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Self appointed Gurus, black hat SEO,
link exchanges, and other things that go bump on the internet
by James R. Sanders
If you have a web site and are looking for traffic, then
I am sure you have done your fair share of research on
the internet. With so much at stake and your web site’s
success or failure hanging in the balance, there is a
wealth of information to be had on the internet to fix
whatever problem might be ailing your web site. But with
the cut throat competition and everyone vying for your
ear to give you that “silver bullet” to fix
your internet web site woes, where do you turn and who
can you really trust to help you with such a critical
quest? You want web site success, increased traffic, a
top 10 ranking with the search engines, and you want it
now, but how do you find the right information to help
you fix your problems and help you realize your web site
goals?
Differentiating between the gurus and the self appointed
gurus – If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck,
and quack’s like a duck, then it’s probably
a duck, err guru.
In many ways, the internet is still a sort of “wild
wild west” of our present day era. Although some
things are becoming regulated and standards are emerging,
there are still many things left to fall through the cracks.
Anyone with some extra cash to throw around in marketing
ads can put up shop on the internet and call himself or
herself a guru. Many of these “good Samaritans”
will part you from some of your hard earned cash and offer
you a “silver bullet” to solve your internet
marketing woes. The problem stems from those that are
self-proclaimed, and just starting out, who lead the masses
to believe they have the answers to almost any web site
dilemma. With time being a precious commodity, many people
buy into these self-proclaimed guru’s advice then
wonder why their internet marketing woes still go unsolved.
Very few people I have met online take any real time to
research these “gurus” to find out if they are
credible.
The problem I have always had with these types comes from
the “secrets” they speak of selling you. Many
tout that they have made armored carloads of cash and
now they want to give something back to the world in exchange
for the successes they have enjoyed, but the nature of
people and business would dictate otherwise. Most business
tends to guard such trade secrets to ensure their competition
always stays three steps behind them. Why would they give
these secrets away? Maybe it’s just a case of outdated
information that no longer works, so there would be no
need to safeguard such secrets. If those secrets work
so well, then why is it they must sell them to us. Why
not keep those secrets to themselves and continue reaping
the rewards of high profits and sales? If they want to
give back to the world, then why not GIVE us the secrets
instead of selling them? There’s just too much that
doesn’t add up whenever I think of this topic. Call
me a conspiracy theorist, but I just can’t see why
someone would want to give away or sell the secrets that
have made them money unless the secrets no longer work.
I will admit if someone in a very different field than
the guru is using the information, then there is no competition,
and there is no fear that the information gatherer can
use the information to compete. In that case, there is
nothing for the guru to loose and much more for them to
gain through their sales. Say for instance, a guru imparting
wisdom on marketing techniques. Unless the information
seeker is running a marketing business, there would be
no competition, and the guru would be loosing nothing.
But, if the information seeker were running a marketing
company, then the gurus would be opening themselves up
to possible competition.
Another danger to the guru side of things comes when a
couple people get together with large email lists and
join forces. I’ve seen this one done before. They
all cross-market each other to their lists and come off
looking like experts in their field. Each individual builds
credibility for the others and they look like the next
big thing. The good ones catch email readers up in their
hype clouding the facts in obscurity and making bundles
of cash in the process. They prey on the naivety of the
new web site designers and marketers, and wind up giving
so little in return. I find that most of these types operate
by getting you on all their friends’ lists, and then
they bombard you daily with marketing email pitching their
programs. They entice you by telling you they are running
a newsletter on marketing tips and tricks, but do the
old bait and switch by sending you email with links to
their affiliate programs instead of the marketing tips
and tricks you thought you were signing up for. It’s
the grand daddy of marketing tricks. Promise them what
they want and then try to sell them something to get it
while making them think they were getting it free.
My point is simple. Take some time before you just buy
into someone’s information and check to see if they
are truly reliable. If more people did this online, there
would be less people being ripped off by the hucksters
peddling their garbage. The first stop would be the Better
Business Bureau. Check and see if they have any complaints
on file and see how successful they have been in resolving
them. A good and credible company will always bend over
backwards to keep customers happy because they realize
their value. The not so good and credible will play the
numbers game and not care about complaint resolution.
They take the money over the customer satisfaction every
time. If it’s a guru touting search engine placement
then do searches in the local search engines on their
keywords to see if they rank well. Go to customer sites
and look at the keyword tags, then do searches on the
keywords and check them out. If they rank highly, then
chances are they are credible gurus; if not, then you
might want to take your business elsewhere. Just because
you see their name frequently around the net, it doesn’t
mean they know what they are talking about.
SEO practices and promises – Can they really deliver
what they promise?
My next favorite is the SEO’s out there that will
promise you top 10 rankings in the major search engines.
These guys kill me. I am sure there are some that can
do that, but I question the methods they use to accomplish
it. I’ve been doing SEO work for years now and have
found that such top 10 placements are very difficult to
accomplish especially in highly competitive search terms.
Some will use ad words and PPC campaigns to accomplish
this. That will cost you additional cash, usually above
their service fees, and on an ongoing basis. Many of them
leave that out of their marketing material though. Some
will pay other websites to link to you as a means to accomplish
the goal. I caution you that NONE of this is the way that
search engines intended things, and as such, goes against
most search engines rules. Links have become a commodity
to be bought and sold.
How can you promise, to everyone essentially because you
run it in your add and anyone can see it, that you can
get them top 10 rankings? Take for instance the term web
site design. The competition for that set of keywords
is so staggering that to get a top 10 ranking for it is
next to impossible. Even if you do get one, the chances
of tweaking your page to get it and then keeping that
rank without ongoing maintenance is virtually impossible.
