Nothing pleases the ‘evil’ side of me more than fielding a sales call from a ‘search engine marketing firm’ calling a search engine marketing firm to solicit business.  The other day, we got such a call. Normally I don’t take cold sales calls, but whenever I see a search engine marketing company calling our office on the caller ID, I’m drooling to take the call.  This girl Kate calls the other day, announces to our customer care Rep Danielle that she has found some interesting information about our company and she would like to speak to the person who handles the search engine marketing for the firm.  Danielle puts her on hold and intercom’s me to see if I want the call.  Absolutely.  She puts the call through and Kate begins her spiel….

Here’s the synopsis: she happened to be googling a search term which happened to be corporate website design. She expressed to me that she was concerned that we were only number 20 on Google and that she could make us number one RAPIDLY.  I of course asked her how she planned to do that, but she redirected the question and probed about our hosting company (which is us…..) and why our web host was not getting us number one results… Web Hosts have NOTHING to do with search engine marketing or internet marketing.  A web host simply HOSTS.  I asked her for the URL to her site: I click through and sell an amateur poorly designed completely FLASH driven website with duplicate title tags, NO copy visible to search engines, etc.  Basically, an internet marketing company who has no clue about internet marketing.  I proceeded to thank her for her time and hung up.  This company was selling the dream of number one placement, they do this by setting up a Google adwords account and submitting keywords that are probably not entirely relevant to your company and walk away. That in my opinion is NOT number one placement. 

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Was talking to one of my long time customers the other day, checking in and see how he was doing. He was sharing with me how many so called search engine optimization companies solicit him on a daily basis trying to pitch him the dream of online internet success. He loves to ‘play’ with them on the phone and always asks:

Steve: How did you find me?

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Well thank you very much!  I’m honored that you have added my web site link to your crappy directory!  I am especially honored that you think that my site content is valuable and that YOU think it would be a great idea for both parties if we exchanged links. 

Sound familiar?  I get about ten of these worthless spam emails a day.  They get specific as well: we have placed your link here >> All you need to do is add a link from your Google Page Rank 6 site to my Google UNDISCOVERED or blacklisted directory and we’re in business.  What a scam.  Many of our search engine marketing clients forward these to me asking me if we should go ahead and exchange links  Absolutely, Positively NOT.  That’s what that delete button is from.  Folks, link exchange can be dangerous, you never know unless you check where this web site is coming from: again, it could be coming from a BAD neighborhood: could be a known spammer, could be banned from Google, and if you link to it, you could be penalized or banned as well.