Manning Search Marketing

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The more you educate yourself on the basics with Internet Marketing, the better you will be on spotting Internet Marketing Scams and making better decisions for your website. These are a few Scams that you should be aware.

Guaranteed #1 Ranking / Special Relationship with Google

Google themselves mention that “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google” and be aware of anyone claiming to have a special relationship with Google. This is totally false. No one has an inside person at Google.

Getting Listed in 48Hrs

Also similar to this is getting listed on the first page of Google in 48 hrs or so. With this they are generally using Google Adwords, which involves PPC (Pay Per Click/Paid Listings). This does not involve the organic free listings. If you want instant traffic now, Google Adwords is a good choice to go. You can pay for the targeted traffic that you want. It is as simple as that.

Submitting your site to 100’s/1000’s of search engines

Chances are your website is already listed in the top 3 Search Engines, those being Google, BING/MSN and Yahoo, and these search engines provide the majority of the search engine traffic, with Google being at the very top. Each search engine has a free submission and really all it takes to be listed in the search engines is to have incoming links to your website, and then the search engines will naturally discover your website.

Being listed is only really the first step, gaining quality links to your website is another step that is needed which leads to the next SEO Scam.

Mass Directory Link Submissions for $9.99

Gaining the proper quality incoming links for a website takes time and careful research. With such a claim as the one above, the directories that your website will be listed in will most likely be of low quality and not benefit your website very much. Quality links take time! You want to make sure your website is associated with trusted quality, related sites to your industry.

SEO Email Scams

You have to be careful with these as they will commonly use scare tactics, distort the truth regarding your website, or using an email template and just changing a few parameters and no actual time was really spent reviewing your website.

A good way to research these companies is to search for their phone number in Google. A lot of times you can find others complaining about similar emails received. A little bit of research will save you a lot of time and money.

Google Backlinks Displayed

“Your site has X Google back link(s), this can be improved further.”

Google only shows a snapshot of incoming/back links to a website. They do not provide the full complete incoming links to a website within their web results. So, a company claiming you only have X amount of back links in Google is very misleading.

If you want to see what links your website has in Google. Sign your website up with Google Webmaster Tools. It is a good idea to have your site added to Google Webmaster Tools as it provides many useful tools and reports for your site.

Is SEO a Scam?

SEO itself is not a scam. It can be part of your search marketing campaign to help drive qualified traffic to your website. Taking the right steps to ensure that you have a proper search engine marketing campaign is a great idea. Areas of consideration for your online marketing could involve SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) and SMO (Social Media Optimization/Marketing). These are the three main areas, but there are many other digital marketing areas for consideration as well that you may want to research depending on your business.

Google also has a search engine optimization starter guide that you can use to help educate yourself, and for some general tips from Google see the following http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291