Hi, Marshall and Gary here

One of the reasons we run the Small Business Internet Marketing blog is that there are many people in the internet marketing space that want to make you an offer too good to refuse.  But as the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!”.  One example we look at here is whether a high search engine ranking for an article with the rarely searched keyword combination of Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret will really assist your business.

We believe that our blog offers unbiased and sensible information and advice that can really benefit small business owners, business consultants and anyone wanting to use the internet for commercial purposes.  Have a read though our older posts – you will hopefully learn a few useful internet concepts.

By far the most common “great” offers we see revolve around 2 themes:

1. Get your website built for free;  and
2. Let me drive huge amounts of traffic to your website by achieving high Google search engine rankings.

We have no problem with these offers – when all is as it seems and clearly laid out – but it rarely is.

Offer # 1:  Get a free website built

Let’s have a look at the first one – one recent offer we have seen offers to build you a free 10 page website.  Built in an SEO friendly CMS we are told.  Who is driving the strategies of keyword research, titles, meta descriptions, URL naming, product segmentation based on keyword strategy, etc which will get good search engines rankings is not mentioned.  But we probably agree for many businesses, a website with poor SEO & strategy is better than none – as long as people understand what they are getting.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.  The sting comes with the hosting of the website.  This particular offer had a range of hosting options, the cheapest being around US$500 a year with 2 email accounts (not sure what business nowadays runs on only 2 email accounts) for a 2 year deal.  That is a commitment of just shy of US$1,000 for a “free” website – interesting economics.  To get the princely number of 5 email accounts, the cost almost doubles.

We like BlueHost in the US for hosting where possible (like .com, .net, etc).  They charge US$6.95 a month or around US$85 a year, give you the first domain registration free, allow 2,500 email accounts, have unlimited transfers and best of all let you have unlimited domain names (and websites) hanging off the one hosting package.  And have a free website building tool if you feel that way inclined.  In short – this is awesome value.  This is why we are affiliate sellers of BlueHost and we use them as well.  We have about 8 websites hanging off our US$85 a year hosting package (you do have to pay to register other domains – which are very cheap).

According to our Small Business Internet Marketing maths, over 2 years this leaves around US$800 to build a website for the same cost as the free website offer.  We have many associates who will knock up a SEO friendly 4 to 6 page site for around US$300 (we are talking about your basic “have an online presence” type site – nothing fancy). Using an outsourced service like Odesk is even cheaper.

We think we know where the better value lies – but value is always in the eye of the beholder.  We just worry that the beholder does not know what to look for when assessing value.

Make sure that you have a look around at what hosting packages really cost for your preferred domain before committing to the “free” website offer.

Offer #2:  We will get you lots of Google #1 (plus #2, #3, etc) rankings for you

At Small Business Internet Marketing we have banged on about this quite a bit.  But it always seems that there is someone else around the corner ready to make outrageous Google ranking claims.

One ridiculous claim we have seen from a supposed expert is “look how I dominate the Google rankings for my name!” – presented as evidence of capacity to get rankings.  Well search Google for “Marshall Vann” and you will see lots of listings for me as well, particularly for Australian based searches.  Have I optimised myself?  No, just had a sufficiently public life to gather lots of references on the web.

The next one is getting a fistful of rankings in Google for really obscure keywords.  Our favourite is the #1 ranking for – wait for it – “Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret“.  And the ranking is for an article, not a website.  Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, when you do a quick Google Keyword Tool analysis for this long. long tail keyword – the result is “not enough data”.  For those who have used GKT, you will know that this is Google’s polite way of saying “there are no searches being done around the world for this keyword or phrase”.  So great, it ranks #1 for something absolutely no-one is searching for (other than maybe the author) – even better, it also ranks #4 (woo hoo!).

So are we getting our knickers in a knot over this.  Yes.  They want people to pay for this service!  It is rubbish.  A #1 ranking for unsearched keywords does not help your business, does not drive traffic to your site, in fact, does nothing of any note other than make someone else a bit richer and you a bit poorer. 

We have seen these strategies offered as a free service as well.  The trick here is to take some obscure keyword (again) and get it ranking #1 for you (well, normally an article that may have some passing relevance to your business).  Then having proven the supposed knowledge of SEO, proceed to charge for a raft of subsequent (and useless) #1 ranking keyword articles.

However, don’t get us wrong.  Article submission strategies are great for building strong and plentiful backlinks to a website.  If the article ranks highly for well searched keywords, even better.  So when people search for the keyword (and you know they are because you have done the research on GKT or elsewhere), find your article, click through, read it and then click on the hyperlink in the article to your website – great and proven strategy.  Get the link in the article, not just at the end – these are called contextual links and really help with your own web page PageRank.

So what to do?

So what is the lesson here?  Please don’t rely on claims made by others peddling something that may or may not be of value to you but is of value to them.  Do your homework.  Use blogs and sites like Small Business Internet Marketing or the hundreds of other really good and informative ones to make informed decisions.

Once you have the knowledge, make the decision.  The apparently quick and easy way may cost you a lot more than you think.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary