:: lol yfobny ::

Now you’ve gone and opened up a right can of worms with the whole “all SEO is snake oil” line of reasoning.

The point is return on investment. Will the money spent on SEO increase rankings, targeted visitors, and conversions? If the answer is no then it’s a waste.

Then again, I’m seeing your point in relation to all the post-tweaking tweaking. I think the devil is in the semantics, but for pity’s sake, at least pretend you’re going to get the keyword research side of things right from the get-go. Two-thirds of the money is for them not getting it right in the first place.

But, I can flip this and argue that a Web site without any form of marketing plan is an even bigger waste of money. How much is the design and creation of the site costing?

My main argument is black hat vs white hat linking / SEO. You can look at it from the angle of this week’s financial crisis if you want. White hat SEO is similar to a regulated financial market that offer ‘safe’ returns over a longer period and black hat is short term money grabbing that exploits loopholes before the site is penalized or the loophole is shut by Google regulating its algorithm to prevent a meltdown.

But, then you come back to the ROI question again. If the short term, quick fix is acceptable, do you risk it? Especially in a competitive online marketplace such as insurance.

I say no. But I haven’t been to black hat finishing school.

It was a fancy document to say the least, lots of colours and simple layman speak to amuse the ‘non-technical’ reader, but the bit which interested me was the price for the SEO side of the work. £750 ($1500) for the meta tag generation, title bar tweaking and content text fiddling. Then a further £250 ($500) for post-launch tweaking. Then a further £750 ($1500) for setting up a link share scheme. Then a further £2000 ($4000) per annum for ‘maintenance of the website’ (which includes further keyword tweaking).

By the way, did I tell you how big the site was going be? 15 pages max. Not bad work if you can get it. I wondered how long the web design company would spend per month reviewing and tweaking the site for it’s search engine friendliness. I’ll bet you it’s not days anyway.

So while we may be dazzled by the bright colours and fancy speak of the so-called ‘reputable web design companies’ who, let’s face it, are really hip and with the kids, underneath they are the same bunch of SEO shysters which the author of this article is ‘tentatively outing’.

So the moral of this story, and I wasn’t aiming for one, but what the hell, is don’t trust the colours or you may blinded from the truth.