I receive a lot of emails and a lot of spam, lately I have been receiving emails from so called SEO specialists saying that they can improve my page ranking on Google… But for a price (this is the downfall to having a contact form)! OK, last post I attacked spammers and now I’m attacking all unsolicited emails from everyone. It’s probably not the best way to make myself popular on the net by getting on peoples case and having a go at sales reps who are just trying to drum up some business but I feel the need to have a rant about something today and today’s target are “SEO Specialists”.
First off, why do I need to pay for your services? It’s not like you’re going to tell me anything that I don’t already know and didn’t pick out of the big book of search engine improvements. I have my online journal which is how I’m here complaining about your emails (this is good for improving rankings). I also use social media such as Twitter, Flickr, facebook, Delicious and other such social tools for organic SEO improvements.
Let me make a few things clear, site traffic is not an issue to me as this is my personal site and is really only used as my portfolio and test ground for code so I don’t really care about its rank I also use it for the occasional rant about things that annoy me. I design and build websites for a living and if briefed actually know how the sites content and layout would improve my page rank… That info is for free BTW! I also know all the tricks that you are likely to try and tell me to improve and use (so why would/should I pay you). Now I use WordPress and Drupal and out of the box, both CMS platforms are pretty good for search engine optimization, so if you knew the first thing about what you were trying to sell me, then you would know this… SO yet again why would I employ your services?
I have attended a few seminars on SEO and found them very interesting, usually it has a lot of classic lines from people who don’t know anything about design and development of web platforms and are trying to sell crap that people don’t need to improve something which if the product is right and works can actually sell itself… I know a lot of the time word of mouth works better than any search engine and paying for a service which can’t actually improve anything, which with a little time and energy can do that work for them so conning people with the promise of better google ranking is just pointless. I am not blindly doing this and I am going to list a few sites here so other people can search for this and hopefully make improvements themselves without the need to spend cash. One classic line I can pull from one particular seminar who told me a load of rubbish ( I cannot remember the talker but it’s not important) who felt the need to say that you should still support IE6 (possibly a secret Microsoft lackey). I stopped checking my site in IE but I will cover this now
Here are few key pointers for improving your SEO without paying;
Know your Audience – I know my target audience are designers and developers, but most often it is employers who I want to work for and most of these people work on Macs and use Safari, Firefox or Opera and if they do happen to use IE, it is often the latest version so I don’t have to worry about my site not rendering properly in IE6. I also use google analytic’s so kind of know for myself which browsers are visiting my site and on which operating system, so telling me crap that IE6 is still used by 90% of the worlds internet users is a load of bull and very out of date, can you not come up with some up to date stats and maybe some proof!
Know your code – I am confident that my code is clean and tidy and usually when I develop I try to stack things as they would be read. This is the first rule I learned as a web designer, but it helps working with a good CMS which takes these things into consideration, learning to use a good CMS can make all the difference and both Drupal and WordPress come with good out the box SEO tools as well as a few bolts on which extend how great they are.
Now If I really wanted to pay to improve my Google rank I would probably go direct to Google and pay for some adwords myself as this is pretty simple and I don’t need to employ the services of a third party to do some pretty simple work. Now for future reference if you want to sell your services for improving my ranking, make it worth my while reading the message… I don’t care much for apparent “white hat” techniques! I could rant on further but instead I will endeavor to post as much as I can on SEO techniques and teach people how easy it is.
Thank you for your time!