I need an SEO reality check?

Question

Please tell me if this is a typical situation or if I’m being misled. About 6 months ago, I paid $2,800.00 for an SEO package which guarantees that out of the 20 keyword phrases selected, I will have at least 5 of them listed in the Top 10 results on major search engines.

HOWEVER, not only have I not had any sales on my website, the 2 ranking reports they sent me over the last 6 months state that I have zero rankings on all 13 SE’s they’ve submitted my website/keywords to.

The company claims it takes 1 year+ for a brand new website to show any kind of rankings. IS THIS TRUE? They’ve added some text and submitted my website to SE’s several times but not much else. Should I be patient with the company or am I being misled?

Answer 1

My first warning to you is the promise of top rankings and what were the phrases selected and how are they incorporated on your sites. The other thing, is what did they actually do for you. How did they optimize the web site, did they add sitesmaps etc. Without a url to look at I cannot say what they did or did not do. I can state from the over 1000 web sites I have done in 15 years of SEO, everyone of them acgieved rankings within a few months and more as they site grew. Yes, SEO changes often, and your site needs to stary current.

Did the SEO comapny do something to place your site in trouble:
The worst kept secret in Internet Marketing is the advantages of a well-wrought search engine optimization campaign. Companies are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimize their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. However, not all SEO practitioners are created equal so be sure you know what you're getting before you sign a contract.

With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. These techniques are known as spam and can get you penalized or banned from the search engines.

Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.

Consequences of Spam

While search engines may have different rules for detecting spam, in the end, the results are the same – you lose your rankings and can be taken out of the index. It is not easy to recover from a ban, so it is important to know the techniques that must be avoided.

Many sites may be unwitting victims of spamming techniques used by aggressive SEO vendors. Whether it happens inadvertently or not, the search engines will penalize and ban, temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on search engine traffic, you could be in trouble. When infractions are serious, it can take many months to convince the search engine that you corrected the problem and deserve a second chance.

SEO Techniques to Avoid

Search engine optimization practitioners are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success. A number of Black Hat vendors have turned to White Hat techniques over the past year; however, there are still many unethical vendors claiming to practice SEO soliciting business.

Below are some basic spam techniques to avoid. Obviously this list isn't exhaustive but it will give you a good idea of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable. Familiarize yourself with Google's Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you know if what is being done to your Web site is in agreement with those rules.

Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. When determining the appropriate keyword density for your page content, plan to repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. You can use the keyword density analyzer available on our free SEO tools page in order to determine if you or your SEO is using a particularly keyword too often.

Hidden Text or Links: This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site's human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, the easiest of which is by using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won't be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.

Cloaking: This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have proper uses--some sites use it to redirect based on location. For example, if they sell a product that is illegal to market in a particular area, they can direct those users to a different page where the illegal products are not mentioned. However, by and large, cloaking is used to deceive the search engines and must be considered a spam technique.

Doorway Pages: Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page irrelevant to the search query. These pages frequently auto refresh to a second Web site. Be sure that every page on your site that you want indexed can be accessed by at least two internal links and that the page provides value to the user.

Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content: This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users. An optimization company who suggests that you interlink all the Web sites that you own is doing you a great disservice. These types of incestuous link rings are a clear violation of the search engine's spam guidelines.

Link Farms: Google's quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with poor neighborhoods. Avoid these inbound links at all costs because they will result in serious penalties and banning.

Ask any prospective search engine optimization company about their best practices and be sure you know what they're doing to your pages. Beware of spammers who claim to be legitimate search engine optimization experts. Realize that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.

Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. When you use spamming techniques, your site may benefit briefly from high rankings that last for days, weeks or months. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated. You might even have to start over with a new domain name. So beware of unethical SEO techniques and ask any prospective vendors if they adhere to a Code of Ethics and/or a Code of Conduct. Once achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. That's why it's important to acquire your search engine rankings fairly and maintain them ethically.

Things to be concerned that they did for your site
1. Keyword Use In Title Tags – “Notice number one – that you have HTML title tags that reflect the key terms you want your page to be found for. That’s been the advice since I first starting writing about SEO back in 1996. Eleven years later – and even in the age of it’s all about links — it remains the top ranked tip by so many experts. – Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land.

