Half the people with websites don’t even know what SEO stands for, but, like an addict, they never think they are getting enough of it. Without question, there is an obsession with the mystery of search engine optimization. Over the course of a year, I field dozens of emails and phone calls from people who have mistakenly been given the impression that there are magicians afloat who hold the keys to secrets that can outsmart Google at its own game. I hate to deliver the bad news, but don’t blame the messenger when I advise that there is no such magic wand. Want proof? Do a Google Search for “best magician in the world”, scroll down, click on “More results”, then repeat, repeat, and repeat. The DavidCopperfield.com website is as invisible as the Statue of Liberty in one of the great magician’s most famous illusions.

We are living in a time when too many of us expect instant gratification in everything that we do. The owner of a new (fictitious) campground in central Oklahoma, with a new website that was just launched the previous month, cannot understand why his website does not appear in the results — er, at the top of the results — when he searches for “campgrounds in the United States”. In large part, this expectation is driven by the countless emails that slip by our spam filters and the robocalls that evade even the best junk call filters, all claiming exclusive knowledge to the secrets to search engine placement. The first thing that you need to understand is that 99.99% of the outfits that contact you regarding so-called SEO services are scams, typically working out of overseas boiler room operations. Some may even represent that they are calling you from Google itself, in this case only the first in a series of utter falsehoods. They may also claim to be a “Google Partner” and display a badge to that effect. If that is the case, they are in violation of the Google Partners badge guidelines which specifically state, “You cannot show the Partner or Premier Partner badge on any materials, such as websites, that advertise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services without a prominent notice saying such SEO services are not verified or endorsed by Google.”

If that in itself does not make you suspicious of what is being offered, dig a bit deeper and you will often learn that the alleged services involve “creating links in blogs, websites, and directories that are intended … to generate traffic to your website … so that search engines know that this site is important for both its content and the references made to it on other websites.” The “blogs, websites, and directories” referenced are usually owned and maintained by the SEO outfits themselves, with manufactured content that nobody accesses. These backlinks carry little if any credibility with legitimate search engines (which are basically Google and Bing these days) and have zero influence upon search results. In fact, these “White Hat SEO” services are in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines because they involve the creation of what are considered to be unnatural or artificial links. Rather than helping the SEO of your website, paying for these alleged services could actually inflict harm upon your site’s SEO by penalizing your site.

My favorites are the scammers that send what looks like an invoice, with a “search engine optimization fee” to “renew your listing” on some worthless directory, implying that non-payment will result in the removal of your website from the directory and thereby cause its disappearance from Google search results. It is amazing how many people panic, do not read the fine print, and turn over what is typically about $300.00 — as well as their credit card information — to these thieves.

In other instances, the SEO scammers get really nervy and ask you for control panel or FTP (file transfer protocol) access to your website, or ask for WordPress account access credentials, so they can go in there to “fix” things. Do NOT under any circumstances give anybody other than your webmaster this level of access. If you ask them to provide you with the recommendations that you might provide to your current webmaster, they will probably hang up and move on to their next call, hoping to find somebody more naïve. In other instances, they might send you an auto-generated report that could look confusingly impressive if you are your own webmaster, although any competent webmaster will recognize the report as inconsequential bunk. In rare instances, particularly if you built your own website or hired a local tinkerer to build your site, there might be some serious errors and oversights that are in fact impeding your site’s SEO and that should be corrected. Would you like somebody working on behalf of a nearby campground entering your park and handing out sales literature to your campers, attempting to persuade them to camp at their park instead of yours? Think about it. If you have a relationship with your webmaster that is based upon trust in that person’s or company’s competence, there is no reason to panic. Anybody can find minor shortcomings and areas for improvement in another person’s work, but those are rarely of a degree that impacts a site’s search engine ranking. More often than not, the “problem” is impatience and unrealistic expectations on the part of the business owner. Going back to my fictitious campground in central Oklahoma (fictitiously located in Enid), an expectation to appear at the top of the search results for “campgrounds in Oklahoma” is unrealistic. When searching for such a broad term, it only makes sense that the results will feature broad resources such as Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation, KOA, Jellystone Parks, and Good Sam. It is somewhat more realistic to expect to appear in searches for “campgrounds in Garfield County OK”, and much more realistic to expect to appear in searches for “campgrounds near Enid Oklahoma”. Guess what? The most important factor behind appearing in “near me” searches is to claim and maintain your Google Business Profile, which is something that you, not your webmaster, should be doing. Needless to say, the paid “SEO experts” will never offer you such simple and useful advice.

