6 Quick Questions to Stop Wasting Money with SEO Companies in less than 7 minutes

By Rodney C. Boettger
Posted Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Did you know that... everyday people just like you and me
drop hundreds even thousands to companies that promise to
get us to the top of Google, Alta Vista and a host of other
search engines?

A guaranteed top ranking in the majority of search engines
is a simple task and can be accomplished for far less than
the $1295 to $3000+ that some so called Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) companies ask.

Very shortly you too will know the truth and be able to do
deal more effectively with your SEO and SEO companies.

Here are two of the biggest hypes in SEO.

First is the guaranteed 1st position hype...

Many companies tout this as a huge selling point of their
SEO service. That's great. Until you read the fine print.

The fine print tells you that this guarantee is based on a
pay to play basis. For all of us novices and laymen that is
pay per click (PPC) advertising.

You pay a large fee to the SEO company and then you pay
additional money for the PPC ads.

PPC is either in the form of bidding per click such as on
Google AdWords or Overture. Or paid submission to Inktomi,
AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc.

Bottom line is that for enough money you can be number one
on any keyword.

Yes you can pay $8.00 per click on certain words in your
industry, however the question is do you want to and is it
worth it?

The second touted benefit is keyword research. Most of this
research is based on what you tell the SEO and the use of
tools such as WordTracker and Overture's Inventory tool.

The keyword list is mailed or emailed to you for approval.

A huge disadvantage is the limited amount of keywords that
most SEO's include in their fee (some only allow 20 words.)

Most of the keywords are usually what all your competitors
are targeting also.

Keywords need to be laser focused to your target market.

Think about what your product or service solves. Target
customer benefits not features of your product.

More is better. This is definitely the case when dealing
with Google Adwords where you want 100-400 keywords per
campaign.

Why play in the pool with all the high volume, high dollar
feature players, when you can have your own pond full of
hungry benefit driven customers.

Remember that not all SEO companies operate like this,
however here are a few things to find out before you give an
SEO your business.

1. What specifically does the initial fee cover?

2. Do you use PPC advertising to meet the "guaranteed top 10
ranking" ? And if so are additional monies needed?

3. Do you build original pages and hand submit them to the
search engines? If so what is your guarantee based on? Do
you continue to revise these pages until the desired result
is obtained?

4. How extensive is your keyword research? Do you have a
limit as to how many words you optimize for? Is this limit
based on the type of advertising medium used?

5. How do you track and test your results?

6. How do you make this a risk free deal for me? In other
words if they don't perform you don't pay.

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When advertising it is very hard to make any type of
guarantee unless you are paying for the result up front.

However you can acheive massive success when you have
specific goals for your ads and follow a process of constant
tweaking and testing.

You now have no excuse to ever be a willing victim to the
handful of SEO's that prey on the unknowing.

Take this information and use it to explode your business.
About the Author
Pay for performance marketing specialist. Working with various industries to market their products and services through performance based result driven marketing.

(http://www.right-on-the-money.com/dt/t/39/)