I just watched a video that showed how a guy is doing 1 “SEO” trick and getting over 2,300 optins per day! (and it’s not ANYTHING i had ever thought of before).

You can see the video here.

This is the BEST way I’ve ever seen to get on page #1 in Google WITHOUT doing SEO. He just sends out a few emails, and days later he’s on page #1 – for VERY competitive keywords.

Check out the video here to see proof.

Yes, he’s getting 2,300 optins a DAY consistently from this one trick. And it’s something that NO ONE is doing…

That’s just a catchy title to make you read this.

But I do think that some SEO companies are. I’ll tell you why…

Here’s what I discovered yesterday about one of them which still has me hot under the collar.

A colleague of mine is working with a client who contracted one of these “BIG SEO COMPANIES” to optimize his site and supposedly drive tons a new targeted traffic to it.

I took a look at the proposal, which was a bloody 35 pages long, only to realize that it was a giant sales letter in disguise. The “proposal” proposed very little for the client but certainly did talk a lot about how great the Company was. For the novice, non-technical person, it’s rather confusing and misleading as it cites all kinds of examples of high searched keywords in his niche with super high clicks, implying that he was going to get this kind of traffic.  Of course, that’s not what they were promising, but it certainly could have been easily misconstrued to mean that.

Reason being, very little “proposing” was actually being done. Only about 5 pages of the document had anything to do with the client. The rest was just boilerplate bullshit. (Hey, this is my blog and I can swear if I want to.)

Most of the work they proposed to do for him could be done in a single day, if not less. It certainly doesn’t require the 12 month payment commitment and a $25,000 price tag.

Yes! $25k for this, and that’s the entry level package. The middle package, which doesn’t include much more, is $35K and the top level package is $76K. Hard to friggin’ believe.

Now I’d show you this comparison chart, but it is copyrighted and confidential, so I don’t want to get myself into hot water over it, but suffice it to say, this is the lamest list of SEO services I’ve ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong…good SEO/SEM work is not cheap. It’s labor intensive and can bring a huge return for the client. But there’s got to be some serious meat in the work they do to warrant that kind of fee.

What shocks me more than anything about their service is what is NOT listed on the things that they do for that money. Even at the $76K level, the foundational stuff that I do in my practice isn’t even included, such as Web 2.0 properties, Social Bookmarking, RSS Feeds, Video creation and Submission, Pinging, and PAD Submissions, just to list a few. I do dozens of things each month for each keyword, so the list can get pretty long.

The reason I even found out about this is because after having contracted them several months ago, the client has yet to see any evidence of any work being done. He’s still not ranking anywhere on Google and no new traffic is coming in from any of the “supposed” new sources.

Bottom line: this guy got hosed! Big time. He’s locked into a 12 month payment plan, paid $5K+ as a down payment and won’t see any ROI from this.

Worse yet, his current website sucks and this SEO Company didn’t even address that issue and offer to fix is up for him FIRST. They just put in a couple of metatags and said that was all it needed. What good does it do to drive a bunch of traffic to a website that’s broken?

So I’m still really pissed about this.

But on the other hand, it’s encouraging to know that people are buying these kinds of services. In their defense, SEO/SEM can be very complicated and if you’re not familiar with all the jargon, it’s just human nature to believe the folks who are part of the big company. So, there’s a ton of business out there, but hopefully the majority of it will go to companies that really can deliver results and make their customers overjoyed by their work.

The study didn’t really explore what these marketers were doing wrong, but contained a few clues worth mentioning. About 60% of survey respondents were doing SEM in-house. I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to conduct competitive SEM campaigns in-house, and I’d need to know a lot more about the level of automation and staff experience of such in-house teams before laying blame, but it’s still a warning sign. Another cause for concern: key SEM decisions were often made by fairly low-level people, including analysts (48%), strategy/results people (45%) and implementer/tacticians (36%). I’m not saying that these people aren’t qualified to accomplish operational search tasks, but I must question their suitability for high-level tasks such as procuring a suitable SEM agency.

Disappointment over SEM’s performance didn’t seem to dampen these marketers’ willingness to lay out more money in the months ahead. Most (65%) of survey respondents reported that they were planning either to spend the same amount of money in 2009 that they spent last year, with a handful (13%) planning to spend 20% more. I’d hate to think that this is a case of “throwing good money after bad” but one must hope that the survey respondents are taking active steps to reform their operations before handing the search engines even more money.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet for all the dissatisfaction. SEM agencies (and yes, I work for a SEM agency) will likely use this data to hammer companies that continue to do SEM tasks in-house, promising to ride to the rescue. Unfortunately, the reputation of many SEM agencies isn’t exactly stellar; otherwise “agency churn” wouldn’t be as high as it is. Sadly, there are situations in which agencies have done a far worse job with search tasks than a qualified in-house team. Spending more to better train in-house search teams and equip them with an appropriate level of automation will help some, but such investments are difficult to justify in a recession, and the fear that one’s best-trained people will up and leave when the economy improves is well-founded.

If there’s one sure cure for avoiding disappointment, it’s to manage your expectations correctly. Paid search is an exceptionally difficult marketing medium to master, despite the perception (promoted by the search engines) that it’s a self-serve, plug-and-play road to profits. Here, failure isn’t just an option: it’s practically guaranteed for the unwary and the unequipped. Buyers must always be wary, whether they’re buying keywords, staffing in-house teams, or shopping for SEM agencies. The good news is that if you approach this medium with fear, respect, caution, and a first-rate, executable plan, you just might wind up being happy with your results.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/06/29/unhappy-with-sem-youre-not-alone/

The Internet has broken down many barriers that traditionally existed between people and technology.

However, the irony is as more information is loaded up onto the World Wide Web the harder it is to find it a 1.6 billion people go online.

In the United States, over 250 million people everyday are looking for products and services online.

Ninety percent of these people won’t go beyond the first page of search results. You might ask the question, how do you get seen in front of this captive audience? How do you get seen in front of these thousands of searches everyday? Well, that’s where Search Engine Marketing (SEM) comes into play.

The practice of Search Engine Marketing is having your website presented on the first few pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN).

The wonderful thing about our Search Engine Marketing is that you are attracting your ideal prospects at the precise moment they are looking for your products and services.

This means that your website is being sifted and sorted through the clutter of millions of websites and screaming out loud, “Hey, this is the product you are looking for! This is the service you seek! Come have a look!”

This is the beauty of Search Engine Marketing.