How To Waste Money On SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis
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SEO is a time consuming business at the best of times, however there are some SEO practices that are simply a waste of money. In fact, I would go so far as to say they are a total scam.
As you tour the web I am sure you have come across many ads claiming real SEO miracles – at a cost. Some suggest they can get your site to the front page of the search results in seven days. Others claim to be able to submit your site to hundreds of directories – for a fee.
The reality is that most of the activities mentioned will, in the long run, do more damage than good. One of the more recent search engine optimization scams is one that has been around for a long time. Over the last month I have seen an upsurge in the advertising including emails and advertising in newsletters. This is a claim to submit your site to hundreds of search engines.
They make the process sound good by stating that they will submit your site on a weekly basis – yes, for a fee. I can tell you now, submitting your site on a weekly basis will not improve your rankings. Search engines don’t need prompting to come and visit – they do it often depending on how frequently you update the content.
Most of these services are, to be friendly, a waste of money. They are unnecessary and in the long run likely to be counterproductive. If you want your site spidered by a search engine, submit a sitemap. As far as submitting to ‘several hundred’ search engines, the reality is that 70-80% of all search engines rely on the big three for results anyway.
When it comes to SEO, you cannot buy a quick fix. You can however pay for a sustainable SEO program that will gain you extra traffic by lifting your search results placement on a long term basis.
7 Responses to “How To Waste Money On SEO”
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Owned and Operated by:
Nick Stamoulis
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Nick that was a very imformative blog. I to have had clients who suddenly were launched to the first page in Google only to fall off the face of the search engine world the next month. Because of the Black Hat SEO tatics used by some firms, clients have been banned from Google. Getting a client un-banned from Google is very difficult.
Good stuff as always, Nick.
In the link you provided, Brick Marketing indicates they would comb through an organization’s site and rewrite title and H1 tags, etc.
How useful is it to rewrite title tags for SEO? Is it worth the effort, knowing the new title phrase would not match the URL phrase?
Hi Ari,
Thanks for the support and reading!
Are you referring to a blog or website? If you have a blog that inserts the title tag the same as the blog post title (as ours) then I would leave it along. If you have a static website, then I would recommend optimizing each page, including the title tag…hope this helps!
@Ari Herzog: Hey, Ari. In my experience rewriting title tags to include the primary target terms of the page has a great deal of impact from an on-site SEO perspective. Definitely worth the effort!
Adjusting the H1 tags accordingly is debatable among respected industry experts and likely has a varying degree of impact from site to site. As Nick mentioned, a blog could be a different story when addressing the H1 on each page, as well. My experience is primarily with WordPress and the initial H1 is typically included within the header itself – making it impossible to create a unique H1 for individual pages.
As for the title tag, WordPress offers a number of plugins that allow you to specify a title tag that is different from the blog post title itself – very useful in maximizing the impact of terms within the title. Check out my post entitled Must Have WordPress Plugins For Newbies” for more information. I’m sure other CMS offer similar functionality for addressing on-site SEO issues, as well.
I’d also add two tidbits to this article…
1) These firms that are submitting your site to search engines (for a fee) are probably just using a simple software program that is doing all the work. The process probably takes them 5 minutes of real “work”, then the software program does all the submitting. If this was a valid SEO tactic (it’s not), you could find/use similar software and do it yourself.
2) In the search engine submission process (using submission software), you have to specify an e-mail address to confirm many of your submissions. Whichever e-mail address is used (it may be yours!), get ready for hella spam!
So…As Nick says, don’t go there.
I understand there are a lot of little things that make huge differences in the practice of SEO.And although I’ll admit I’m a newbie to all this, but in your meta tags you can include how often the spiders should crawl your pages.So continuing to resubmit all the time would be fairly useless.
Ted, you are right. No need to continually resubmit, but the meta tag you mentioned about telling the bots how often to crawl your site is obsolete. The search engines will not crawl your site the number of times you tell it to.