Do you think you need a search engine optimizer? Let’s get serious. Your company is not a hobby, and you’re not working to build it only because the work is fun. Companies - smart companies - want to receive profit from their investment of hard work and money. Profit is what companies use to pay the bills.

It would be unwise to throw away your profit on SEO services just because you hope it may work out - someday. Don’t pretend to be shocked if I tell you that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing every day. I see it all the time that companies test the water and shakily hand over their credit card to the next SEO that gave them a good pitch. Other companies have all the skill they need for success, but they fail to use it.

I will give you some good pointers on how to select a good SEO, the basic components of their role, and even why you may (or may not) be able to handle much of it without their help.

I blame the Internet. Attack this all you like, but I blame the Internet and its many over-hyped success stories for allowing people to let down their guard and take a “witness” approach to their marketing. We all know that the Internet is a hugely important tool to businesses, but the lack of understanding how and why the Internet is valuable to a company has led a lot of people to throwing their hands in the air and giving up participation in their marketing. It is a knee-jerk reaction people make because all that information about Internet marketing is beyond the comfortable things they understand.

What makes this worse is that as so many people give up trying to be participants in their marketing efforts they give up on even knowing the right questions to ask or directions to take. It is as if they just throw all their fate to Google and a few other websites, and hope they get the right results.

A Non-Participant Seldom Gets Exceptional Results

I received a message a couple days ago that bothered me. It bothered me enough to write this, but it was a message that I see every day from small business people. I want to share it with you, but first, I want to say that this is a good example of why small businesses remain small.

I was taught that it is not nice to call somebody a liar, but if you hear these things from a search engine optimizer, there is a good chance they are lying to you. They are either lying about the facts, or lying that they know the job of SEO. In either case, it is unreliable information that can cost companies a lot of money and can have some disastrous results.

Let’s have some fun and review these common lies told by SEO. If you have stories to tell, please add your experience in the comments of this blog post.

SEO Lie Number One: Meta Tags

One of the most common lies I have ever heard is when the SEO says, “You just need some keyword meta tags to improve your ranking.” The truth is that meta descriptions are important, but the keywords tag is mostly meaningless. Meta tags are a minor part of SEO and if somebody tells you that adding meta tags is your answer, they are lying to you. Here is some more information on the topic: “SEO Meta Tags: Oh, You Must Be Another SEO Expert!”

SEO Lie Number Two: Search Engine Submissions

Here is one of my favorite SEO lies. The SEO says something like “We will submit your website to 40,000 search engines and directories.” This is not only an ineffective thing to do, it can also be very damaging when your website links are in a bunch of penalized websites called “link farms”.

If you just must submit your website somewhere to make you feel productive, submit it to DMOZ and Yahoo! Otherwise, leave it to the search engines. They will find you if you have something that other people believe is worth linking to.

Never trust the SEO who sells directory submissions and pink ponies. REF: SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies For Sale

Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!

It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.

I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.

After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.

I often find myself visiting with everything from small emerging SEO clients to mid-market SEO clients and large enterprise SEO clients. A commonality I find is that each of them have a hard time justifying the initial cost of SEO services, but I want to help explain how they are able to do so. In each instance, there is a clear understanding that they need SEO. After all, it is what makes them visible to more people searching to buy what they sell. Let’s not get silly and start questioning whether SEO works or not.

We surely all know that SEO provides an excellent return on investment when it is done just right. If you don’t know this already, there are a squillion solid case studies to back it up. If you are reading this, you know very well that it works. I wrote this and SEO’d it for you, and now you are here to read it, so let’s not be coy. You want more people to see your brand and your value proposition, and this is something that enterprise search engine optimizers do well. The challenge lies in how to justify the stroke of a pen that puts your money into the SEO’s bank account. So let’s look at that and consider how everything from the enterprise SEO service level all the way down to a “let’s fail fast and get it over with” marketing budget is justified.

What is Enterprise SEO?

Let us first look at the term, enterprise SEO. What does it really mean? Somehow the word enterprise has been used to define an elite level of businesses that spend a lot of money on marketing and have thousands of employees in huge skyscrapers. Let’s put that definition of enterprise to bed right now, and start looking at this a bit differently. I like the definition provided by Princeton University which states as follows: