I
Attended A "FREE SEO Seminar," and All I
Got Was A Box Of Mints. MMMMMM… Mints.
By:
Chris Behan - President, Socius Marketing, Inc.
Posted: 05-05-07
For those of you who have visited our office, you
know that we are located in Rocky Point of Tampa in
a fairly large office building. As I was entering
the lobby of our building a few weeks ago, I noticed
a little sign on a plain white sheet of paper that
simply said, "Free SEO Seminar" with that
fantastic little black arrow pointing to the location.
I
just had to attend. After all, it was free! So, one
of our account managers and I quietly entered the
room, which contained about 8 people, sat in the back,
and listened.
The young lady conducting the seminar did an acceptable
job of presenting the information she was trained
to present. The problem is, she knew very little about
search engine optimization, and a lot of the information
shared was only half true or not true at all. She
spoke about blogs, Meta keywords, and reciprocal link
schemes, all of which are either very dated techniques
or about to be dated. The conversation about the content,
the most important part of search engine optimization,
lasted about two minutes. Why was this so brief? That's
easy: It's hard to write content. Their company does
not write content, so they certainly would not want
to make that a large issue.
There
were many other questionable topics covered in the
seminar, including the "SEO expert" telling
one company I can only assume sold some type of running
shoe that they would not want to be on the first page
of Google for the term "running shoes."
Somehow, the term "running shoes" was too
broad and did not speak specifically to what the running
shoe company did. (I think they just thought they
could not get him ranked on that term.) Regardless,
we just sat quietly in the back, and at the end of
the seminar simply thanked them for little box mints
and left.
I should state that I am not suggesting you should
not attend an SEO conference. What I am suggesting
is for you to find out who is running the seminar
before you attend. What are their credentials, and
can they demonstrate actual results for you?
I
have been to a few SEO seminars that were very good;
they just cost me upwards of $2,500.00 to attend.
If that price seems steep, just realize that following
the advice at a "FREE SEO Seminar" that
does not fully understand your market, site, and corporate
goals can be very expensive too.
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