumstances ( example: “DJ’s Chicago Style Roasted Chicken” ) Or they have no intention of backing their guarantee and will simply brush you off when you complain.

Bottom line: Nobody controls the search engines, therefore, no one can guarantee specific rankings.

8. Will submit your site to the top 300, 500, 3,000 or 20,000 search engines and directories.

Hmmmm, let’s see…MSN, Google, Yahoo, Gimpsy, Alta Vista, DMOZ, Gigablast, LookSmart…uhhh Lycos…HotBot.. hmmm, AskJeeves…the list gets pretty short very fast. These statements are just nonsense. If they actually did submit to even to even a fraction of their promised 100′s of search engines and directories you can bet they are mostly FFA ( Free For All ) junk sites that you’d never want to be associated with. Also, as stated before, submitting to search engines is unnecessary.

9. Sends you unsolicited email (spam) or uses cold call telemarketing techniques to tout their services.

“Pardon me ma’am, if you don’t have the latest Nike Air Jordans you may not be jumping as high as you’d like. We can help!”

This is pretty obvious. Have you ever received unsolicited junk emails or cold calls from Nike, Citibank, Toyota or any other any reputable company?

Won’t happen. With spam…think scam.

Not All Monthly Fees are Scams

Monthly fees are not always scams. Legitimate reasons to pay monthly fees to an SEO company would include situations where you are regularly generating new content or new features that require the oversight of an SEO expert, managing PPC campaigns, or implementing a *link build campaign.

Other search engine marketing services that may require a monthly fee would be generating and distributing press releases, article placement and promotion, evaluating and tracking your inclusion in paid directories for best ROI (return on investment) and managing email campaigns.

Note: I reluctantly included link building as a legitimate activity. I receive link exchange requests regularly and every single one of them is completely useless at best and sometimes so off the mark that I know they didn’t even look at my site. I’ve never responded to any of them and I don’t know of any educated business person who does. None the less, theoretically, it could be a worthwhile investment if done correctly…I’ve just never been approached by anyone worthwhile in six years.

Buyer Beware

In conclusion, bogus monthly maintenance contracts tend to cover these areas:

1. To regularly resubmit your site to search engines (useless)

2. To tweak your code to keep up with the latest algorithm changes. Pointless…unless your rankings just got creamed because you were spamming the search engines. In that case you shouldn’t be using that company anyway and find someone who won’t put you at risk. Also, the search engines carefully guard their algorithms and any attempt to “game them” is at best an educated guess. If done correctly, good SEO is largely a “set it and forget it” or “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” endeavor.

3. Preparing monthly ranking reports. Most likely just some automated reporst that you could easily generate or view yourself. At any rate, you should be reviewing your stats at least weekly if not daily and you can easily do this yourself by looking at your server logs (site statistics). If your hosting company doesn’t provide these in any easily understandable form (awsats, wusage, etc.) then find another host. There also a wide variety of free online tools to evaluate your site. I’ve found that my clients really enjoy tracking their stats and will spend far more time and care in examining the nuances than some intern generating an automated report ever will.

Disclaimer: If your are in an extremely competitive and cut throat industry and are willing to risk anything ( your reputation, your domain, etc. ) to make temporary but huge gains in ranking and traffic then the above advice will seam hopelessly naive and outdated. If you view your business as nothing more than an expendable resource to quick profits there are many high risk and sophisticated means to that end. However, I work with above the board clients who have long term assets to build and protect and therefore have pitched the above advice to support their needs.

Got a call a couple of month’s ago. The Dr Joseph Mercola group needed to have a storyboard created based upon their script. Having an extensive background in cartooning, character design and storyboarding, I was an obvious choice.When I read the script I was thrilled. It was tight, funny and relevent. Politically and socially the commentary was right up my alley.

I created 13 panels for what was originally going to be a static slide-show type of presentation – See Here
Untimately the storyboards were converted to a full blown flash movie with an awesome soundtrack and lots of action. See Here

Here’s what my client had to say:

We reviewed Clay’s extensive portfolio of previous cartooning work and especially appreciated the emotion he draws forth in his characters and in his captivating use of colors and lines. We were also extremely impressed with the rave reviews Clay’s other clients gave him. Due to these factors, plus Clay’s own enthusiasm and attentiveness to our needs, we knew we had to hire him to develop the cartooning for our “The Town of Allopath” video. And to say we are glad we did is an understatement. Clay is a pleasure to work with and he knows how to translate needs into powerful results. Mercola.com’s “Town of Allopath” presentation has spread rapidly across the Web, many hundreds of thousands have viewed it already, and it has received widespread critical acclaim for its visual power — for which Clay’s exceptional cartooning laid the foundation.

Brian Vaszily, Consulting VP of Marketing and Editorial for Mercola.com

www.mercola.com/townofallopath/index.htm Fully Animated
www.mercola.com/townofallopath/index2.htm Oringinal Storyboards

These days, it’s not often that I get to draw skeletons. When I was younger my illustrations were frequntly on the macabre side and usually based around, sci-fi/swords and sorcery themes. This illustration was a great way to spice up an already exciting month of projects. First I created a really tight pencil drawing then scanned it, touched it up in Photoshop, and added the color in Painter. The Artwork was then exported as a TIFF and the layout and additonal color tweaks were done in Photoshop.

