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At first glance,
it looks great. An online marketing program
where you pay so much per visitor that's brought
to your site. But beware, because this program
usually works out to be a much better deal for
people doing your search engine positioning than
for you. Here's some reasons why:
How the
Service Keeps Track
Services that
charge per visitor usually keep track by the use
of "Doorway"
pages. This in itself is no problem. We actually use your
own content pages
(see Consultation and Development of Keyword Rich Content)
as one of the tools to achieve
higher rankings on search engines. The difference is that we
keep any new content pages we create and your own pages that
we edit on your server, so even if you no longer use
our service, those important links from the search engines
to your content pages stay in place. With a service that charges by the visitor,
those pages are hosted on their server, so they
can keep track of the visitors that see them and
continue on to your site. When you no longer use
their service, the doorway pages disappear,
along with your website traffic. It's a pretty
convincing way to force you to continue using
their service. We prefer to rely on excellent
value and customer service to maintain our
customer relationships.
Too Much
Reliance on Doorway Pages
With SearchEnginePosition,
development of additional site content pages is just one of the
strategies we employ. We also work to optimize
the pages in your existing website, because a
content rich site that's been optimized with
proper Metatags and Keyword weighting can be
extremely effective in ranking well on search
engines. We have no vested interest in using one
tool over others. We do whatever we need to to
make your online marketing work!
Services that
charge per visitor only get paid if someone
comes through one of their doorway pages. They
have no reason to use other tools, because they
wouldn't get paid this way. They rely completely
on one search engine positioning tactic. This is
increasingly dangerous as more and more search
engines place more importance on site popularity
and less on keyword relevance, an area where
doorway pages are not terribly effective.
The Risk of
Cloaking
Another downside to
paying per click is that cloaking is a favorite tactic of
search engine marketers who bill this way. To date, every
reputable SEO expert and search engine has come out against
cloaking. It's considered Spam, plain and simple, and that
could result in your being banned on a search engine. For
more on cloaking, read these articles on our site: The
Dangers of Cloaking and Cloaking
Uncovered.
Being
Penalized for Success
A typical charge
per visitor for one of these positioning
services is $.25 per visitor. Doesn't sound like
much, right? A reasonable investment for a
potential customer? Let's compare to our charges
and see. One of our clients, Campion Marine,
went from 800 visitors per month to 9,000 per
month with our service. In an average month,
2500 of these visitors would have been directly
referred from a search engine through our
positioning efforts. At $.25 per visitor, this
would have cost Campion $625. Our service cost
$199 per month. In fact, on the average, our
service works out to a total cost of about 5
cents per visitor. No comparison? That's what we
think too.
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