Avoid Getting Scammed and Ripped Off by Search Engine Marketing Scams

Search Engine Marketers Are Trolling the Web for Easy Prey. Here's How to Recognize the 5 Red Flags for these Huckster's So You Don't Get Fleeced.

These online predators promise you the moon and mountains of web site traffic. All you have to do is open your mind and your wallet to receive the blessings of the Google gods.

As long as I can remember the old American axioms of 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' and 'if it's too good to be true, it usually is'.

Let's face it, we'd all like to take the soft and easy road to online success; but the road less traveled is the only road which leads to success. But it is very easy to get side tracked unless you have the facts.

The scammers email usually starts out like this;
I am sure that you know this already but your web site needs some help. I am talking about your web site from a marketing standpoint. There are things you should do to get more conversions and sales. I am an independent internet consultant and I am working with lots of small businesses in helping them to be found locally in the search engines. I have a "gray hat" trick that I can do for your site that will blast you to the top page of Google in 7 days for just about any keyword .....guaranteed! Don't worry, it won't hurt you with Google. It's only "gray hat" because I use software but it is completely legit!

The First Red Flag
There is usually a phone number and a free email domain name such as bigdealmarketer@gmail.com, hotmail, yahoo.com or other free email domain.

Ask yourself, 'Why isn't there a company domain name in their email?'

Truth is they are hiding behind a facade and is easy for them to disappear into the wood work, after they fail to deliver on promises made.

Second Red Flag
The email is usually filled with miss-spellings. I corrected the spelling in the email pitch above, but there were originally 5 mistakes. A legit professional company does not make these kind of high-school mistakes.

Third Red Flag
If there is a phone number or person's name associated with the email, then take a moment and vet them over Google as I recently did. Having recently received a rash of clients emails containing a search marketing pitch ( as a virtual webmaster I am copied in most of my clients email traffic) I kept seeing the same number over with a 512 area code.

When I did a search on Google using the entire phone number, the entire 1st page of results were filled with web sites that referenced the same phone number with postings of lies, scams and complaints.

Even if you don't find any complaints, you should still do your home work.
Ask what state they are incorporated, do they have a city/county business license and ask for a list of 10 references. If they can deliver the goods, then they should have hundreds of references; but 10 will do!

Forth Red Flag
If they are guarantee 1st page results on Google, Yahoo or Bing, then you should run the other way. No one, absolutely no one can guarantee 1st page position on these search engines.

Fifth and Final Red Flag
They will razzle and dazzle you with fancy terms and jargon like

High Quality Keywords
Back links
Quality Links
Anchor Text
In-bound Links
Out-Bound Links
Viral Marketing
Blog Marketing
XML Site map generation
and so on.

Did you know that Google posts on it's own website pages, exactly what you should do and what is required to have a successful website that gets good placement on their search engine?

Google quality guidelines and basic principles include the following:

a. Make web site pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

b. Don't trick your visitors users or present different information to search engines than you display to users. This is known as page cloaking.

c. Do not use tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

d. Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your web site's ranking.
(*Avoid spam linking or bad web sites on the web. Your own web site ranking may be negatively affected by those links).

* This is a common method use by back link builders who dump your web site link on hundreds of useless blogs, forums, directories and article web sites.

There you have it. Go forth and build a useful web site, filled with useful content and the rest will follow.