Hang around in the SEO circles long enough and you’ll find no shortage of anecdotes about poorly-served clients and agencies that just don’t get it. I’ve certainly seen my share.

There are still businesses out there selling “search engine submission” services – I had a VP at a marketing company explain to me just a few weeks ago how they were providing this for all their clients. Most knowledgeable SEOs consider this a scam, but in this case I was pretty confident the marketing company just hadn’t done their due diligence. Not that that’s any excuse…

It’s mind-boggling, but not when you consider that most entrepreneurs, especially small business owners, are way too busy running their shows to keep up on search engine technology. That means the companies selling them SEO services get to slack off. There is no watchdog outside this two-partner relationship.

For $30/month Sam’s Club will sell you SEO. What are you buying? For most people I’d say peace of mind – the vague idea that your SEO is being “taken care of.” Maybe that is worth the thirty bucks. But is it getting your website anywhere?

Most SEO agencies operate on monthly or annual contracts. In the interest of scalability they standardize as much as possible, automating wherever duplicate tasks occur. Build it like a franchise and you can expand almost limitlessly – if you’ve read The E-Myth Revisited this should resonate.

So services are offered as a “bolt on” to your existing marketing – a standard rate, a long list of deliverables that may, at any point, be going on behind the scenes. The agency sends over a ranking/traffic report once a month, and as long as the numbers are in the black the client keeps paying and SEO agency stays in business.

Here’s a question: if the SEO agency sat back and did nothing, would those numbers still go up?

Or better yet: how can you correlate the traffic growth to what specific actions the agency has taken on your behalf?

The dirty little secret is that sometimes the people doing the work are just coming up with ways to be busy – ways to justify whatever monthly charge they’re bringing in for the service. Filling time cards.

Chances are if you don’t know what your SEO agency has done in the last 3-4 months they’re not doing much of value. SEO isn’t all “under the hood” work. It has a lot to do with creative marketing – building compelling content and sharing it with the world, attracting attention and links. The kinda thing that’s hard to miss if you’re paying any attention to your own website.

There’s no easy answer here. No bulleted list.

There’s just this: understand that your SEO strategy is central to your online marketing strategy – which today should be a huge part of your business plan or, at least, your business awareness (since business plans are overrated).

So if you’re not aware of how, exactly, the SEO services you’ve been paying for are benefiting your business what makes you think they’re doing a drip of good?

UPDATE: here’s a nice post from Rishil at Explicitly.me on the Search Engine Submission scam – he hits it square on with this one.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that each of us is at our own point on the path of learning.

While those of us who live/breathe Internet Marketing have come to view certain truths as self-evident and obvious, many people are just starting out, coming to grips with the basics and uncertain about what information they can trust.

We all start there.

And when you’re just starting out it’s tough to separate the scoundrels from the sages.

I’m not one to claim that I’ve “seen it all” in SEO in my 4-5 years of involvement, but I’ve certainly seen my share of scams. And it amazes me: they don’t seem to be going away. Some of the oldest and most ridiculous scams are still being run.

And if they’re still selling that means that there are business owners out there who don’t know better.

It’s sad, but there are those who prey on the uninformed. This isn’t unique to SEO. It’s an unfortunate fact of life in the business world. Honesty isn’t a prerequisite to charge for services.

Here are 8 SEO scams that just don’t seem to go away and an explanation of why each one is simply not worth your money.

1) “X Top Ten Rankings Guaranteed!”

I had the unfortunate experience of working for a company that offered “50 page one Google rankings guaranteed” as an incentive for uncertain prospects. Not to say hard work wasn’t being done – it was. But guaranteed rankings are meaningless.

Why this is a scam

First off, nobody can guarantee a ranking. Secondly, your website already has hundreds of page one rankings. Here’s an example: search for “mike tekula unstuck.” I guarantee you UnstuckDigital.com (my website) is the first result. Shouldn’t it be?

Go through your own website and put together a list of similar ridiculously obscure keywords. Search for them. You’re going to find lots of page one rankings.

Rankings have never been the goal. They’re merely a means to an end. The end is leads/sales/whatever your goal is. Qualified traffic that converts. A ranking by itself means nothing if it refers no qualified traffic.

2) “We’ll submit your website to thousands of search engines!”

Really? Thanks. Thousands of search engines sure is a lot. It would probably take me weeks to do all that myself.

Why this is a scam

How many search engines have you heard of?

How many do you use on a regular basis (at least once per week)?

You’re not unique in this. Most people use Google – about 70% of people in this country as a matter of fact. Something like 20% use Yahoo!. 8% use Microsoft Live. Ask.com, Dogpile, Metacrawler, etc – the handful of remaining search engines collectively get about 2% of search traffic.