SEO’s don’t put out there, up front, that ranking
takes time, and there is no way to really guarantee a
top 10 placement especially with highly competitive search
terms, and especially if you are new to the market. They
might give you that information before they sign a contract
with you, but they tend to leave it out of their marketing
materials. You also have to ask yourself what happens
if they have eleven or fifteen other customers in your
market. Who wins in that situation? I can guarantee you
that big SEO companies do have that many customers in
the same market.
My preferences are the ones that put all the information
right out front and tell you the facts. You need to pick
someone that can provide you with real life examples and
isn’t afraid to tell you how they accomplish their
objectives. Once you have those real life examples, go
to your favorite search engines and do a search on the
keywords provided. If the sites rank in the top page or
two, the keywords are competitive, and the company has
ranked more poorly in the past, then you have probably
found yourself a competent and reliable SEO company. I
like SEO’s like this because they have nothing to
hide, so that shows me they use ethical and accepted market
practices to help their clients rank better. I especially
like the ones that tell you they can help improve your
rankings, but do not guarantee you top 10 placements.
In my opinion, these are the realists of the SEO market.
These are the ones that have been around long enough to
know what works and what doesn’t, will do the best
to help improve your ranking, but aren’t going to
make promises they can’t deliver on. These types
will always hold a credible place within my mind. Any
SEO company reluctant to tell you how they are going to
gain you the rankings or who won’t provide you real
life examples probably has something to hide. Even worse,
they probably use black hat SEO strategies that could
get your web site banned from search engines. Stay away
from them and find someone who will be honest with you.
Link exchanges and other urban legends – Finding
things that will actually work.
My next favorite urban legend is link exchanges, just
as bad as the others I’ve written about in this article,
and just as confusing in the amount of information to
be found about them on the internet. In fact, most the
topics in this article have to do with increasing web
site popularity and traffic, but finding the reliable
information to do it. And this topic is no different from
the others. The biggest problem with this topic is the
potential for abuse, and the lack of targeted traffic
you will get out of it. What sense does it make to increase
your web site traffic if the traffic is not targeted,
won’t click on your links, and is therefore generally
useless? Why would I say such a thing? I say it because
of an article I recently read from Exact Seek’s AllBusinessNews
newsletter.
I recently opened my email client to find an article entitled
“Traffic Exchanges: Avoiding the Pitfalls and Ensuring
Successful Campaigns”. In this article, the author
suggests setting up 10 accounts and linking the ten accounts
together. His example tells you to link #1 to #2, #2 to
#3, #3 to #4, and so on until you get to ten. Then he
suggests spending an hour a day clicking on your own 10
links for about a month. He figures that by the end of
this time you should have about 500 page views across
10 exchanges for 5000 page views per day. Therefore, that’s
5000 page views a day from one webmaster just clicking
links to elevate their own program. What happens when
it’s 100 webmasters, or 500 webmasters or more, doing
the same thing? I’ll tell you, lots of pop-overs
or pop-unders doing absolutely nothing for your web site.
None of those clicks are targeted, and none of them are
going to help you to sell your products or services as
affectively as spending your time on other targeted means
of generating web site traffic. Worst of all, they are
all clicks from webmasters who aren’t looking to
buy anything, but instead trying to elevate their own
traffic exchange program at the expense of all the other
program members.
Yes, I admit this scheme will get you some traffic over
time, but again, if this traffic is not targeted and looking
to purchase your offers, then what good is it to you?
The only thing it will get you is some higher rankings
in Alexa or some of the other traffic reporting sites,
a hosting company that could start charging you more for
your hosting, and a whole lot of useless traffic that
isn’t going to buy a thing you are promoting on your
site. Your time would be better spent developing your
web site content or working with a reputable SEO company
to increase your site ranking, or finding other web sites
and webmasters with comparable non-competing content to
link to your site. On the other hand, maybe you could
spend the time writing some articles for submission just
as I do and get some valuable one-way links to your site.
Almost anything else is going to be better than using
such link exchanges, especially if it is time in reading
reliable articles to educate yourself to get the most
out of your web site design or promotion time.
Other things that go bump on the internet – How to
avoid nightmares after parting with your hard earned cash.
It’s amazing the amount of information to be found
on web site design, marketing, and affiliate programs.
It’s all rather scary when you look at it. Everyone
wants your attention so they can pitch their “silver
bullet” to cure your web site woes. There are so
many people and companies out there making so many promises
that it’s really quite difficult to separate the
fact from the chaff and hype. They all want you to think
that their solution is the end all to your problems, and
although any one of them in particular might actually
have that solution, it becomes increasingly difficult
to differentiate between the honest businesses and the
quacks. If it sounds too good to be true, then remember,
it probably is too good to be true. About the only thing
guaranteed to solve your problems is either self-education
that allows you to understand and fix your own problems
or never ending deep pockets full of cash to pay the “experts”
to fix the problems for you. The problem becomes finding
the reputable “experts” that can truly help
you, or do the work for you, to fix the problems that
ail you.
Take the time to do the research. Don’t be fooled
by the hype, learn to look PAST it. Don’t get caught
up in the emotion, which is what the web site designers
and marketers WANT you to do. If they can get you caught
up in emotion, they can convince you to throw caution
to the wind and buy their products or services without
much thought. Take the time to do the research on them.
It could mean the difference between finding the solutions
you seek and loosing money to a quack.
About the Author
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders Consultation
Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and web site designer
since 1997, and involved in self-employment ventures since
1992. He is presently a contributing author of NewbieHangout,
and has been published through WebProNews. You can email
him at webmaster@sanders-consultation-group-plus.com. |
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