When it comes to processed foods, probably the most deceptive phrases are:

• Serving suggestion.
• Enlarged to show detail.
• All natural.

The serving suggestion lets you know that the strawberries and blueberries in that bowl of cereal are not included in the box, the image that is enlarged to show detail helps you to really see what that cracker or potato chip looks like, and the words “all natural” have no definition whatsoever and can include just about every chemical compound found on the planet. The first two phrases are usually shown in very fine print, whereas the last phrase is generally promoted in large text with an eye-catching graphic.

It is unfortunate that parts of the business world have adopted language that essentially applies this same sort of lipstick to their pigs. A used car becomes “previously owned”, previously frozen fish in the supermarket becomes “thawed for your convenience”, products made in China might be “assembled and packaged in the USA”, and most people know that a “processed cheese product” is anything but real cheese. In particular, some of this deception has become commonplace in the Internet industry.

Serving Suggestion

If you have ever registered a domain name with a company like GoDaddy, you will encounter their version of the “serving suggestion”. I just went to GoDaddy to try to register a domain name for $9.99, the sale pricing for new domain name registrations. Before checking out, I am presented with an offer the “Get 3 and Save 67%” by registering the .net, .org, and .info versions of the domain name, as well as an opportunity to “target local shoppers” by adding the .nyc version of the domain name for an additional $39.99.

As I pass on those options and proceed to the checkout, I am encouraged to “Protect My Personal Information” by adding so-called “Privacy Protection or Privacy & Business Protection” for between $7.99 and $14.99 per domain per year. (The $14.99 price is made to appear particularly attractive, since it is discounted from a “regular” price of $32.97.) The next options are “Website Builder Hosting” for anywhere from $1.00 to $10.99 per month, and E-mail hosting for anywhere from $3.99 to $7.89 per month. Then, of course, I will be encouraged to register my domain for the maximum period of 10 years, rather than only paying for a single year.

Under this exercise, I only wanted to register a single .com domain name for $9.99 (plus a mandatory $0.18 ICANN fee). Most people are confused by all of the options – after all, doesn’t “privacy protection” sound important? – and will pay for at least some of the unnecessary add-ons. If I purchased everything that GoDaddy suggested, but still only registered my domain name for a single year, I would be paying $375.51 per year for that $9.99 domain name. Yes, those are “serving suggestions”.

Enlarged to Show Detail

Many website builders have a way of exaggerating their skill levels. Often, these are the local jack-of-all-trades computer shops in town, where the owner fancies himself a webmaster in between attempting computer repairs and selling home theater systems. In other instances, this might be your son or daughter or that smart kid down the street, generally telling you that “anybody can build a website.” In yet other instances, you might be misled by TV commercials from companies like Wix, Weebly, SiteBuilder.com, VistaPrint, or those wonderful folks at GoDaddy again … all suggesting that it only takes a few mouse clicks to build a website for your business for next to nothing or even free (before, of course, leading you back into the “serving suggestions”).

Needless to say, there is not a single website for any seriously legitimate business that was built under any of those scenarios. Even among companies that are engaged full-time in website development, there is a propensity toward exaggeration and a “sure, we can do that” attitude. Your best protection will be a careful review of their portfolio and references. It has been said that “the proof is in the pudding”, and you may want to confirm that the dessert being served matches the dessert being described on the menu. If you are being promised a world-class website, that is unlikely to result if there are no signs of the necessary skills visible in previously completed projects.

All Natural

The trickiest to detect is the claim that a product is made with all natural ingredients. From processed foods to pet food, from cosmetics to candy, there are no clear standards or definitions for the term “all natural”. As a result, consumers need to rely upon their own instincts, underfunded consumer watchdog organizations, or the slowly moving wheels of governmental regulatory agencies for protection. Snake oil was all natural, but it never cured a single disease other than psychosomatic disorder.

The snake oil of the Internet age is search engine optimization, commonly known by its acronym: SEO. How many phone calls have you received recently from somebody offering to get your website “listed at the top of the Google search results”, offering to help get your business listed on Google Places, or asking you to “update your Google front page listing?” In most instances, you have probably gotten dozens of such calls. Not a single one of them has actually come from Google or a company that is legitimately sanctioned to call on Google’s behalf.

