Don’t Fall for this SEO Scam
This blog post originates from a conversation that I had with a business owner yesterday who is paying an SEO company to market his website. During our conversation he told me, “I have received monthly submission reports which indicate that about 1000 submissions are being made per month.” (1st red flag)
First, submitting to website directories is worthless SEO and will never generate any ROI for this type of SEO tactic. The only directories that you need to submit your website to is DMOZ ( http://www.dmoz.org/add.html ) and Yahoo directory ( https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/).
Yahoo directory charges $299 per year if your site gets accepted. The link value you will receive will be worth the investment however the charge to your site is an annual basis.
Once your site gets listed in DMOZ and Yahoo, your site will begin naturally building links from directories without any additional effort. Basically your site will get feed into most other directories on its own.
If you come across a directory that has a page rank of 3 or higher, then go ahead and do it for the link. But that is all you are going to get out of it.
The Theory of this SEO Strategy
The intent of directory submission is to try and create as many 1 way links to your website. However this is not quality link building and therefore your website will only benefit from more links. However links from directories rarely produce real traffic that turns into sales. Directory links produce junk traffic to your website.
To build high quality links, it is best to engage an article marketing campaign where you are publishing relevant information linked back to your website or even deep linked into other pages.
Dont pay for an SEO company to submit your website into Directories
Submitting websites into directories was a real popular SEO thing to do for about 5 years, now the search engines like Google and Yahoo don’t care for this tactic. So if you are paying for this, it is pointless.
If you are blogging and providing high quality content, you should have an RSS feed to distribute your posts. This expands your network and will bring in new visitors to the blog. Submitting your RSS Feed to relevant directories will help you.
Upon auditing the rest of the SEO work that is being performed on his site, the SEO company told him that they were only going to focus on 2 pages and because according to “their reseach, this is the best strategy.” (2nd red flag)
My next question to him was then what is the point of having the rest of the pages on the site? If only 2 pages were worth marketing to, then why would any buyer click to the other pages? He could not answer this question.
To address this type of SEO tactic, dont buy into it. It just doesn’t return any type of results that produce sales.
From a conversion point of view, people do not try to find information on a product to buy and then want to click through gateway pages. In fact, the more clicks you require your visitors to take, the less likely they are to proceed.
This company mentioned above was clearly getting scammed by their SEO company. Once again, the reports looked overwhelming and success was just around the corner.
My final question to the business owner:
“How many sales has your website made this month?”
The answer: 0 Sales. A ROI of negative. The SEO work has yet to delivery even 1 sale.
The SEO is not working. And he was yet another victim of a SEO scam.
Here is an example of a link pointing to the Funnel Science website that is good for the reports, but very unlikely to ever generate sales.
Dallas Internet Marketing Company – Funnel Science
Here is another from an article that has already generated high quality traffic that has turned into leads.
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Most-Effective-Internet-Marketing:-High-Lead-Volume-Vs-High-Quality-Leads&id=6153084
