Here are five tricks used by the more unscrupulous internet marketing firms. Swindles such as these have been going on since the dawn of the internet and while some of them are just a cheeky way of getting a few pounds out of your marketing budget, some of them could cost you thousands and potentially cause long-term harm to your website.

Each of these is a scam in use today and is one that businesses we deal with have been caught out on in the past. We are highlighting them here so that you can see the types of tricks that exist and can hopefully spot them before handing over your cash.

Scam #1 - “We’ll put you top of Google for 10 of your keywords for only £200 a month”

This is a pay per click scam that has become pretty popular over the past couple of years, with a number of businesses we know falling for it, to their later regret. On the face of it, the offer seems like a good one: A company calls you saying they will put your website in the sponsored listings on Google and guarantees that your site will appear on the first page for only £200 a month. What they don’t tell you is that the search terms are ones that are rarely used so are cheap to bid on. For example, if you were an IFA that works nationally then bidding on the keyword “pension advice” would be expensive, but bidding on “independent pension advice in South Wales” wouldn’t be. These pay per click companies will bid on keywords like the latter so that not that many clicks happen, and when they do, the cost is minimal. Out of the £200, you may only receive a few pounds worth of clicks, with the company pocketing the other £190 or so as a monthly management fee.

We have also seen one company that doesn’t stop there. They will charge you an additional £50 set-up fee which they say is mandatory as it’s charged by Google. Whilst it is true that Google does charge an Adwords set-up fee, it is actually only £5, and it gets refunded out of your first few clicks anyway.

How can you avoid this scam? If anyone cold calls you offering pay per click advertising then perhaps it’s better not to sign up over the phone. Instead, take their details, stick them into a search engine, and have a look to see if they are associated with this type of con. If it looks genuine then find out whether they let you bid on the more competitive keywords or whether they just let you choose from low level ones.

Scam #2 - “We’ll submit your site to hundreds of search engines for only £10”

One of the oldest online marketing scams and one of the most pointless. The first thing you should be aware of is that there are only three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing) and they take up over 95% of all search queries made in the UK. Submitting a website to any others is a worthless exercise.

The next thing you need to know is that submitting a site to a search engine can potentially do more harm than good. For a long time it has been widely accepted within the online marketing world that search engines prefer to find websites via inbound links. It is believed that search engines will sooner show a website they find on their own, via another website, than one they are force fed through a submission.

If you have a new site then to get indexed, all you need is one link from a website that is popular with the search engines and your site will start showing in results pages within a matter of days or weeks.

There is a variation on this scam where companies try to get on-going money out of you by offering to re-submit your site regularly. Even if the above wasn’t true then this additional service is a complete waste of time as once the search engines know your site exists and have crawled it, they place you within their database, something they don’t need to be asked to do over and over again.

Scam #3 - “We guarantee to get you #1 on Google”

No-one can promise you the first position on Google. There are hundreds of factors that search engines use to determine the search results, many of which aren’t known to people outside of Google. If someone is making guarantees then it is highly likely that one of two things are happening. They may be offering to optimise your site for keywords that are of a very low competition level (much as the pay per click scam, above), or, more worryingly, there may be something dodgy going on.

Black hat techniques, such as cloaking and keyword stuffing, are used by some SEO companies to trick search engines into ranking a website. Whilst these often work in the short term, they can actually damage your website in the long-term. When the search engines discover that these techniques have been used they can penalise, and even ban your website from the search results. Don’t think it can’t happen to you either, as BMW once had their website disappear from Google thanks to some black hat work, and if it can happen to a company of that size, then it can happen to anyone.

Scam #4 - “We will give you 1000 links for only £9.99”

Whilst inbound link building is an important part of search engine optimisation, the links do need to come from quality, relevant websites. Buying links in bulk, through companies that have automated link submission systems will never bring in links from good websites in relevant fields.

The links will most likely come from spammy directories that no person and no search engine is ever going to bother with. Not only will the links be completely worthless but they could highlight to the search engines that something dodgy is going on and pose harm to your existing rankings.