In a recent phone call with the former president of one of the world’s leading e-commerce companies, I was struck (but not surprised) by his advice to “never hire an SEO agency”. Wasting time trying to find a legitimate SEO company is like trying to find a “good” fortune teller, used car salesman, or payday loan company. They are all truly good at taking your money. SEO is nonetheless big business. Be suspicious of companies that offer SEO reports as a means of getting their foot in the door, offer to “fix” your website so that it will “start ranking higher on the search engines”, or show you Google Analytics charts and graphs with misleading annotations that allegedly document their expertise.

We are living in challenging times. In order to survive and prosper, you need to cut through the chatter and filter out the noise. Should you really expect one business to provide the same services for significantly less than most others, should you really expect companies to provide free services with no strings attached, and should you really believe that there are companies with magic wands that will make your website suddenly appear more highly ranked than any other relevant search results? Sometimes business decisions come down to who you can trust, and trusting your own instincts is almost always the soundest business decision.

Maybe you are familiar with the concept of urban legends, plausible but untrue stories that are perpetuated by people who blindly accept and share this misinformation when they read it online. In the old (pre-Internet) days, these were often referred to as “Old Wives’ Tales”, and included nonsense such as how it takes swallowed chewing gum seven years to pass through a person’s digestive system or how you will drown if you go swimming less than an hour after eating. Some of these tales still persist, although most of us have smartened up to the newer wave of wealthy Nigerian widows wanting to share their fortunes and the alleged family members stuck in an airport with an urgent need for a loan.

When it comes to websites and what it takes to attain top search engine rankings, the myths seem to be never-ending, and new scams surface (and older scams resurface) on a regular basis. The fact is that quality content, well-written text, and incoming links are all important factors when the Google or Bing search engine robots are evaluating your website, but the following bits of frequently espoused advice are purely fiction.

1)    Companies can provide top search engine placement. Those telemarketing calls that we all receive, with a pre-recorded message about your website’s poor search engine placement and how the caller’s company can remedy the situation, are sheer rip-offs. First of all, you are only being called because you have a business telephone number that is on a telemarketing list. The caller has not looked at your website and does not even know if you even have a website. They DO know that you probably have money in your bank account. Most of these callers imply that they are affiliated with Google, but they have no connection whatsoever.

2)    Hyphenated domain names are better for SEO. In reality, long domain names and hyphenated domain names should be your last choice, and they have no impact upon SEO. Which example makes more sense – SpaceCenterCamping.com or The-best-campground-near-the-Johnson-Space-Center.com?

3)    The .com extension is ranked higher by search engines. Not true; however, the .com version of a domain name should always be your first choice because many people subconsciously think of .com when they think of domain names. If your domain name is WonderlandCamping.biz, it will be ranked just as highly as WonderlandCamping.com would be by search engines, but many users might inadvertently type in the domain name with the .com extension, usually bringing them to the website of another business (which beat you to the .com), making the .biz extension less desirable.

4)    An older domain name is more valuable than a newer domain name. An older domain name with a high existing search engine ranking is better than a new domain (which spends time in what is referred to as the “Google sandbox” before it gains traction), but there are also older domains that – due to their former content – have actually been delisted by search engines. Typically, the people making this argument are ones who have a domain name that they are trying to sell. The point is that the age of the domain name, in itself, has nothing to do with search engine ranking.

5)    If you register your domain name for the maximum 10 years, it shows the search engines that you have a serious business, so they will rank your website more highly. I actually sat on a roundtable a few years ago where one of my competitors made this outrageously incorrect statement. The fact is that this myth was intentionally started by GoDaddy, in an attempt to get people locked into their service for a longer period of time. It has zero effect on search engine ranking.

6)    Buying sponsored search advertising will influence and improve your organic search engine ranking. This is patently untrue. One has nothing to do with the other, although significant increases in the amount of traffic to, from, and within your site could be a contributing factor in a search engine’s ranking algorithms.

7)    Link exchanges and reciprocal links will improve your search engine ranking. This is also usually untrue, unless the other businesses have something in common with your business, such as serving the same niche of customers. If you own a shoe store, and your website has a page of links to the websites of the major airlines, this is going to do nothing to enhance your search engine ranking.

8)    Load time is no longer important because most people have high-speed Internet access. Actually, load time is still important. Faster loading pages have lower bounce rates (representing the numbers of people who reach a site but leave almost immediately) and their rankings will be higher. This does not suggest that a page should be all text and no graphics, since that type of content is unlikely to persuade visitors to follow the intended call to action.

All in all, it helps to exercise a bit of common sense before concluding that anything and everything that you read online is reliable and true. Even if something sounds plausible, get a second opinion. Either ask somebody whose knowledge you trust, or do a Google search for the claim to see if there are either differences of opinion or a downright disproval.