I received an email solicitation from an SEO Company in India.  I guess they’re bored tonight or their sales team was having a bad day, so they did the ‘auto form spam’.  Essentially or most likely, they have a piece of software that crawls websites and will find a form on a website and auto fill it out.  Maybe they actually have a sales rep doing it manually.

So I hit their site and did a bit of snooping around.  Luckily for me I came across their “Live Chat” and figured I’d have some fun.  I’ll let you read the rest for entertainment purposes: (ps. I’m jerry )

jerry:
have question

Welcome jerry! Your request has been directed to the Sales department. Please wait for our operator to answer your call.

Call accepted by operator Sales. Currently in room: jerry, Sales.

Sales:
HI..this is Vijay how can I help you?
jerry:
hi vijay how many seo’s do you have at bestseowon?
Sales:
are you asking about how many people work in our company?
jerry:
yes
jerry:
i got an email talking about my site so i’m curious about your company.
Sales:
Ok…right now we have 300+ professionals working here in 3 shifts
Sales:
and my official website is www.auroin.com
jerry:
ok. your site, www.bestseowon.com is a pagerank of zero, why?
Sales:
my website is www.auroin.com
jerry:
then why did the email solicitation say bestseowon.com?
jerry:
and thats where I came to chat with you
Sales:
Ok…that’s only to establish initial contact
Sales:
what is your website?
jerry:
it also gave me a ’seo score’ of 85%. how did you come up with that number?
Sales:
may I know your website?
jerry:
not yet
Sales:
then how do I guide you?
jerry:
well, i find it odd that an ‘seo company‘ would be soliciting for leads when if they ranked their own site in the search engines people would be contacting them. don’t you?
Sales:
If you can tell me your website we can talk
jerry:
what computations did you use for 85%? Surely you guys used something….
Sales:
If you can tell me your website we can talk
jerry:
www.xxxxxxxxxxaaaa.com
jerry:
now tell me how you came up with 85%
Sales:
One sec…let me check your website
Sales:
we check the title, meta description, alt tags etc., and calculate if they are relevent to your business
jerry:
oh ok. why 85% then?
jerry:
does this help? http://www.semrush.com/search.php?q=xxxxxaaaaa.com&x=0&y=0&db=us&stype=domain
jerry:
or this? http://siteanalytics.compete.com/xxxxxxxaaaaaa.com/
Sales:
what are you trying to tell me?
jerry:
Dear Head of Business Development at xxxxxxaaaaa.com, Were you aware that you are paying every time your online marketing advertisement is clicked? It hurts! I know, as many of our clients have shared this frustration when I first talked to them about how to drive more quality prospects to their sites – without having to constantly pay for every click. I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting more organic (FREE) search engine traffic for xxxxxxaaaaa.com 1. Your home page rank is 2, this can be improved further. 2. Your SEO score is 85%. This can be improved as implementing on and off-page factors will fetch better results in major search engines. 3. Open directory listing is not available. If you can stomach more bad news about what your site needs, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with further detailed analysis in the form of a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) SITE REPORT – FREE OF CHARGE. I would first need to know that you are serious about using our services, as the report would involve several hours of our research. To brief you about the company, we are an ISO 9001 certified team of over 500 SEO specialists in the USA, UK, Australia and India and would like to talk with you about how you should be winning new business from the search engines, without paying advertisers over and over again for it. SEO is not instantaneous, it is not free, but it is the only sensible internet marketing choice. Your return on investment (ROI) after 6 months of SEO will be at least 3 times that of paid advertisements, and many times greater than our cost. In fact, we guarantee that in the first month of our work you will see an improvement in ranking, link popularity and traffic or we’ll work for free until you do! Our clients’ consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of Google. Being on the top left of Google (#1- #5 Organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation. Ironically, It’s very likely that had you spent your last 6 months of online marketing dollars on SEO instead of paid advertising that you would have 3 times or greater the traffic today and not need the paid advertising at all. Fortunately you can still start today and begin getting that traffic in just a few weeks. We look forward to discussing our SEO plans with you. Sounds interesting? Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide your best time and phone number to call you. Best Regards Sales Team —————————
Sales:
are you there?
jerry:
im trying to figure out why an ‘seo company‘ is spamming me when my rankings are outstanding.
Sales:
we have also written if you are not interested mention it and we will not send it again
Sales:
just one line could have saved your time as well as mine
jerry:
do you know what this means for seo? “we are an ISO 9001 certified team of over 500 SEO specialists”
Sales:
what are you trying to prove or tell? you don’t want to receive emails from us…correct?
jerry:
you guys are a joke. i can’t wait to post this transcript on my blog. you spammed my client. no wonder SEO is given such a bad name because we have to deal with spammers like you auto filling out web forms.
jerry:
iso 9001 – hilarious
jerry:
good luck spamming people for clients
jerry:
go sell something

