Do you think search engine submission services are a scam?

There is absolutely no reason to use them and many reasons to avoid them. If you do use them, be prepared for an avalanche of spam.

Instead, go to: www.google.com/submit_content.html and submit your site to Google. It may be necessary to have at least one other site link to you that Google has indexed. You will see the other engines pick it up.

You need to have your site prepared and optimized properly (assuming a competitive environment) before you will get satisfactory results.

To see if it is indexed use Google to search with this search:
site:www.yoursitedomain.com
example: site:focus.com

Well put, Rob. It's disappointing to see this in our industry. It is basically a scam. No one should have to pay for submission. It should be done correctly, for free or not done at all. If the site is build correctly and offline promotion of traffic is there, search engines will find it soon enough.
On the same note, I'm seeing a lot of companies doing the same thing with social media - promising the world, charging A LOT of money and delivering questionable results.

To illustrate how widespread this scamming business is, read the Google page I linked to above. Google gets spam from SEO companies telling them that they can't be found on the search engines!

The reason HyperGold's lights are still on after 15 years is simple: Customer Service. We always tell our clients the truth, even if it means we don't get a job. SEO and other website "improvement" companies spam our clients constantly, telling them that they can't be found on the search engines, and that they have magical formulas and secrets that the "web professionals" (that would be us) don't want them to know, and for the price of a cappuccino per day, they can keep them on the top of the search results for "import key phrases" relevant to their business. Luckily, our clients are loyal, and ask us about these things.

In many cases, our clients' sites are already at the top of the search results for the actual keywords and phrases that describe their products or services, so the scammers are flat-out lying. They are skimming money away from their victims' web budgets, and getting nothing - or worse - in return. And in this economy, that's criminal. Not only are they hurting businesses by ripping them off, they're hurting the rest of us who are honest and providing real, lasting benefits.

And have you priced a cappuccino lately?

Let me give you an example of a web maintenance and marketing bid that we lost, even though it was the same price as the one that won. This would have been a new client, FYI.

Both proposals were virtually identical, except for one important factor: the "SEO" company promised miraculous ranking improvements virtually overnight, but did not include any web development or editing work that would need to be done to make these miracles come to pass. This was brilliant, because by not offering to make the actual changes needed to the site to increase the rankings, they could skim money off the top simply for providing consultation and recommendations. By making the recommendations vague, and filled with buzz words, they could point to the in-house webmaster if the miracles never came to fruition, and take advantage of the company owners' lack of knowledge.

HyperGold, on the other hand, told the prospects the truth - no secrets, no tricks, no miracles. Only persistence, proper maintenance and a continual refreshing of content and promotion over time can accomplish what they want, and sustain it. We lost the bid because we would not "guarantee" quick results.

Look at it like this: Let's say there are 100 widget manufacturers. And let's say they all had identical websites, and all sold identical widgets for the same price, with the same terms, with the same customer service. And let's say that all 100 of them go to the Fly-By-Night SEO company to get on the first page of Google search results for their type of widgets. What do you suppose would happen? Do you think Fly-By-Night SEO company would take the first 10 widget companies who would sign the contract, and tell the other 90 that they couldn't help them? Of course not! They would contract with all 100 widget companies, and spend most of their time weaving elaborate layers of buzzword-infused BS to explain why 90 of them were not on page one. That's what we're up against.

Rob Wood
Special Projects Director
HyperGold Web Services
www.hypergold.com

I feel Rob's pain as another professional who has been in the business for 15 years! We can be as honest as the day is long, yet lose clients for whom we could potentially impact noticeably on the bottom line, to um, "con artists"?

The sad thing is there is no easy way to educate business owners, in particular SMEs, because we have entered this wikipedia age of information overload and poor info that many are too time-strapped to see through or research the truth.

Sometimes, it feels as though we are shouting into a vacuum but companies whose clients are benefiting from great advice, real results and honourable workmanship, find themselves without the time (and often motivation for clients when word of mouth kicks in) to get involved in the often depressing task of "re-education".

