This Months Topic: Is a SPAM mail the best way to find a promotion company?

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You've gotten them in your inbox. If your like me... EVERYDAY. An email message from someone you don't know promising all the traffic you need for as little as a few hundred dollars a month. Should you jump at the offer. It sounds promising and they offer a guarantee?

Before you jump in... Ask yourself a few questions... :-)

1. If you want to do well on the search engines, shouldn't you look for companies who have pages listed on the search engines? If a company has to resort to sending you a SPAM message how good could they be? If they cannot achieve placement and listings for their sites, what makes you think they can do THAT for you.

2. If you backtrack the SPAM message source and try to find the site origin, you can study the host site. If not, email for information and get it that way. Review the site for promotional aspects. I have found so-called promotion companies not using meta or alt tags. Using Flash without specialized tags like noframes. Or using noframes without realizing that Netscape doesn't hide the text. There is special way to use a noframes tag while still covering both IE and Netscape.

3. Once, you find the site of origin, do a search on the web using http://www.metacrawler.com  or http://www.dogpile.com for the company name first. Using a metacrawler search engine will all you to view the listing for the top 16 search engines all at once. You should find their site listed. 1-2 listings are okay. 3-5 times is good. 6 or more is excellent. If you don't see the site at all... RUN......

4. If you do find them more than 3 times. Do a search for the service keyword you are looking for: website promotion, website design, search engine optimization, website optimization, good website design, etc. If you keep finding the company 2-5 times, they are good.

5. Do this to find the top 5 companies and start comparing prices, services, and looking at the client list. Contact a few of the clients on their list. Simply call the company and ask for the webmaster or the site owner. Tell them you are thinking of using their promotion company and were interested in what they thought of the service. If they say good things. You may have the company you need.

6. Last, email or call the promotion company for information and a free analysis of your site. If they are good they won't make elaborate promises and not try to overbill you for services. They will tell you how your site will be optimized. Not how much the services cost. Here are the questions I would ask.

• How much does it cost to optimize a site? At a rate of $35-$50 an hour, you are looking at 5 pages for around $300, 10-20 pages for $500. That should include maintenance for a limited number of months. 3 are average. Then a maintenance program of $10.00 per keyword phrase/ month to keep your pages up and active with regular monthly reports. Reporting of more than once a month is repetitive and could get your site banned because you are using up the search engines bandwidth.

• Any good optimization includes listing in as many directories as possible. You should be billed the fee from the directory to list your site and a small processing fee usually 1 hours worth of labor to process the order. Currently, Yahoo and LookSmart are billing $199 and then we bill $51 for our expertise. Some people want to make you believe they have a special relationship with the directories and ask you to pay extra for that but any good promotional company can get an effective result.

• Maintenance is an important aspect of the promotion. A good company will know the resubmission interval for each major engine and be able to guess when your next submission should take place for each particular engine to insure your pages are up for the highest percentage of time. They also know what services to take advantage of to give your pages stronger relevance and be able to analyze what is going on with your site, locate problems, and offer effective solutions.

• Finally, a great website promotion company will be doing constant research. Always be buying and testing new software and services to see if they would be effective for promotion. He/She should be on top of the latest views and ideas. They would have a large variety of test sites where they would try these new services to test effectiveness before presenting them to clients. Testing leads to quality. Clients want well-tested service.

• If you follow all the advise above, you will find an effective promotion company that is going to be honest, fair, and have the technology and support to offer you quality service. AND, since, you are already here.... Let's chat about your site...