Using Robots.txt – Matt Cutts video on search results and robots.txt blocking of pages.

Managing Your Brand – Joanna Lord

BrandJacking – What happens when a well known brand specialist turns evil?

Beyond Headlines – Getting your audience to read every word

Meta Tag Keywords - Usless.  Yahoo has now joined Google in ‘NOT using’ the meta tag.

Social Media Traffic – What are you doing with it?

Web Analytics Book – Avinash, who else?

Landing Pages with Yoast using Magento Commerce

I know what you’re thinking…how can that be possible!  Well it is.  Theres not too many companies that can pull off that type of activity without throwing up red flags, getting penalized, or quite simply getting banned by Google because they did something extreme.

1. Generate Backlinks by Creating Products That People Want

One of the easiest ways to build backlinks is to create a product that people want.  This particular company has released hundreds of products that have taken the net by storm.  They’ve released Apple applications for the iphone, they’ve released community based social networking platforms, and they’ve released multiple websites that visitors WANT to visit! Creating a great product that generates buzz is a key ingredient. Sometimes when you create buzz for a new product it can be bad as well.

2. Generate Backlinks by Staying in the Media…Good or Bad

Bad press and good press all have the capacity to get your site backlinks.  From IPO’s to the firing of executives, a link is a link.  This company has seen it all and continues to get hammered in news organizations across the web for their lack of innovation over the past few years.  Don’t get me wrong, they’ve also been the ‘hero’ of the internet and continue to dominate specific areas online.  This may be debatable by many who read this post, but its the truth, hands down.  They are one of the top 3 leaders in their industry, period.  You need to apply the same mentality to it If you’re a small business owner.  Go meet your local newspaper reporters. Take them to lunch and listen to them. Its always their job to listen to the latest news, happenings, and buzz, but be social and turn the tables for once. You’ll also want utilize the press release distribution services that are widely available  and are picked up by the search engines daily.  If you’ve made a big hire, announce it.  Released a new product? Announce it.

3. Generate Links by Generating Content

As much as its been said over the past several years, its true.  Content is king.  One way to generate backlinks is from user generated content creation. This company has created multiple platforms that allow users to register, post, and interact with one another which fills up the servers of the search engines with more and more content to index.  This user generated content comes up in thousands of search queries everyday.  Imagine for a second that real, genuine, user generated content could make you a millionaire.  Many sites are doing just that.

Lets take a look at DigitalPoint.  Shawn Hogan owns this web property thats a basic community forum running vBulletin Software.  Hundreds of post are created everyday on that site.  Webmasters everywhere reference a specific post or a specific solution by embedding links to Shawn’s site. Anytime you have members that are linking to your site based upon the content already on there is a win-win situation for both Shawn and its users. He’s built thousands upon thousands of links to his forum this way.

Back to our sample company. What makes one of their web properties so hot?  Real content, real useful.  The interaction of the community drives butt loads of content on the site. Providing answers to questions is their key ingredient.  Hundreds if not thousands of people link to it daily.

4. Generate Backlinks by Updating Your Site With The Latest News

Updating your site regularly with the latest information is a no brainer.  Most small business owners may have static pages on their site, but some may also have blogs.  Update it.  Use WordPress and let it ping Google each time you make a post.  Wordpress is also great with the timestamp feature.  Sit down and write some blog post and timestamp them with different dates.  Its a fantastic way to save you time and it will help prevent you from scratching your head not knowing what to write next.  If you’re new to blogging you may find yourself writing multiple post over a one hour time period. Try not to stare at the screen like a zombie waiting to write and idea.  Find what suits your time schedule best and take advantage of it.