Yes, our industry is full of scammers, but it has ever been thus. 14 years ago, the easy game was to stick "Pamela Anderson" in every meta, alt and ref tag to garner traffic - Google didn't exist then but if it had, they would undoubtedly have fallen for the same scam as many of the directories and search engines did back then, propagated mercilessly by the snake oil SEO.

There was little understanding then of conversions as everyone was too busy crowing about how many hits their website was getting. ("Don't say hits" was an article I wrote in 1996 to try to explain what exactly a hit was and how irrelevant it was as a metric but that was preaching to the converted and missing those who needed to know!)

It'd be nice to think we had moved on, set some standards within our industry, weeded out the chaff, taught our clients how to judge a company and choose an agency, but sometimes I look at the morning's emails and think we are still a long way from people getting even the basics. There are still people selling SEO/SEM/IM snake oil to a seemingly undiminished audience.

If a client thinks they need to submit their site to more than 3 search engines (total time: 3 mins), or that a little SEO will 'make them no 1 on Google in a month', or that an SEO can suddenly turn their sales around on a poor product, we are a long way from getting the message across about what we can realistically do. Even when we know what we are doing due to hard won and often painful experiences over the last decade plus.

The reality is that we can only do the best for our clients, and do so day in and day out to ensure that each client is getting value for money, great customer service and most importantly, RESULTS.

For those who believe that their site needs submitting etc etc etc, the information that this is the wrong way forward and a waste of money has been written untold times on the Internet. In order to find the best supplier for their business, whether that is a parcel carrier, a widget manufacturer, or someone to handle their online marketing, research is essential. Less than 10 minutes on the Net would have you seriously questioning any spurious offers made by the Fly-By-Night company mentioned above by Rob, and if you want your business to succeed, you need to check your facts, suppliers, prices, costs, alternatives etc.

Those of us still in the game this far down the line are proud of our clients, our work and our expertise. Interestingly, less and less SEO businesses are focussing on the SME market as SEO budgets and client knowledge of what can be done increases. Perhaps we are to blame for the never-ending supply of snake oil/fly-by-night SEOs as there just are not enough of us to go round to take on all the SMEs who desperately need help? Are we are furthering the existence of the gap in the market that allows these people in....?!

Or should we all take the responsibility for teaching at least one person a month, whoever they are - friends, family, colleagues etc - to use the search engines properly so they can themselves discover very quickly what utter rot some of these companies are spouting?

I'm making a presentation today to a Rotary club's weekly luncheon meeting. I'm going to be talking about what works and what doesn't, and how the Internet is transforming Rotary and business communication in general. I'll be using a laptop and projector, and my own portable Internet connection. Some people will get it, some people's eyes will glaze over, some people will be looking at their watches, 2 minutes into it. And some people will decline to attend the meeting, because they aren't interested, or they're computer or Internet-phobic.

All we can do is speak the truth to those who are receptive to it, and establish ourselves as experts in our field at the same time. By the way, service clubs such as Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, etc., are always looking for speakers for their meetings. Since there are likely to be business owners and managers in those meetings, it's an opportunity to educate and network at the same time.

As far as our industry credibility is concerned, we are in our teenage years. I deal with successful small business owners daily, and corporate division managers as well. In the case of small business owners, most of them became successful before the web was even a reality. They struggle with all of this, and the best way to help them is to approach them with old-fashioned, face-to-face sales calls and regular drop-in visits.

Just because a client or prospective client uses e-mail does not mean they are comfortable with it, or that they are not susceptible to falling for a Nigerian funds transfer scam - something that just happened to the tune of millions of dollars, right here in the heart of Silicon Valley! I make it a habit to get off my butt, walk away from the computer, and take people out to lunch. Today, though, lunch is on the Rotary club. (-:

Rob

I rest my case.

