Roy Hunter

Florida Marketing Consultants

July 27^th, 2009

http://www.mymarketingcompany.com/

I love that joke!

The sad thing about it is, for the most part, the promise of search engine optimization and the companies that provide that service, really are a joke.

Granted, there are some legit SEO companies out there, don’t get me wrong, but the ones that really get results are VERY few and far between.

I recently did a search in a directory for SEO companies nationwide and sent out nearly 700 emails of which I received about 100 or so responses at the time this article was written.

I made a simple request. I was willing to bookmark their website on all the social bookmarking sites I submit to (17 of them) if they were willing to do the same for me.

Of the hundred or so responses, NOT ONE SEO company at the time this article was published had bookmarked my site in any of the social bookmarking sites on the internet today. The main bookmark sites that come to mind are Blinklist, Delicious and Google Bookmarks.

But here is where it gets really funny!

I bookmarked every single company’s website that had sent me a reply. Over 100 of them. When I logged into my Delicious account to see how many times my site was bookmarked, (and discovered no one bothered to return the favor) I looked at all the SEO company websites I had bookmarked to see what the average number of bookmarks my competitors had.

Ready for the punch line?

75% of the SEO web pages I bookmarked had NEVER been bookmarked on Delicious before. NEVER! I was the first person to bookmark their site! 20% of the companies had less than 5, and the remaining sites had more than 5.

5% of the nationwide SEO companies understand one of the most basic SEO techniques available to get sites some exposure!

That is 1 out of every 20, or 256 companies out of every 5,120 for you number nerds, that actually get what social bookmarking can do for your website, let alone theirs, or even has any customers willing to bookmark their website! One out of Twenty!

One of the simplest things that can affect your page rank and placement in organic search results is how many “links” there are to your site on the internet and the quality of those links.

If an SEO company is promising to get you higher placement in search results and can not even get their own site up the search engine results list, what are they REALLY going to do for you? If the owner of the SEO Company can not even take the time to get links to his own site, does he really know what he is doing when it comes to Search Engine Optimization?

Before you hire a SEO company I am going to tell you the easiest way to know if that company will do what it says…

First, check their placement in the search results for your area. If they are not in the top 10, dont bother. If you have a google tool bar, check to see if their site has any page rank.

Sign up for an account on www.delicious.com and bookmark the page of the company you want to hire. You will then be able to see how many Delicious.com members have bookmarked that company’s website. It gives you a hint to their popularity.

If it is more than ten, you probably have found an SEO God.

If they have 1 or less, stay away, you are going to get burned. It is what we call in the marketing industry “SEO Malpractice!” Anyone can provide SEO services, but few understand what SEO really is.

And when you think about it, it really is not that funny…. Websites can actually be hurt by black hat SEO tricks and owners of those websites will be up against some huge losses for the privilege. Both financially, and from lost revenue previously generated by the website.

My next article will define Page Pank as this is another conversation you can have with your SEO, if they do not understand page rank and how it works, then you will really know you have a bum steer!