What is stopping you from getting results for your website using SEO?

Search Engine Optimization has a long history of being a complete scam.

Even if there are companies today that do it respectably, the history of the industry would make me wary.

More than that, I’m a rather firm believer that if your page doesn’t come up in a search through the normal intended procedures of the search engine in question, the content of your site is not of relevance to me. “Optimizing” the site to have the same content but appear higher on the search results list smacks of deceipt.

@Mritty thanks for the feedback, it is a shame that there are some companies out there that engage in unethical SEO behaviors have given some the impression that SEO isn’t valuable and I hope that you haven’t been taken advantage of in the past. I always recommend that when someone is considering hiring an SEO they take the advice of Google itself, http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291.

The answer for me, personally, would be programming capability.
And I suppose time to a certain extent.

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LOL, this was on the page you referenced:

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 think what keeps a lot of folks away from professional SEO is that the techniques aren’t very consistent and the results for poor techniques are at best temporary. The advice that stands the test of time seems to be things you should be doing anyway. Build great content, figure out what you want to say and say it consistently, focus your market, empower your fans to link to you, title pages appropriately.

I’m not saying there’s no value to some good research into how people use search engines but techniques to get that elusive first page ranking quickly are historically a string of things that are later downplayed by the search engines and rendered obsolete. Ask the folks with huge meta tags or background colored keywords in their footer if that time and money would have been better spent building great content and marketing to potential customers/users in other ways.

I’m actually all for professional SEO if it’s done ethically with realistic expectations and sustainable practices. These techniques tend to be less concrete and therefor more difficult to market than “We’ll get you ranked in the top ten by next week for ‘peanut shell floor coverings’”. People want to know what result they’re getting for their money so firms tend to give them those type of promises.

Everyone should get their site looked at by someone who knows what they’re talking about in order to make their content accessible to the search engines. Beyond making it easily accessible, focused, and appropriate most of it seems to be short term fixes that will need to be revisited.

@fireside, @funkdaddy – thanks for the feedback. @fireside, definitely time is a legitimate reason why you wouldn’t be getting the results you desire. Creating great content is a task for sure.

@funkdaddy – thanks a lot for the thoughtful response. We definitely struggle a lot with customers who want to nail us down with questions like, “Well, when am I going to be ranked #1?” and they are looking for an exact date. We try to communicate that no reputable firm can guarantee any specific ranking for a certain keyword. Unfortunately, this is not what they want to hear. We have definitely found that best results are garnered by focusing on content and presenting the content in a way that appeals to humans just as much as the search engines. Our rule is we never insert anything onto a web page that doesn’t help the human visitor navigate the site and is strictly for the search engine. I definitely think the most overlooked part of SEO and SEM is communicating appropriately to the visitor once they are on the site. I think that too many SEO firms focus on traffic numbers and rankings and not enough on the big picture which is turning a visitor into a customer or a lead.

When people tell they they want their site ranked well, it is a good point to ask them as to “why” they want so. You really need to make them understand it will get them more customers and more people who are looking for their service. Because they may be unaware of this.

Indeed sites need to optimise differently as well. Sometimes a google pagerank is not so much of a concern than other things.Couldnt agree more to “communicating appropriately to the visitor once they are on the site”

It’s too scammish – we put up a website about a year ago and got tons of calls and emails from India (we know cause they told us) promising that we would be number one on Google for $100. We looked on Google for legit sounding companies and they were all too expensive. I finally decided to do it on my own and was successful.