The following is an article written by Google and filed on the following Google web page (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291). The article explains what SEO is all about and provides important information in regards to obtaining SEO services.
In order to be completely transparent to you about our E-Marketing Bureau SEO services and SEO approach, we have created a copy of the article below and have added our own notes (in blue) to help explain why our services can be trusted, and why E-Marketing Bureau can be considered a reputable SEO company.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:
• Review of your site content or structure
We can provide a detailed SEO review of your existing website.
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Whether you are developing a new website or upgrading your existing website, we can provide critical advice on all aspects of effective web development for SEO purposes.
• Content development
Effective and unique content is one of the most critical components of SEO, we can show you how to properly structure your content and where you may need to add additional content.
• Management of online business development campaigns
The whole purpose of SEO is aimed at increasing your potential customer acquisition opportunities. Our approach is based on opportunity metrics and our services are based on exploring each online opportunity with Return on Investment as the key success factor.
• Keyword research All SEO work begins with keyword (search term) analysis. Our services are focused on local search volumes, ensuring that any customer opportunities will match the geographical areas that our customers are doing business in.
• SEO training
SEO training is provided to all of our local representatives so that they can effectively answer any questions you may have.
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
E-Marketing Bureau is founded on the principle that the best SEO support must come from local experts. Although we are an international organization, your direct contact with us is provided by local experts that have been SEO trained by us, and yet have a great understanding of your business and your potential customer base, because they live in your local area.
Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading “Sponsored Links”) as well. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results.
Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.
Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.
If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:
• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
We not only provide SEO services to our customers, we also use all of these services for our own e-commerce websites. The more customers we have the more knowledge we build re SEO success rates for local markets. We can not show you other company’s websites, however we can show you various SEO statistics derived from our own websites and those of our customers.
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
The simple answer is yes. Following the Google Webmaster Guidelines is not as difficult as it may sound. These guidelines have been developed with the web searcher in mind, so that any websites that follow the guidelines will provide better information and a more comfortable and consistent experience to the visitor. Google wants to make sure that any website that it refers a searcher to provides value to the searcher. Google’s robots have been developed to weed out the low quality websites, ensuring the best possible experience for a Google searcher.
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
We offer a unique approach to SEO. Our goal is to provide qualified customer opportunities to our small business customers as quickly as possible. To do this we set up a double edged marketing approach where in the first several month your fee goes more towards Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and less towards SEO activities. As we gain more knowledge via the PPC results, we then begin to increase the SEO activities in the areas that are showing the best returns. We work with you to set and adjust these percentages on a monthly basis. This approach has proven to provide earlier results and improved metrics than most other SEO approaches.
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
Before we begin to work for any customer, we do a review of the customer’s business goals and a high level assessment of the internet market base that would best support these goals. With this information we discuss potential customer opportunities and what volume of visitors it might take to turn a sale. We then determine the value of a new customer and compare the monthly potential against our fee structure(s). This provides us with a potential return on investment(ROI) and lays the grounds for any further SEO work.
• What’s your experience in my industry?
We have done SEO work for many industry types, however, regardless of the industry type, the important factor in any SEO contract is ROI and as mentioned above our process is based 100% on ROI. For any month that we do not achieve the agreed minimum ROI measure, you do not have to pay.
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
E-Marketing Bureau is established in the United States and Canada. We work solely through our local representatives. Our company is growing, however we may not as yet have a representative in your area. Please call us to find out if your area has a local representative.
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
Our focus is on local businesses and therefore our services may not be effective at the International level.
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
As mentioned previously, our unique approach blends PPC advertising and SEO activities under a single fee structure, ensuring that we can provide quality traffic to our customers much earlier in the process. SEO activities alone tend to require several months before they provide consistent traffic. The percentage of PPC vs SEO is a customer decision that we review together on a monthly basis.
• How long have you been in business?
E-Marketing Bureau started as an International business in May of 2011, however the co-founders of this business have successfully been doing SEO activities since 2008.
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
All communications occur through our local representatives. Once a contract has been established, the work as laid out in the contract is performed as identified. On a monthly basis the representative will discuss progress with the customer and identify any changes that might improve the customer’s ROI. The contract would be amended if any changes are agreed to and the work would proceed accordingly for the following month. If at any time the customer feels that their representative is not providing sufficient support, then the customer can call or email our main office.
