Misleading claims by some self-proclaimed SEO gurus.

I regularly receive e-mails with links to websites that claim extraordinary SEO promises. Typically they will tell me that:

1.  Use their program and it would bring me hordes of traffic.
2. They promised results within a few hours or just overnight.
3. They make it all sound so very easy.
4. You will dominate the search engines.
5. they show examples, where by the use of their program, they are at the very top of Google for a keyword that has enormous competition.

So what is it all about? How do they apparently achieve such extraordinary results. Just to top it off, they will show you so-called 'evidence of financial income'. In this example, just a couple of hundred dollars each day, but very often. It amounts to 2000. In this video. I plan to run through a couple of fairly typical examples. I will show you how these apparently incredible claims are really not effective in any way.

The first, I received in August 2009, and it says that 'you will be making it quick and easy to round up those profitable keywords'. This one asks, "Want to dominate Google and get a ridiculous amount of traffic?". It is a selling ng ploy trying to have the customer say yes to the first question and eventually, they will say yes to buying your program. and it also claims "Less than 18 hours since I took 22 minutes to do the work". Here we are given a screen shot of the page one on Google, and it claims that in less than 18 hours there are listings and the competition is 67 million competitors. Here at the top of the Google results page we have results 1 to 10 of about 67 million and the keyword in question is 'keyword minute'. This video was recorded in March 2010 so it was 7 months later and we can say that the number of competitors was down to 19,700,000, but it would still seem to be pretty impressive.

Let me draw to your attention that the search is for - keyword minute - without inverted commas. In other words it is a broad search. We can do a narrow search by putting inverted commas around the keyword. When we do this the number of competitors dropped from 19 million to 36,000. Even more interesting is that if we use the Google suggestion tool, even under broad search, there are 6 million searches globally for the 'keyword', 24,900,000 for 'minute' and nobody is actually looking for 'keyword minute.  It's not a term that people are even interested in.

 Linkassistant.com have produced a series of SEO programs and three of them I regularly use, and I highly recommend. In their advertisements on their website they have a video. I think that this video demonstrates that even those with an incredibly successful program can make extraordinary claims. Here they are looking at the keyword 'SEO book', and they suggest that there are 1,220,000 competitors. This is from their video and at the time of that recording there were 1.2 million competitors for the keyword 'SEO book', and the company were in position number one. At the end of March 2010, and in fact, there are 17,800,000 competitor webpages and SEO book.com remains number one for the keywords 'SEO book'. If we undertake a narrow search for 'SEO book', the number of competitor webpages dropped from 17.8 million to 284,000 but still a significant number.

Using the Google keyword suggestion tool, under broad search, there are 22,000 searches each month for the keyword 'SEO book'. With the same keyword tool but set to exact which means narrow search, the numbers drop a little to 8100 for monthly global searches, but we can accept that this is a useful keyword with a number of potential searchers.

So we must now ask, how can this webpage be at number one for a highly competitive term with potential for a large number of visitors. Here I have undertaken an analysis of the keyword SEO book using my program Keyword SEO Pro. Keyword SEO Pro assesses the strength of the competition, for what I believe to be the most important factor available to us for identifying competition strength. That is the PageRank of the HomePage of the competing web page, and we can see here that SEO book.com is in the number one position for SEO book, it has a HomePage PageRank of 6. PageRank depends on the number of backlinks. This is then modified by a variety of factors, for example, the number of links on the linking page. PageRank and backlinks are discussed in greater detail in video 4 of this series.

Here, I have used one of Link Assistant's own programs, SEO SpyGlass to evaluate the links to their SEO book.com webpage. We can see, just looking at the number of backlinks, there are more than 14,600. That is an extremely high number and accounts for the high PageRank of 6. We would be hard pushed to achieve such numbers of backlinks and such a high PageRank.

My advice is that you should avoid being misled about keyword difficulty. Search engine optimisation to obtain high ranking for desirable keywords is no easy matter. When you are shown success of a program for a very competitive webpage because of the large number of competitors check to see if you're being shown the narrow search or the broad search. This is particularly important for long-term keywords that is to say keywords with three or more words. If it still looks valid the program is effectively getting high ranking for a webpage in a very competitive field then look at the HomePage PageRank of that website.