Yes, search engine submission is a waste of time. Link building does still work, and is vital to most SEO campaigns unless you are competing on non-competitive keywords.

On-page SEO factors, like page titles and content are absolutely necessary, but given two nearly identical pages (aside from duplicate content issues), the one with the most quality links pointing to it will rank the highest in the serp's. That's the basis of Google's "PageRank."

The reason some low PR pages sometimes outrank higher PR pages is usually due to on-page factors, but link relevancy can also contribute to this.

The fly by night companies are able tom get you ranked on terms that no one searches for.

They do rely on spamming techniques to sell their services. The guarantee Is useless due to the caveats.

Most common is that you failed to implement all their recommendations. Implementing everything is impossible.

Further the guarantees are cleverly worded. Some fly bu nights like nbs seo only promise that your site will be ranked for something. That is meaningless.

Each of the comments on this page will be found by a searcher who entered the right set of keywords.

Anecdodal evidence is meaningless. Firstly, you don't see the same page rank google does. Secondly, there can be penalties or the high pr site has lots of good links that they got from the wrong site.

These fly by nights never show their clients organic traffic. They show rankings for terms with extremely low volume.

Why pay someone to get you ranked on terms that cannot get you more than a dozen visitors per month?

Google spells out in their Help Section on what YOU can do the improve your page ranking.

The hard part is taking the TIME to actually do it.

Aside from cleaning up your website, making a site map, a robots file and other general site tidyness, the really hard part is creating content.

Creat content, distribute it, blog it, have it blogged about by others with link backs, to where your content starts to exponentially grow and expand. The more intelligent presence your content has on the web, the better your search result rankings will be.

Most people just don't want to do the work.

Either way, as per Google, it can take several months before their spiders see your site and/or your rankings change as a result of your revisions.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&hl=en

BTW... Google has tools that allow you to make your site map and robot.txt files for you.

GUYS !!!!! (Sorry for the shouting!)
You mean to tell me with a straight face that after doing this kind of work for 15 YEARS you cannot GUARANTEE top search positions?

I have been online since early in '94 and would hang my head in shame if I could not apply my years of SEO, Marketing, and Design experience into accurately defining a method that is showing 100% first page results.

Clickthrough.
Your statement was: "If a client thinks they need to submit their site to more than 3 search engines (total time: 3 mins), or that a little SEO will 'make them no 1 on Google in a month', or that an SEO can suddenly turn their sales around on a poor product, we are a long way from getting the message across about what we can realistically do."

As a SEO expert you should know that you should NEVER submit to search engines. Doing so breaks the Page Rank process.
ONE link that gets seen by Google is all that is necessary.

Since the advent of the Caffeine update sites DO index OVERNIGHT.
It IS possible to get a #1 overnight.
My last site showed up in less than 24 hours with 89% of search terms on page #1. I tweaked a bit and upped the total search terms by 50% and got all of them on page 1 - 40% of them in #1 positions.

One of the major misconceptions is that building links will raise your search positions.
This ranking metric was devalued by Google late last year when they removed Page Rank from their webmaster's tools.

Building links has an undetectable influence on ranking position.
Since Caffeine and Mayday updates building links has an undetectable influence on ranking position.

One of the indisputable proofs of this is that a low PR webpage can out rank and higher PR webpage.

As for turning sales around on a poor product, that is more in the realm of how you dress the product. People do not know if it is a good or bad product until they buy it.
SEO can definitely turn sales around on a poorly PROMOTED product.
Properly SEO'd pages terminate in a call to action to facilitate conversions.

If you follow G's guidelines to the letter, you are actually writing your pages for the human visitors, and the best way to disseminate your information is to present it in an encapsulated "benefits first" format with links to further information or a purchase routine.

best,
Reg

http://NBS-SEO.com
eBook Just released. The SEO Fast Track to Internet Profits.
Guaranteed to put you on Google's page 1.