While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:
• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue. Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
”Dear google.com,
We do not use email as a marketing approach for our services. We train our reps to call or visit their local small businesses to offer our unique services. We believe that direct contact makes for a better long term relationship between our representatives and their clients. It also builds a positive awareness of our services within the community.
• I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”
Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
Although there are many search engines and website directories, we are focused on doing one thing, providing you with qualified potential customers. If your website is not indexed by Google’s search engine, then this will be part of the information that we can provide you as part of our initial review of your internet challenges. Fixing this alone will not necessarily provide you with the ROI that you would be hoping for from internet customers. We will explore all of your options. The initial question that we might ask you is “are you interested in growing your business via local internet search traffic?” or perhaps “are you currently satisfied with the return that your website provides you today?”
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
We would add that a #1 ranking in Google doesn’t always translate into new customers. There can be a significant difference in results depending on which search term you rank for. This is why we believe that it is so important to blend PPC advertising with your SEO activities. The PPC advertising can help zero in on what terms are the most profitable to your business (even if they don’t have as much traffic volume).
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.
Once again, our approach is based 100% on ROI. All activities are fully disclosed to our customers as part of the contract. All of our services are totally above board.
• You should never have to link to an SEO.Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
We 100% agree on this one. It is the quality of your website that allows you to rank higher in the search engines. However, link popularity goes a long way in helping a quality website gain Google recognition.
• Choose wisely. While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, we’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
• Be sure to understand where the money goes.While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
As mentioned several times above, we strongly believe in the results we can achieve by using a blended PPC and SEO approach. This will all be fully disclosed in our contract and is completely in the control of our customers.
• What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
In the local small business market, businesses do not have as much money to invest in their websites, and to be frank, minimal local traffic volumes won’t provide effective ROI’s when there is a requirement for a high amount of website investment in order to obtain this minimal traffic. It is our opinion that the “trust me” approach offered by most SEO firms is the major abuse in the SEO world. Our approach establishes the required minimum ROI at the outset and determines if this can be achieved quite early in the process. The “trust me” approach can have you spending a large monthly fee with a promise of traffic down the road, usually in 6 to 9 months.
• One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.
Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.
Obviously Google is bitter about the various tricks that some SEO firms will try in order to get traffic. We agree that all websites should be developed with quality content and the visitors best interests at heart. Having a quality website will always win out in the long run. We do disagree with Google when it comes to the value of “shadow websites”. As mentioned previously small businesses do not have the luxury of spending large amounts on the development or overhaul of a website. Within our process we utilize “shadow websites” to test out the potential local traffic opportunities. Visitor’s to these “shadow websites” are directed to call our customer’s business number if they wish to find out more about our customer’s services. Having these “shadow websites” permits us to test out various search phrases in order to determine potential sales metrics. Doing so also takes the burden away from the small business owner for having to spend more money on their existing website. Our customers have the choice as to whether these “shadow websites” are purchased by the customer or by our representative. If the customer wishes to own these “shadow websites” then our monthly service fee would be a bit higher. All of this is disclosed and fully explained at the time of initial contract negotiations.
• What are some other things to look out for?
• There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
◦ owns shadow domains
Again, we disagree with Google here, and strongly believe in the benefits of “shadow domains”.
◦ puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
We do not use doorway pages.
◦ offers to sell keywords in the address bar
We do not sell keywords.
◦ doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
We highly recommend the blended PPC and SEO approach.
◦ guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
We do not guarantee rankings, we guarantee the minimum agreed monthly ROI.
◦ operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
All WHOIS information (website registrations) are legitimate and are either in the name of the customer or our representatives.
◦ gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
Our focus is on Google traffic, but often this focus will lead to traffic from other search engines as well.
◦ has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
Both our .com and .ca websites are indexed by Google. Google will never remove quality websites from its index. Our focus is always on quality because quality always delivers the desired long term results.
• If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint Online,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to: Federal Trade Commission
• CRC-240
• Washington, D.C. 20580 If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.