I really hate to admit that I wasted over $2,000 on SEO (search engine optimization). Take a lesson from me if you’re smart ,and DON’T DO WHAT I DID.

I had a start-up ecommerce website selling bird houses(that’s a story for another time). One day, I got a call from a person who said they represented Web Marketing Source.com (a division of Captures.com), and they just happened to notice that my website wasn’t working as well as it should. They proposed to greatly improve my results and of course they just happened to have a special deal for me that included all these items:

• Meta analysis and recreation of clients tags and keywords
• Automated search engine submissions for quick indexing
• Manual search engine submissions for non-automated engines
• Auto and manual site maps submissions for faster site map indexing
• Submissions tracking reports "upon request"
• Simple maintenance and updating of tags "upon request"
• HTML site map which helps your pages to be indexed quickly

Well, honestly I wasn’t selling that many bird houses so I let myself get sweet talked into signing a contract for their "services".

I was too new at internet business to understand that all the "services" they were going to provide are pretty easy to do yourself for almost nothing. So I took the bait, and the contract set the hook.

Basically I got nothing, OK well I did get poor customer service. As near as I can tell, all they did for $2K was generate a Google site map. After they got my money, the sound of silence from them was deafening, and I was too stupid to know what to do. They offered no help whatsoever.

What I did notice is that their services provided absolutely no detectable improvement in my website. What did change was my bottom line – it got worse. Thanks to that contract I signed, I had to keep paying them for 3 more months after I tried to cancel the deal. So I lived up to my part of the bargain – I gave them a lot of money for a few minutes of work.

If you have a website, keep in mind that there are people trolling the internet looking for website owners to call on the phone to sell them SEO. It’s a good bet you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars for a Google site map!

Here’s my advice

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES buy anything from anybody who calls you out of the blue to tell you that they noticed your website wasn’t optimized and they’re going to help you get those rankings that you deserve. And for sure don’t sign a contract with someone you don’t know.

– End of Story –