There are not thousands of search engines to worry about. There are three. And if you’re really pressed for resources, there is one – Google.

The worst part about scams like this: those “search engines” they’re submitting your website to? They’re mainly SPAM centers. So not only is your money being ill-spent on this “service,” but you’ll be inundated with SPAM emails until the cows come home.

3) “500 Directory Links for $49.95″

Link building is important – links are the most powerful way to outrank your competitors. Link building is also really, really hard.

So when someone comes along offering you 500 links for $50 you might think it’s a good idea – that’s just $.10 per link!

Why this is a scam

Ask yourself: if you were Google would you want it to be this easy for websites to achieve top rankings? Just drop $50 here or there on a few links and bamn, you’re at the top?

Of course not.

There’s a general rule of thumb here: the cheaper the link, the less powerful.

Sometimes, when you’re clever and create great stuff, links come on their own – and these can be very powerful. But the kind of links you’re going to get for nothing more than a $50 upfront investment are worthless.

4) “1st Page of Google in 48 Hours!”

This scam preys on those in a hurry – they’ve got a website, the sales are not coming in and they’re hoping to hire an “expert” to get them visible in search engines quickly.

Why this is a scam

Anybody (yes, anybody) can get to the 1st page of Google almost instantaneously, and you don’t need to hire someone to do it.

• Step 1: Sign up for AdWords
• Step 2: Pick a keyword, any keyword
• Step 3: Pay

You can pay for top placements all you want – that will make Google very happy. Consistent and qualified traffic streams and a positive ROI are another story.

5) “We have an inside man at Google”

Wouldn’t it be cool if your consultant had a “man on the inside?” You’d get your SEO advice straight from the horse’s mouth!

Why this is a scam

You really think Google employees are selling state SEO secrets to John and Jane Q. Consultant? Remember the Rosenbergs?

Google’s ranking algorithm reportedly contains 200+ variables. In short: they could hand the formula to just about anybody – we wouldn’t be able to “crack the code” and start ranking well. Too many of the variables are hard, if not impossible, to game.

6) “Our methods are a trade secret – we can’t tell you what we’re doing”

Of course some things are proprietary – you can’t expect companies and consultants to give up all their goodies.

Why this is a scam

The minute you’re paying someone for a fuzzy list of deliverables you’ve entered the twilight zone of the B2B services universe – where the basic trade of money for actual work unravels.

I wouldn’t expect your SEO to tell you everything about their research methods, tools and software, but then your mechanic doesn’t turn over a work order with one line item titled, “secret car repair service” and expect you to pay, does he?

7) “We’ve studied and cracked Google’s algorithm”

Similar to #5, this one is equally absurd. It sounds very nerdy and scientific – and we all like the idea of being in on top secret info, especially when it makes us money.

Why this is a scam

Not even Google employees have “cracked” the algorithm. It’s handled by a team of engineers and is updated sometimes several times per week. In other words, a minute after someone “cracked” the algorithm their information would be outdated.

8) “We just need to install this link directory on your website”

Sounds simple enough – and they’ll usually offer to do it for a low upfront price.

Why this is a scam

Your SEO consultant/company is basically telling you that their link building strategy amounts to nothing more than a thin link exchange program. Run screaming. They might not be knowingly scamming their clients, but they don’t know SEO.

This method was already stale and fruitless when people were still listening to Creed (isn’t it nice to let the past die?).

Wouldn’t it be great if SEO were easy?

Imagine if every project you looked at was a “no brainer” – the starting point, the goal and every step along the way laid out clear as day like Google Maps directions.

We’d all be happy as clams, sitting back and watching the money roll in, laughing as we sipped cocktails in the sun on a beach somewhere.

Uh…wait. How big a beach are we talking here?

If you’ve read The Dip you know that the concept of something being both easy and very valuable is usually ridiculous. In fact, the opposite is usually true. The difficulty of reaching the goal determines the scarcity – and scarcity creates value.

There Can Be Only One (OK, maybe two)

There’s money in ranking #1. How much? Well, that part depends – on what you’re selling, how many people are searching and how well your site converts that traffic. Some of our clients generate as much as $4k of revenue per month through a single #1 ranking.

How much do you think the #2 position is worth? If we use the leaked AOL data as our basis, 3.5x less traffic – so $4k/month becomes a little over $1k. Pretty big difference, isn’t it? That’s about the salary of one entry-level worker in this country. $1k a month is nothing to shake a stick at for most people, but you see the point.