Scam #5 - “We will build you a high ranking sales page on our site”

Whilst micro sites and separate sales pages can work for businesses there is one fairly common trick that should be avoided. The company offers to build a one-off page, branded with your logo, optimised for your keywords, and hosted on their business directory site. This sounds good as there are no hosting or web development fees for you, but what it lacks is control. The page is a part of their site, not yours, so your monthly fee is paying them to work on improving the ranking of a website that doesn’t belong to you.

If you ever decide that you no longer want the page then you are left with nothing, and they are left with a valuable asset that they can easily sell to one of your competitors. If you decide that coming up high on the search engines is a goal for your business then it is probably wiser to work on improving your site rather than someone else’s.

This week Microsoft has decided to do something about click fraud and has filed a lawsuit claiming $750,000 in damages. The defendants are a Canadian family who are alleged to have run a scam which led to a large number of false clicks being placed across the Microsoft Pay Per Click advertising network.

The fraud used automated programs which entered search terms onto the Microsoft search engine (formerly Live Search, now Bing). These programs then clicked on the highest paying ads so that the daily budgets were run down and the adverts would soon stop showing. This allowed the lower paying adverts (used by the fraudsters) to rise up to the top.

Whilst $750,000 is petty cash for a company the size of Microsoft, the software firm hopes that the lawsuit will make a statement and show the price of click fraud, warning off other would-be scammers.

In an interview with the New York Times, Tim Cranton, associate general counsel for Microsoft, said “We have decided to become more active in the commercial fraud area on the enforcement side. The theory is you can change the economics around crime or fraud by making it more expensive.”

The investigation started after Microsoft received several complaints from car insurance advertisers saying that they had seen unusual increases in traffic from their Pay Per Click ads. Keywords such as "auto insurance quote" were being searched far more frequently and the adverts were receiving much higher click through rates.

Microsoft claims that Eric Lam, one of the three people named in the lawsuit, had his own Pay Per Click advertising in place for the insurance keywords, directing traffic through to his site where he would collect a visitors info in order to sell it on to insurance companies. Microsoft believes that Lam made around $250,000 from the scam, while it had to refund $1.5m to advertisers that received the false clicks.

Other search engines that offer Pay Per Click advertising have also noticed problems with click fraud, and have often fought back. In 2004, Google filed a successful suit that won the company $75,000 from a webmaster who was using fake traffic to increase his Adsense earnings.

We manage the pay per click advertising campaigns for a number of businesses and often see a problem with the way they have been set-up – no use of negative keywords.

Using negative match means choosing the keywords you DON’T want your ads to appear for. When running a pay per click campaign, such as Google AdWords, it is vital that you include negative keywords, especially if the keywords you are bidding on are broad or phrase matched.

Negative match will stop the advert being shown if the keyword is featured in the search query. By stopping your adverts from appearing for phrases that are not relevant, not only will you no longer be paying for clicks that you do not want, but as your overall click through rate will be higher, your advert quality score will improve. A higher quality score means you will start rising up the advert rankings without having to pay more for each click.

An example of how negative matching can help is for a business that sells DVDs. A look at the Google keyword tool shows these as the top search results for “DVD” last month:

dvd = 24900000
dvds = 5000000
dvd player = 1830000
dvd players = 1000000
dvd recorder = 823000
dvd drive = 450000
dvd for sale = 368000
dvd sale = 368000
dvd software = 301000

As you can see, a lot of the searches containing the phrase “DVD” are not made by people looking to make a purchase. Having an advert appear for the search “DVD recorder” would not be a good way for a DVD disk retailer to get the most out of their online advertising budget. By placing the keyword “recorder” as a negative, it will prevent the advert for ever appearing for this search term again.

Negative keyword match is put in place simply by placing a minus/dash symbol in front of the keywords. The initial list of negative keywords that would help this shop improve their pay per click advert performance would look like this:

-dvd player
-dvd players
-dvd recorder
-dvd drive
-dvd software

Use the Google keyword tool to find the searches that your adverts appear for and see if there are any you would rather they didn’t. Use negative match to exclude these keywords and you’ll soon start seeing an increase in click through rates and an improved return on investment.

