SVA Forum

rod@AitchBee · Joined: 03 Dec 2010 Posts: 36

Attended interesting Seminar on e-Commerce and Internet Marketing on Wednesday. Two things I came away with are:

1. Don't believe SEO companies that say they can get you to the top of the search engine listings in 3 weeks. Apparently a room full of people could ask the same enquiry but each get slightly different results, as it is tailored to the individual's previous Internet useage. And apparently, although SEO people are in a slightly better position than the rest of us, the search alogorithm are still somewhat of a well guarded mystery - even to them. Even if an SEO company get you to the top slot, it may only be temporary and may to be to your long term detriment, if they use methods that the search engine provider does not approve of. Apparently the whole of one multi national disappeared from a particular search engine for 6 months, because of the actions of one of its companies.

2. I need to change our website to a PHP based one, that is quicker to load and to navigate through.

caroline · Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:40 am Post subject:

Thanks for sharing Rod!

I wholeheartedly agree with your first point... Be very, very careful who you hire to do your SEO. I'll share a little story and hopefully it'll not offend too many people:

I have a Google Alert set up to show me results for "virtual assistant" blogs (I like to keep an eye on the competition, albeit honestly!).

Anyway a really odd result came up: the article in question was saying not to use a virtual assistant, that if you use a virtual assistant you should check XYZ... Something about it seemed really weird - it wasn't written in proper English and was peppered with keywords and links to a particular virtual assistant's site. Now usually I'd write this off as an inexperienced VA using an SEO guy who was using "Black Hat" techniques to skip to the top of the search engines.... But this particular US VA should really know better - especially since she charges for SEO training herself as part of her VA coaching company, and claims to have phenomenal organic results from her marketing system alone.

I can't imagine I am the only VA who clicked on that link - that SEO guy has probably done an incredible amount of damage to her business, and she may not even have a clue.

The lesson? Be very careful who you hire and check the strategies they are going to implement on your behalf!
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dawnjlane · Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:58 am Post subject:

Rod - can understand the first bit but not sure I agree with the second. Both of my sites are Wordpress based and have video content included and they have no problem loading quickly.

Perhaps the guy was trying to get you to spend with him?

Dawn
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Laura1 · Star Poster Joined: 19 May 2011 Posts: 131

You are totally right. SEO is a lengthy process and alarm bells should ring if anybody guarantees you first page in a short amount of time.

SEO is a lot of guess work, nobody knows the formula that Google use to rank their pages, only them, SEO professionals can discover things that they think work only for Google to update their algorithm.
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caroline · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 3:48 pm Post subject:

Actually I had a very interesting meeting with an SEO guru a few weeks back - we were geeking out talking about the Panda update. He has over 500 websites their company monitors of all different sizes, formats, etc and put a freeze on any changes so he could see what Panda did to their rankings. And there is no huge trend which creates a "backdoor" shortcut.

He'd thought that their flash plug in would prioritise flash based sites - which may be what Rod's guy was talking about when he advised to switch to PHP, but there's actually no bias on them, they just rank as normal.

Incredible that one company wields so much power!!!
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Laura1 · Star Poster Joined: 19 May 2011 Posts: 131

Absolutely, we all hang on Google's every word relating to SEO!

[quote="caroline"]

Incredible that one company wields so much power!!![/quote]
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