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 ... With so much at stake and your web site’s success or failure hanging in t
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.