2. Global Link Popularity of Site (The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web – both link quality and quantity) – “Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.” – Lucas Ng (a.k.a. shor), Fairfax Digital online marketing analyst.

3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link – “Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is ‘about’.” Sitemaps added– Mike McDonald, WebProNews

4. Link Popularity within Site’s Internal Link Structure (Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page) – “As mentioned on my blog, you can pulse a page’s rankings by including and excluding links to it from your home page.” – Russ Jones, Virante CTO.

5. Age of Site (Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines) – “We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the ‘parent’ site that has already gained trust.” – Chris Boggs, Search Engine Land Associate Editor.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site (The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword) – “We seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.” – Caveman, SEO/SEM Consultant.

7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community (The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world) – ” I’ve seen one of my sites goes from #39 to #1 right after I got 1 link… from the #1 spot on the keyword I was trying to get” – Guillaume Bouchard, CEO NVI Solutions.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page) – “If you are writing about ‘dogs’ then you should naturally use keywords related to ‘dogs’ within your content. If you don’t have keywords within your content it can become hard to rank for those terms.” – Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site – “This is why people bought PageRank 7 site links for lots more than PageRank 6 links. The links were very valuable, and the information on how strong they were was very valuable (this is why it’s also very hard to GET an accurate read on anymore without an SEO shaman). – Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl SEO Consulting.

10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site (The frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain) – “I don’t think getting fifty links overnight will kill you. Especially if those links are bringing traffic and from quality sites. Getting 100K links overnight and having no visitors or search queries as a result smells abit fishy no matter how you look at it.” – Rae Hoffman, Principal, Sugarrae SEO Consulting.

This isn’t reverse engineering, says SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin, who called a virtual quorum of the top 37 minds in the SEO business. It’s a list of 35 factors that make up, in Fishkin’s estimation, 90-95 percent of what Google’s algorithm is looking for when determining rankings.

Answer 2

Ok -- one of the first things you need to avoid are SEOs who will "GUARANTEE" you top 10 rankings in your keyword phrases. That's a sure sign that this SEO company does not know anything and as you've seen -- your money will just go down the drain.

It takes time for new sites to rank well -- unless you are competing for obscure terms. For example, most of the 1-2 phrase keywords are locked in by sites that have been in operation prior to 2000. To beat them, it will take a lot of work on the SEO as well as in your part developing content.

Some SEOs get around this by saying that they've been able to get top 10 rankings to keywords -- however, those are typically long winded 6-10 phrase keywords that hardly anyone is competing on.

Search engines have gotten smart about the SEO tactics. In linking for example, SEs don't care if you have 1000 links -- what they want are links from authority sites and links from sites within your sector. You can get 1000 links from every nook and cranny on the web that's not related to your site -- and instead of ranking, you can even be penalized.

More than trickeries, develop QUALITY content on your website which your visitors will love and search engines will love, and other sites will freely link to.

You've basically wasted your time and money.

Answer 3

An ethical SEO company should not gaurentee rankings. You should ask them some questions.

1) Are they tweaking the keyword density, keyword frequency, keyword proximity and keyword prominence, throughout the HTML elements of your webpage?

2) Are they building high quality incoming links from relevant sources?

3) Are they using best coding practices or fixing the source code on your webpage? Does your source code validate with the W3C - http://validator.w3.org

4) Is you website listed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If not, have they submitted your URL to them.

I would be happy to take a look at your website to see if they are using good SEO practices. Please contact me if you are interested.

http://www.insightstyle.com

Answer 4

Using social media for strong backlinks is what SEO has become today.

Answer 5

Tell them to refund you money. Send them a link to this page. Tell them you will blog about the extremely negative experiences and start ranking for their own keywords on google and if they refuse a refund, then follow thorough. Go to blogger, word press and setup blogs targeting their brand name. Then maybe hire some black hats to get you to rank even faster.

Answer 6

Check out this site http://www.webmarketingnow.com hopefully that will help you out some. If you have any questions contact these guys they will help you out!

Answer 7

I would do a search for the company name/address on the better business bureau website.

www.bbb.com

Answer 8

You need to do some research,
http://www.e-businesscents.com

Answer 9

they should refund you