SEO

Every site owner gets emails that promise to put the site on top of Google. This page translates one such offer that came to this site, with the comments of its author in bold, and then lists what search engine optimisation really is. The name of the sender is replaced by the author's own, just in case: no offence, nothing personal.

An SEO offer, with comments

Hello! My name is Andrei Olegovich, and my comments are in bold. I have been promoting and optimising websites for more than 10 years (no kidding). I would like to offer you my services (not that I really want to, but the mailing list came along).

You are on my site now and came here thanks to its excellent, at times brilliant, optimisation. Think about it. Working with me, you get:

• Two to three times the income of your business or more. (How I do that without knowing your income today I have no idea, but if it works I will say I planned it.)
• Two to three times the targeted traffic or more. (I do not know your traffic either, let alone your targeted traffic.)
• Savings on advertising, because promoting a site is cheaper and works better than ads. (I cannot prove it.)
• Savings on promotion, because I am half the price of others. (Neither of us knows what the others charge.)
• Savings of your time and effort. (True.)
• Higher positions for your target queries. (If it works out; the more you spend, the better the chance. And "higher" is a vague word.)
• Monthly reports and advice on promotion. (Reports are useful.)

The plan

The offer goes on with prices and a plan:

1. A list of the search queries the site should be found for, the semantic core, in 2–3 days. (Presumably for a small site.)
2. An analysis of technical errors: broken links, errors in the code, external links that should be closed from indexing, wrong internal linking. (This part is worth doing, and you can do it yourself, see below.)
3. The positions of the site for each query in Google and Yandex, in a spreadsheet, to decide which pages need links with which anchors.
4. Buying "quality, natural" links to the site, 50–70 a month, about 160 dollars a month. (A natural link is one nobody paid for. A bought one is not natural by definition.)
5. Ongoing support and reports. Results in 3–5 months, "top 3" promised. (Top 3!)

Bought links

Search engines treat paid links meant to raise rankings as spam. Google lists them among link schemes in its spam policies and can lower or drop the pages that use them; Yandex introduced a filter against bought links in 2015. A plan whose core is renting dozens of links a month can do more harm than good, and the damage stays after the payments stop.

What does work

• Write for the questions people really search for, and answer them completely on one page.
• A unique title and description for every page; they are the text of the search result.
• One address per page: redirects for moved pages (Redirects) and a canonical URL for copies (Canonical page).
• No broken links and correct status codes (HTTP status codes).
• Fast pages on a phone: small images (WebP images) and a check in PageSpeed Insights (Website testing).
• Measure where visitors come from, for example with UTM tags and goals in your analytics (Yandex Metrica: goals).

Article authors: Andrei Olegovich, Klavdiya Kondakova