SEO is continuing to gain a lot of interest. However, this interest is generating more and more people trying to cash in on the interest and pose as SEO experts. A lot of people come out and advertise ways to beat the system and rank higher using secrets contained in a pricey e-book. Last week was really annoying in talking with these “experts.” Within a couple days, I was accosted by posers (to borrow a term from the late 80s skater culture) who were very excited to show how they were better than the rest. These posers were people wanting to perform or sell some sort of SEO work. This has been a real burden to bear in the Search Industry where people may not be all who they promise to be.
The 1st annoyance was someone who found my LinkedIN profile and kept trying to “chat” with me by repeatedly saying “u there? happy new year!” at odd hours of the day. I was bored one morning and decided to bite. “Who are you?” I answered. He went to describe that he saw me on LinkedIN and wondered if I could send him all my SEO work. He was in India. This was really annoying. (Not that he was from India, but that he wanted my work) I’ve seen an increase in SEO people out of India and they have flooded LinkedIN, eLance, and Odesk. I went to my “new friend’s” site which was pretty but had really bad grammar in all the content. I said “no thanks” which let him to wonder why someone would refuse such an offer. “I do my SEO thank you.” I thought about offering to correct his grammar, but them outsourcing to me would probably create some sort of tear in space-time so I left it alone. I should have asked him what the deal was with the “happy new year” chatter.
The next annoying thing was that I received an affiliate offer through LinkedIN again (I was not liking this trend!). This time an asian lady, or someone posing as an asian lady, wanted me to watch a video on some atrociously long URL about how this guy has exploited a “loophole” in “MSN” so that you can rank #1 easily for any keyword at any time. Of course, you had to purchase the e-book to get this millionaire tactic.
Let this be a lesson to all of you: If they were millionaires they wouldn’t be selling how they made their wealth.
Because I had some downtime, I layed out a scenerio for this kind asian lady by saying if that was true, then I would rank higher than her on her keywords and increase competition so it would be good for her to keep the “secret” to herself.
Last, but not least, I got a call from a design collegue that I have. He said, “Uh, I just got a call from a guy who wants to do SEO for me. He said he was young, outsources to India and can market the s*&^ out of anything.” I actually did apply my palm to my forehead at this point. “What did you say?” I asked with a chuckle. He said “Well, I said I already had a guy and that he should work on his pitch some more. He then thanked me for not hanging up on him and ALSO that I was the first person not to hang up on him.”
Young indeed.
Normally, these events would not irk me, but since they all happened within a relatively short period of time it made me think about the exponential increase of those posing as SEO experts. Here are some recommendations I can pass along to you when wanting to get some SEO work done.
1. Find someone with a strong command of the English language. It helps, trust me.
2. Know that real SEO takes time for results and anyone trying to “exploit” apparent loopholes and other black hat tactics invites a sound beating from the search engines and any white hat SEO people who find them.
3. Ask for some current sites they worked on, case studies and the like. If someone is demanding your business in SEO stuff, then demand some examples. Get to know who you are dealing with.
We here at SEOboy want to work with you to attain the best results in your niche. The more white hatters who look to legitamite work, try to make surfing and ranking a pleasant experience for all. We are not “posing” as experts, we genuinley look to find and test how to get your site favored by the major search engines. So if you see someone promising fantastic results immediatley, don’t walk away – run.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