Here’s what Steven Hagy, the author, had to say:

“I love the book cover that Clay designed for me. He listened patiently as I described my vision, then, he illustrated it. I made suggestions, and he fine-tuned it. His illustration accurately depicts the contents of my book and by trying various color schemes, he was able to reflect its mood also. The illustration is a beautiful work of art and… it’s on my book. I’m very happy.”

Steve Hagy Author of “A Pirate’s Fate”

Buy it at Amazon

Mistie and Jennifer of Beyond the Words Inc. came to me with an interesting verture.They wanted to creat ASL (American Sign Language) themed wrapping papers. So instead of text it would have hands spelling out the letters in ASL. A significant reason they were drawn to me was they really liked the way I drew hands. I’ve been a professional illustrator since 1984 and have over twelve years experince with professional political cartooning. It was this blend of realism and cartoon style that they felt was the perfect match.

First step was to create the entire alphabet. I sketched them with pencil and inked them with a Kurtake brush pen. The inked drawings were then scanned, cleaned up in Photoshop, and then converted to vector images using Illustrator CS2′s incredible new feature “Live Trace“. A bit of gradient was added as well as some soft shadowing effects and then the corresponding letter was added in the palm area to help those who can’t read ASL. In a sence these hands are bilingual.
After that I just had to create the cake, candles and serving plate and go nuts and have fun with it.

Here’s what Mistie and Jennifer had to say:

“Working with Clay has been a wonderful experience for us. This is a new venture for our company and Clay was very informative about the design and layout of our product. He gave us such excellent direction and the samples he created for us to choose from really hit the mark as far as what we had in mind for our customers. He has a gift of taking the vague, simplified idea of what the client is looking for and turning it into a vibrant, unique and professional work of art. We couldn’t be more pleased with his work and we look forward to a long and successful partnership with him.”

Mistie Glass & Jennifer Lazarev, Co-Founders, Beyond the Words, Inc.

Just wrapped up the rebuild of www.qualitywatertreatment.com. The old site had several major issues that needed to be adressed:

1. Poor branding

2. Poor navigation

3. “Buy Now” buttons that didn’t work properly in Firefox

View screenshot of old site.

Solutions included a completely new navigational structure, new logo, a new contemporary design, and “buy” buttons that are fully functional in all browsers.

New features include a custom built water softener sizing tool so customers can easily determine the appropriately sized water softener by pluggin in their GPG hardness, their mg per liter iron and number of people in household. The calculations are handeld automatically…no more complicated mathematical formulas!

See it in action here: Sizing your water softener

This what my client had to say:

Hi Clay,

Even though its only been a few weeks since our newer web site that you built for us has been up and running we have seen a 20% increase in business. Our on line E-commerce orders have increased by 100% so we do not spend as much time on the phone which gives us more time to focus on projects that will increase our business even more.

You took a extremely difficult web site that was partly homegrown and turned it into the best website that our industry has to offer, we get this compliment from many of our customers and it is obviously making a big difference in our sales… and this is before all the search engines have crawled our site for better rankings. We can’t wait to see even more increase in business after our search engine rankings get better, along with the big saving of not having to pay for search engine pay per click advertising.

It’s great to find a company that will actually take the time to learn our business, which is very complicated and complex, and then design a web presece that will exceed and perform better than our competition.

We have hired several companies in that past and have always had to redo there work do there lack of understanding of our business, which always turned out to be not only a waste of money but a lot of re-design work on the site to make it some what use able after they were finished with it.

We will be hiring you again in the near future to add more product pages to our site.

Thanks again for all the personal attention you gave us and the great job.

Sincerely,
Craig Phillips
President
Quality Water Treatment

When searching for competent individuals or companies on the internet to hire for various needs it has been my experience that you need a certain amount of luck. I have had both negative and positive experiences. I would say without question the most positive experience to date was the hiring of Clay Butler to design a new logo for my recently launched website Madwinners.com. A picture says a thousand words. Look at our logo and you will understand why I feel so fortunate to have stumbled across Clay’s portfolio on the net. In just a few short days the perfect logo was created for us.  Clay incorporated all of the ideas we gave him for the design, and created a logo that far exceeded my expectations. Thank you Clay for delivering exactly what you promised, a highly marketable character and logo.

Al Price
www.MadWinners.com 

Clay,

I just wanted to thank you for being a true professional. It’s not easy being a small business owner and a new one at that. It’s an almost daily uphill battle trying to find reliable people to work with. From our first conversation you have totally “gotten” it. You took my loose idea for a logo and your execution of it far exceeded my expectations, which is saying a lot.

You have handled everything for us; including business cards, our POP display, letterhead and designing and maintaining our website. We receive so many compliments on our logo and website, which is thrilling. Once again, thank you for all the advice and hard work.

Best,

Nelle Dreyer, Owner of The Well Adjusted Dog Company