It doesn’t get more scarce than this – only one website gets that top position and the traffic benefit (value) that comes with it.

Of course, the cat wasn’t always so far out of the bag. Before search engines were saturated with competition, valuable top positions weren’t nearly as difficult to come by. Some had the foresight to jump into valuable niches early. Others stepped in shit and realized what they were sitting on later.

My Delorian is in the Shop

Remember in Back To The Future II when the elder Biff stole the Delorian and brought the sports almanac back to younger Biff so he could make a killing in sports betting?

Wouldn’t it be nice to go back and jump into a valuable niche before everyone else did?

Sure would, Doc.

Even narrow niches are more saturated by the day. The reason is pretty simple: setting up a website and populating it with content is pretty easy. With platforms like WordPress most developers can register a domain, have a website up and get to the content population stage within an hour and for less than $10.

It’s a Long Road to the Top (Unless you build a helicopter)

In saturated niches the top players are all getting the on-page SEO stuff right – and if they’re not, they probably will eventually.

The determining factor is trust – mainly measured in backlinks.

You can employ a team of link builders on a full-time basis to go out and beg for links. You might gain some ground this way, but you stand the risk of being outmaneuvered by smarter competition.

I read a line recently (I don’t recall where) that went something like this: “no niche is too saturated for fresh thinking.”

If you want an example of this consider Matt Inman’s success with Mingle2. By web standards this story may be old news, but it applies to the point perfectly.

Forget the quality of the website for a minute – forget the on-page SEO (it didn’t matter anyway). Matt built tens of thousands of links to a brand new website in a saturated niche (free online dating), and he didn’t do it with a team of link builders. He did it by being clever. He built links by creating quizzes geared towards bloggers – the quizzes generated badges with nifty little links pointing back to Mingle2.

He got the site ranking #1 for “free online dating” and sold it for an undisclosed (but probably quite large) sum of money.

Simple? Relatively, sure. Easy? You tell me.

There is no shortage of SEO checklists out there, and they all go something like this:

1. Research keywords
2. Write optimized title tags
3. Write optimized headlines
4. Write optimized body copy
5. Optimize internal link text
6. …

If you’ve been learning about SEO for any amount of time you’ve no doubt read a few of these.

And the truth is that most of them are accurate. At least, the tasks they describe generally improve the signals search engines pick up to determine what your pages are about.

But here’s the thing: you’re still unlikely to rank competitively even when you get the on-site stuff right.

Almost everyone gets the on-site signals right

Take a good look at your competitors. Chances are they’ve already done a lot of the on-site optimization you were planning on doing.  Many of them are doing all of it right.

So what do you do when you’ve optimized your pages and your competition is still outranking you?

• Stuff more keywords into your pages?
• Tweak those title tags a few more times?
• Adjust your image ALT text?

Waste. Of. Time.

You can’t beat out more established and linked-to competitors by optimizing your pages. Period.

Even if you could, the on-site stuff is easy – so what would stop your competitors from stepping up their game a bit and beating you out again? The search results would be a non-stop shuffle.

What you need to do is build trust.

Trust is social

Social proof is important. Without it we’d have to spend a lot more time finding out for ourselves, and the hard way, what is and isn’t valuable. This is why testimonials and referrals work so well. We know that business owners all, for better or worse, toot their own horns dry. If someone else is telling us how valuable something is, someone who doesn’t stand to benefit, we’re much more likely to be on board.

This is fundamentally the way trust works for search engines.

Before PageRank (a link-based evaluation of web pages) search engines relied on webmasters to tell them what their pages were relevant to. The results spoke for themselves. Porn websites showed up for searches like “white house.” Actually, porn showed up for just about everything.

Focusing on links allowed Google to cut through the noise and determine what pages were really about. Because links, unlike on-page elements, come mostly from other webmasters – who, unless they’ve been given a specific incentive, have no interest in promoting someone else’s website to the top of search results.

Links are central to search algorithms because links gives search engines a signal of trust they can trust.

The fact is, you don’t need on-page SEO to get search engine traffic. You need people using, talking about and linking to your website, because search engines follow people – not the other way around.

Trust is:

• Powerful – even websites that don’t get on-site SEO right will get top ranks with enough inbound links
• Defensible – competitors can’t easily catch up

So here’s the deal:

When resources are limited (and they always are) figure out how to leverage them to get people talking about and linking to your stuff. Do that and you’ll win – in due time. Simple, but not easy.

Related posts from around the web:

• A Brief Letter to Startup CEOs, CPOs & Founders | SEOmoz
• You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google | Sugarrae
• Sorry, I won’t do SEO for your new website | Jim Boykin