The company I’m referencing yields more pageviews than you can imagine.  Don’t worry, I’ll get to their name in a bit.  What you need to take away is the fact that not only can a large corporation use the above referenced material to build out their online presence, so can the small mom and pop shops.  All of what I’ve mentioned so far isn’t rocket science.  Its far from it.  The speed at which someone chooses to perform the above definitely is and its obviously limited to the size of your company.  Its a small catch 22, but I’m sure you get the point.

5. Generate Backlinks with Social Bookmarking

One of the easiest link building techniques is through social bookmarking sites.  Most of these sites are dofollow links so take advantage of them.  Filling out your profile page with your link should be the first step.  Secondly, go ahead and add your site to the most popular social bookmarking sites like Folked, Blinklist, Oneview, and others.  You can do a simple search through Google and find tons more.

“So Who is the Company that built 62 Million backlinks in 15 Years?”

Its Yahoo.  Yahoo has consistently created products that people want.

Their ‘Yahoo News” is the number 1 news source on the internet.

Yahoo Answers is one of their web properties that has been very successful through the content that users generate.  You can apply the same methods to your own business site by utilizing community forums, or a “Facebook-like” web application.

All of the above are scenarios can be scaled down versions of what Yahoo has done over the past 15 years, but they remain the same for any business owner.  If you can implement the features I listed above, maybe you can achieve 62 million backlinks in 15 years. But if you’re a small business owner, I’d shoot for a few thousands first

“Looking for SEO services. Need onsite and offsite optimization completed. Looking for a long term contract of 6 months. Whats your price?”

Nowhere in the site does it mention the keyphrases they’re trying to target. I wish I had a penny for every time someone asked me “what my rates are”, I’d be filthy rich.

Why Does it Matter?

Well, hell, lets go ahead and explain how pricing SHOULD work with your service provider. The first reply you should get back is:
“What keyphrases are you trying to rank for?”
I mentioned this in another comments section on another post. Someone was thinking about signing up, with a spam company none the less, yet doesn’t understand the difference between a longtail phrase and short tail. Not everyone should and certainly a CxO shouldn’t, but if a SEO provider doesn’t mention it, you should raise an eyebrow and scratch your head.

Longtail Keyphrases – Keyphrases that are easy to rank and are not searched as often. How can you tell? Take a look at the search results at the top right of the results pages. It will say “1 out of x results”. If the number of x is under 1 million, thats a longtail keyphrases. I don’t care if its a one word phrase or a 10 word phrase. I’ll be able to rank that site for that longtail keyphrase in my sleep. Want proof? Google “ijango scam“. Its two words with 24,000 search results. On number 4. I did absolutely nothing except write a post and moderated the comments. Quite a few website owners linked to my blog post on the topic but no effort was involved on my part.

Shorttail Keyphrases – Just the opposite. One word, two word, and three words typically. Google “Miami real estate“. 27 million sites competing against you. You better be ready to open your wallet because you can forget about overnight success. You should be in it for the long haul. Its going to take alot of effort to rank that well. Great content, great quality links, and tons more.

So what are my rates? What are the rates of a SEO service provider? Completely depends on your keyphrases you want to rank for. As for my pricing, anywhere between $300 per month up to $3500 per month.

Google is now embedding Wikipedia links inside the Google News section. Are you kidding me? If were up to Google, they’d probably just use Wikipedia for all of its search results, whether its news or search. Quite frankly, I’m sick of it. How many times does Google miss the boat in ranking a Wikipedia site that has little to no value higher than one with a ton of updated information thats an authority in the space?

Google has become dominant in the ’search space’ for far too long. We won’t see any changes in favor of a more ethical search results page until a new ’search beast’ can make its appearance. Its too bad bing.com has phased out all to quickly. It indeed has great search results….but unfortunately the marketing and branding seems to have again missed the boat. Thanks Microsoft…can you just buy Yahoo now?

July should be the best meetup yet. Its going to focus around link building which is by far, in my opinion, the biggest factor in obtaining great rankings. Most people will differ in opinions regarding that last sentence but all agree SEO is like a piece of pizza. There are many slices that go into obtaining good rankings.

July is also going to be free for our Charlotte SEO Meetup Members, and of course free for SEMCLT.com members. So please check out the site and RSVP now as it will be standing room only in July.