Today I got a phone call from “S” who works at a Search Engine Optimization company (seop.com) which I wont link to because that would help promote them. Anyways, the girl on the phone asked if I rank on the front page for all the search terms that I wanted. I answered “yes” to try to end the call but she kept asking why I would want to lose so much potential business. At this point I decided to screw around with her and put up some tougher questions to see how she would answer them.

I loaded up Google and did a quick search for SEO firms using terms like “seo, seo help, search engine optimization, search engine optimization professionals, seo professionals, seo experts”. This SEO firm was not ranked in the top 20 for each of these keywords. I asked “S” if they do any SEO work on their own website and she answered “Of course!”. When I asked why they don’t rank on the front page for any of the big search terms she changed the subject and offered to show me the results of some of their clients. I didn’t let her finish and asked another question, “Why would I trust your business to help mine if you don’t even rank well for your own keywords?”. Her reply? “If you goto Yahoo and search for seo expert you will see we are ranked #1″. She was so proud to be ranked #1 for a search phrase that recieved just over 2,000 search queries all of last month according to the Overture Keyword Tool. I told her that “seo experts” only recieves 2,000 searches per month and she just hung up on me. :)

The point of this post is for anyone looking to get outside help for search engine work to beware of these so called SEO experts or professionals. Yes, there are lots of very qualified individuals that make their living off of getting websites ranked but there are also a lot of people out there looking to take your money to do things that you and I can read about everywhere. I would suggest most newer webmasters and bloggers to just focus on writing high quality content. Most blogging software such as WordPress already do an excellent job in helping your blog get ranked well.

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