As I was going through my email today, I came across a search engine marketing firm that was advertising in a fairly respectable SEO newsletter. The catchy offer read: read

Click Here to get “guaranteed” Top 10 Rankings within Google, MSN, Yahoo, or AOL within 30-45 days.

Sounds great, right?

No One Can Guarantee Rankings
The first red flag in this listing is the guarantee. Google has actually said

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.

What makes this ad even more suspicious is that the guarantee is in quotes. When I clicked through to their website, there was no mention of what exactly the guarantee was.

Red Flag #2 - Selecting Keywords From Your Website’s Content
The next red flag is how, exactly, the search marketing firm will research keywords. In this case

Each website page will be evaluated and a select amount of keywords will be selected based on the content of the page.

That means the firm doesn’t actually do any keyword research. They simply take a look at your page, select some keywords that sound good, and work from that.

Any legitimate search engine marketing firm starts with keyword research. Yes, initially that means taking keywords from your site’s content and asking you for suggestions, but they will then do some keyword analysis with tools like Wordtracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com to see what people are actually searching for. They’ll also analyze your website’s traffic logs and what you’re competitors are optimizing for.

This is important because often, what you think people are searching for and what they actually are searching for are two separate things.

High Rankings Don’t Mean More Targeted
The SEO firm has a portfolio section where they proudly display their results for clients. One client was a personal stationary store and this SEO firm boasted

online stationery store #1 Yahoo #3 MSN
personalized stationery store #2 Yahoo #7 MSN
personalized birthday invitations #10 Yahoo
stationery birthday invitations #1 Yahoo

That sounds fantastic, right? Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as great as it sounds. Head over to Yahoo’s Keyword Suggestion Tool and plug those words in. This tool tells you how many people actually searched for a particular keyword last month and gives you other suggestions for what people are searching for.

You’ll find that last month (July 2006) the number of people that were searching for those terms were:

online stationery store: 30
personalized stationery store: no suggestions
personalized birthday invitations: 364
stationery birthday invitations: no suggestions

Note that Yahoo’s tool returns “no suggestions” when there are extremely few to no searches for that term.

In summary, they got a #1 ranking for a keyword that only 30 people searched for last month. A #10 ranking (which sits at the bottom of the page for a keyword that only 364 people searched for last month, and two other top rankings for keywords less than 20 people searched for last month.

How To Verify Search Engine Rank
Finally, I went over to MarketLeap’s Keyword Verification Tool which tells you where your pages are ranked for a specific keyword in each of the main search engines - just enter the site’s URL and the keyword you want to look up.

The site had no presence within the top 3 pages of search results for Google or AOL for ANY keyword. Nor was it showing any results for “personalized birthday invitations” (the keyword that was actually getting a little bit of traffic) for ANY of the search engines, including Yahoo. (I quickly went to Yahoo and did a search. Sure enough, that website was nowhere to be found.)

I looked up a couple of the firm’s other SEO clients and the results were pretty much the same - they got high rankings for words that no one searches for. They also had little to no presence in Google at all.

In conclusion, I hope this article debunks some of the prevalent myths of search engine optimization and gives you some tools to evaluate whether a search engine marketing firm is doing legitimate work or is just trying to rip you off. If an SEO firm tells you they’re getting specific results, do a quick check in the tools mentioned here to verify for yourself whether those results are as impressive as they sound.

Read more search engine optimization articles.

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