Breaking Down the SEO Scams

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Search engine optimization scams are common and all-too-often prey on the people that can least afford to be scammed. These seem like cheap alternatives to legitimate SEO activities, so budget friendly to those with small budgets, but here is an explanation of why you should try to avoid their traps. Most of us have seen them, they are the emails that say things like:

"Guaranteed top page placement in search engines!"
"Exchange links with my website to help your website place higher!"

These scams are predicated on sound search engine marketing principles, but they leave out some very important details that cause them to result in very little value for your organization.  I will explain my own personal theories on these scams, but first, a brief overview of the basics of what these scams are based on, search engine optimization:

Search Engine Optimization or SEO refers to activities involving your website that are intended to improve your placement in the organic searches on search engines.  An organic search is the search that you are probably familiar with, when you go to one of the many search engines, type words into the search box and click on the search button - the results that are displayed are the organic search.  This is not to be confused with the advertisements that typically appear to the top and/or side of the organic search that are actual paid advertisements through the search engine's marketing services.  Search engines have each developed their own algorithm that determines where in the organic search your website will be listed, and this algorithm takes into account things like your URL, the title of your page, the content on your page, and even which websites link to your page and where they place based on the algorithm.  When you pursue SEO, you do things such as obtaining a search-engine friendly URL, using the words and phrases in your content that you want to appear under when people search the web, and a whole host of other activities that you hope the search engine algorithm will deem your site worthy of the front page of the organic search.  Statistics show that very few people click past the first couple pages of an organic search.  If you are one of the lucky few to place in the first, second, or third spot on the first page of the organic search, then you will obtain the lion's share of the traffic from the searches for that key phrase.

Back to the scams.  The two scams that I see the most are the "Guaranteed Placement on page 1 of a search" and the "Link to my website to place higher."  Technically, these are both correct.  They probably can get you on the first page of a search and if they link to your website, it does help your placement.  But here is the catch for each of these:

Guaranteed Placement - It isn't too difficult to place high on a search engine, and if you placed high for some key phrases, it would be worth million's in marketing expenses for virtually no money!  Sounds too good to be true, right?  The hard part is linking the two parts of that statement.  I can place high on a search page that no one cares about and has relatively little searches.  But for the million dollar words, there is probably 10's or 100's or even 1000's of organizations competing for the same key phrase as you.  So the scam would be that I can guarantee a first page placement, have you pay the fee, but the actually search engine traffic from the key phrase that I guaranteed wouldn't even be worth the time you spent reading the original email from the scam artist.  If you want a high placement on a valuable search phrase, you are going to have to pay for it and you are going to have to continue to pay for keeping up with it to make sure you website stays optimized.  And in the non-profit world, you have the additional challenge of multiple constituents trying to control the content displayed on your website, as well as increased political ramifications of what is or isn't displayed, and this can all result in a dramatic decrease in SEO effectiveness.  Ultimately, I believe you will almost always have a better return through search engine advertising.  An SEO analysis is still a very valuable tool, and once the analysis is done, you should always try to optimize the website accordingly, but we've found that it's greatest value is in gaining a deeper understanding of your market, than for actually placing high on the organic searches.

Link to My Website - A crucial component in search engine optimization is concerned with the "offsite" optimization.  When a search engine, such as Google or Ask.com searches the web for relevant websites for a certain keyword, one of the elements it uses to determine this relevance is what websites are linking to it.  If more websites are linked to your website, then in theory you will rank higher because you will be deemed more important.  The catch for this though is that the website that links to your website needs to be relevant in your area, not just any website.  As an example, I just entered a search in Google for “student enrollment”.  The first organic search website that came up was “Clemson University : About Clemson : Student Enrollment”.   If I start a website about student enrollment, then this is the best website on the planet at this particular moment to link to my website.  When Google checks back on this website, which it will do often with the higher place websites (probably daily), and sees that it is linking to my website, I would have almost instantaneous success in my search engine optimization efforts.  But when you receive a scam email about linking to your website, it is very unlikely that they have the placement power of Clemson University.  When I conducted this search, there were 2,050,000 results for my search.  In fact, if the website that wishes to exchange links with you isn’t on the first couple pages of the search, then their link is going to be pretty useless to you. 

So ban with us at Marketing in Education and fight back against these scams.  Good luck!