stuff to read, apparently/june 2010

not today, thanks.

number one spot on Google, guaranteed. Bollocks…

i had an entertaining conversation with a very nice young lady the other day.

Because I’m a very sad git who spends far too much time tapping away at this keyboard, I don’t get to chat to nice young ladies very often, so naturally I was keen to hear what she had to say.

Apparently, with her help, I could be number one on Google…

That sounded jolly exciting, but something in her tone suggested she might just be relying on a pre-written script, so while expressing my general enthusiasm, I asked her what ‘Google’ was.

I think this might not have been included in her standard response options, because it apparently caused her some difficulty with regard to what to say next.

Full marks for perseverance though, she explained that Google was the most important search engine and that it was very important it considered my website to be very important in turn.

This is why I like talking to these type of people, it’s quite good fun trying to knock them off their stride. A standard mechanism I notice they’ve adopted is to ignore anything not on their prescribed list. Another nice young lady asked me a few weeks back how many hours per week I’d estimate I typically spent online (her first option was 2-5), and when I truthfully replied “a minimum of 60” blithely skipped past that and still proceeded to address me in the manner one would normally adopt for explaining the internet to a particularly slow two year old.

Back to Google.

Anyway, my current young lady and I were by now getting along famously, and she took the opportunity to explain that her company could guarantee me a top ten (wasn’t it number one a few moments ago?) listing on Google for a relatively modest initial amount then a very reasonable monthly fee, for part of which I’d get a regular report showing me who was visiting my site.

As you can imagine, this sounded very enticing, but I felt compelled to ask her “what, like say, Google Analytics?” One thing I’ve noticed as I get older is when I talk to nice young ladies these days they don’t pay much attention to what I say, and this one, alas, was no different.

And I am a… here’s a clue, it starts with ‘web…’

So I asked my young lady why she was calling me. I mean, how did she find this number? She seemed a little perplexed. So I asked her if she could look at Google right now, and she said, yes, she could. So I asked if she’d mind typing, oh, say ‘Scottish website designers’ or ‘web design Scotland’ or ‘graphic design Scotland’ or something along those lines and could she see ‘Miles Cruickshank’ or ‘Flying Solo’ on the first page (ie. top ten) and as it turns out yes, she could.

Result was (as is customary in my rare encounters with young ladies these days) she seemed to rapidly lose interest after chatting to me for only a few minutes.

If at first…

A few days later I had a pleasant young chap (different company, same witless scripted drivel) taking a slightly different tack. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in ‘partnering’ with him, or at least him and his fellow employees, I assume, in selling my clients SEO services.

I explained, no thanks, my position is that typically a good 75% of ‘SEO’ is simply best practice – ie. just build the site properly in the first place – and that the bits which aren’t are either outside my, his, or anyone else’s direct control (eg. lots of good quality incoming links) or were so inconsequential it seemed unlikely they were worth being overly concerned about (or paying for). After which he didn’t seem quite so keen to be my partner. Oh well.

Is there a moral?

If you get unsolicited calls or email of this type, I’d suggest you view them with the same regard you’d reserve for double-glazing or mobile phone salesmen. Getting decent results in search engines largely means following an established set of guidelines, albeit these have to be regularly reviewed as the way search engines work is tweaked (often to outsmart the halfwits trying to manipulate their results). Some of them are down to me, some of them are up to you on an ongoing basis, but very few if any of them are a ‘bolt-on extra.’

The law of averages probably dictate there are some SEO companies out there doing a decent job in an honest fashion. But trust me, if that is the case, they won’t be cold-calling you touting for work. As Google themselves point out:
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too: “Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...”

I was just typing thinking…

corporate + brand identity | graphic design | website design | dog walking

^ Scroll to Top