One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from Marc Shneider, Ph.D. from Global Vibrations in Washington DC and in the course of investigating it, I found some amazing things I wanted to share with you small business website owners who are looking to hire someone to do SEO for your website.

The email came from a company called “Global Vibrations” in Washington DC and the return email was marcshneider@mplw.net. Like I usually do with these emails, I first looked up mplw.net and found it was all about multilingual search engines. There was a link to sitemap services, and that’s where I found, to my amazement, this graphic:

Wow, a Google Sitemap for $250. Now I realize many of you are thinking, what the heck is a sitemap and maybe this is a resonable price. Not so!

First off, Google and Yahoo and everyone else use the same XML sitemap format. You don’t  need a different one for Google and Yahoo. Secondly, it’s a little text file that simply lists the pages on your site. It’s supposed to help search engines find all the pages on your site. Now whenever I design a website, I create one, just as an insurance policy to make sure Google finds all the pages, but if Google has already found your pages, you might not need one. Click here to see if Google has indexed all of your website’s pages. Google even provides a free site map generator.

Now, if your website isn’t fully indexed and you think you need a sitemap, what’s a reasonable price? Well, for many of the websites I design that are under 30 pages, making a sitepmap takes maybe 15 minutes. Maybe a neurosurgeon can make $250 in 15 minutes, but not most web designers. Therefore, charging a flat rate of $250 for a sitemap is really, really, really overcharging folks for something they might not need and even if they do need it, it’s pretty quick to create.

This is just one example of an SEO company or individual charging for things that are pretty close to free. Here are some others:

Submission to Search Engines

I often see this offered as a service. First off, if you take the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, you’ve got nearly 70% of the search engine market covered (see January 2009 results). What if I told you could submit your website to these three search engines for free? Seriously. Here are the links:

1. Submit your website to Google
2. Submit your website to Yahoo
3. Submit your website to MSN

Now, if the big three let you submit for free, what are chances the other little players charge you? You get the point. Please don’t pay someone to do this for you. And you only need to do this ONCE for your website. Submitting over and over will only annoy them, and we don’t want that.

Robots.txt File

This is another example if a very small file that can help your website. Again, this takes maybe 5 whole minutes to create and is typically much smaller than the sitemap file. Oh, and Google also has a tool that will help you create this little helper file too. Click here to get Google’s help to create a robots.txt file. It’s supposed to give “bots” those mysterious little programs that crawl around the web directions. Again, not super hard to make and should only take someone a few minutes.

Meta Tags

Now this item is a tricky one. It’s super easy to change a website’s meta tags. But what to change them to is the part that takes the time investment. What are meta tags? These little pieces of code, very short, that are (or should be) a part of your website code near the top of your page. Want to see what your meta tags look like? Just go to your home page, click “view source” in your browser. Look at the top for something like:

<title>Hello I am your title and should be filled with keywords</title>

That’s the “title” tag. And here’s the description tag:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Hello I am a description of this particular page” />

That’s it. See how short they are? The hard part is doing the research to figure out what to put in these two meta tags. But actually changing them is very quick. A good SEO person should involve you in this research. Changing the tags is trivial, deciding what to change them to is not. And what about the keyword meta tag? The keyword meta tag was declared dead and useless in 2002. Don’t pay someone to add or modify it.

Link Building

Be really, really careful of link building scams – they can actually do damage to your search engine rankings.  On the Global Vibrations website I saw they were offering a month of link building for over $3000. This is a huge amount of money – and you need to find out exactly what you’re getting for this. If they are just going to spam small business website owners with endless link exchange requests, it’s not worth it. Find out details, ask questions. If they can’t explain their link building practices in language that you understand, look elsewhere.

W3C Validation

While it is debatable whether having your website validate is a benefit to SEO, actually finding out IF your website code is valid is free. Click here to use the W3C Validation tool.

Image Tag Optimization

Sounds impressive huh? Well, it’s a very small task depending on the number of images you have on your website. In general, whenever you add an image, there’s a part of the image code that can contain keywords. It’s contained in the ALT attribute of the image tag. So if you sell widgets, it might look like this:

<img src=”images/widget.jpg” alt=”widget”>

It’s just a little bitty extra piece that should, as a matter of good design, be on every image.

Local Google Listing

By now you’re getting pattern, right? Google stuff is FREE. Click here to learn how to get your business listed in Google Local.

Want good FREE SEO advice? Visit Google’s Webmaster Central. Even if you’re not a web designer, it will give you a good education right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. And if someone gives you a list of SEO services they will provide – do a little bit of research to see if any of these things are really something you can do yourself. There are lot of people out there to take advantage of this thing called SEO – a little education goes a long way.

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More articles from others who receive spam from Global Vibrations:

http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/marc-schneider-and-global-vibration-inc-the-myth-of-multilingual-search-engine-promotions/

http://www.seonj.com/marketing/global-vibrations-inc.html

http://www.spiread.com/blog/2008/12/12/beware-of-this-search-engine-optimization-rip-off

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/09/16/315/

http://r2d5.net/category/company/global-vibration-inc

And here’s the original email my client received:

Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Cordially,

Marc Shneider, Ph.D.
marcshneider@mplw.net

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) – I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting (website URL), I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Shneider, Ph.D.
marcshneider@mplw.net_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL: 1(202)-787-3989 – FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

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