These companies are cold calling many website owners with these claims and it does certainly make a compelling argument for you to part with your hard earned cash. We have spent time talking options through with many of these companies on our clients behalf and time and time again we see the same thing. What could be termed ‘black hat’ at worst but is certainly counter productive at best according to the guidelines issued by many of the top Search Engines (SEs). Essentially these companies are avoiding doing the hard analysis and detailed project design that is required to give your website a true long term advantage in the marketplace.

In a lot of cases you would be as well to spend the money on an AdWord campaign for the same permanence of affect that it has! These are effectively pyramid sales schemes with your website. They rely on an ever increasing network of websites for them to drive their rank increasing process.

We have seen these companies do a couple of things to participating websites.

• A basic review of your homepage title, description and meta data to give the impression that this is a key part of their work. This should just be the tip of the iceberg if best practice techniques were to be followed.

• The key is usually some link exchange code that allows them to add links from other sites they control. So several sites will reference you and you will reference several others. The more relevant the links the more they charge (over £200 per month per link in some cases!). Most website owners go for the cheaper options which means irrelevant links appear on your site and irrelevant websites reference yours….

This is what the major SEs view as counter productive because one of their key aims is to give users of the Internet only relevant websites whenever they search it. These SEs are applying ever more complex algorithms and becoming ever more adept at identifying relevant websites. They gather huge amounts of data about client behaviour through applications like the Google or Yahoo! Toolbar and Google Chrome. It is only a matter of time before any non-compliant websites slip down the rankings. They then have to play catch up by doing the detailed SEO and link building work that should have done in the first place in a planned and analytical manner.

Like a lot of things in life, the rewarding activities are those that require focus and application to achieve. Short cuts are rarely as effective and this topic is no exception.

With Google AdWords it is possible to target the specific words and phrases that a potential customer would use to find your product. Correctly implemented AdWords campaigns will make sure your advertisements only appear in front of people that would find your product relevant. Now this ability is great by itself but we can go even further if it fits the marketing plan. You can choose to only pay for displayed adverts that people then click on to visit your site! An incredible level of control when you relate it back to the placement of an advert with traditional media where you pay a fee and are not guaranteed any return from it.

When the AdWords system is combined with the Analytics service; the real power of the Google suite of tools will become apparent. With carefully crafted AdWords campaigns directing traffic into your website; visitors entering via an advert can be monitored separately to other traffic. This allows the cost of advertising to be measured directly against any goals set within the site. Such as signing up to a newsletter or making a purchase through your e-commerce system. As well as gathering information about visitor’s movements within your site it could even be configured to record the sale price and items that were purchased! So you would then be able to easily see the entire journey that your customer took from showing an interest in your product; to making the sale and hopefully returning in the future.

All of this data is integrated into one neat and accessible system that can provide all the detail needed to be able to make confident decisions about marketing effectively and evolving your business.

What I have described above gives a broad picture to the services available, however this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are real opportunities to learn about your customers in an unobtrusive manner. We are more than happy to fill in the rest of the picture if you are interested….

The problem with this is it means that Yahoo stand to lose out on a large part of the market and thus lose revenue.

Yahoo’s earlier decision to turn down an approach by Microsoft to merge their advertising services would have solidified their position. But it looks like a much poorer offer would be put on the table if they were to revisit that idea. Microsoft may even wait to see if Yahoo get into difficulties and then pick up the pieces.

I think we need competition in this market as that is what has driven the rapid development of the Internet up to this point. Rarely has it been non-profit organisations being responsible for ground breaking advances affecting the way we use the Internet. It has been commercially driven companies forging new ideas and technologies to get more people contributing to and utilising services through it.