If you want to improve your click through rate (the frequency with which people click on your Google Pay Per Click adverts) then you should consider Dynamic Keyword Insertion, using this syntax: {keyword: }

The idea behind Dynamic Keyword Insertion is simple. When keywords in a search term appear in the heading or body of an AdWords advert they appear in bold. Bold adverts attract more attention so people are more likely to click on them. As are adverts that contain the exact keywords that a person is searching for. Wouldn’t it be great then if every pay per click advert contained the exact keywords being searched for in bold? They can…

Instead of creating hundreds of separate adverts for every synonym and plural of a keyword, try using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Group keywords up and place the syntax in the heading. This makes Google automatically use the searched keywords as the title of your advert, improving the likelihood of the searcher clicking on your advert and visiting your website.

Make sure you only use this for keywords grouped together and ones that share the same landing page on your site. Otherwise you run the risk of sending searchers to pages that aren’t relevant, which they’ll just click away from, wasting your budget.

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion also improves your AdWords Quality Score. As one of the determining factors in calculating Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) of an advert, the use of the Dynamic Keyword Insertion syntax will lead to better positioning of your ads without you increasing your spend on each click.

Advanced Dynamic Keyword Insertion techniques:

You’ll notice a gap in the syntax {keyword: }. This is for you to place a default heading, to be shown should the search term be longer than the 25 character limit. The full syntax should therefore look something like {keyword: Default Keyword Here}

Capitalising the K and the W will make all keywords displayed begin with a capital letter, another factor in high click through rates: {KeyWord: Default Keyword Here}

Try using the syntax within either lines of the advert body copy instead of, or as well as, the heading.

Before deciding to roll it out to the rest of your ads, or deciding to cancel the experiment, remember the golden rule – measure the results.

If you use Google Adwords for pay per click advertising and Google Analytics to keep an eye on your website activity then it's worth having a look at the stats, as you may see some discrepancies in the reports between them. A couple of Liberty clients that buy traffic in this way are paying for, and receiving, clicks as usual but Analytics is listing only a fraction of these visitors as coming from google / cpc.

Evidently quite a few other people are also seeing this, their complaints are as shown here.

Google has pointed out that the error could be down to the recent changes in the way Adwords and Analytics accounts link together. You can check that all is well by following this guide. Doesn't help our clients though as their accounts are linked up perfectly, so all we can do is cross our fingers that it's just a small bug and it gets ironed out soon.

“We guarantee to put your site at the top of Google.” If you own a website then the chances are you’ve heard that line before. There are scores of SEO specialists out there, a lot of which are genuine and can generate considerable results (ourselves included, of course) but there are also those that will promise you the marketing Holy Grail: your website as the Number 1 result on Google. They get you thinking about the increased traffic and massive profits this would bring and how it would turn you into the market leader overnight. It all sounds too good to be true but before you sign up you need to know one thing – NO ONE can guarantee you the first position search result on Google.

The way Google ranks websites, using its secret algorithm, changes on a regular basis. No SEO companies know what will happen with search results from one day to the next.  Any companies making unrealistic promises should be approached with caution as Google itself has stated that you should “beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings” and you can’t heed advice from a more qualified source than that.

Ever since businesses started to realise the profits contained within search traffic, there have been tricksters looking to make money out of them. The scams are often pretty simple and though they are well known to most online marketers, they remain unfamiliar to the greater business community. There are a number of scams that guarantee you front page listings or offer you your money back, and the way they get away with these bold promises include:

- Non competitive search terms. When outsourcing your SEO services make sure that you specify the search terms that you want to be found for. “Used Mercedes” would be hard to compete for but “High mileage used Mercedes in Colchester” would not. They may hold up their end of the bargain by getting you to the top of Google for search terms related to your business, but if no one is using these keywords then you’ve wasted your money.

- Short term results. Quite often these companies can generate great search rankings but only for a little while. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of work to maintain high Google rankings. Once they have you there, they will send you a screenshot as evidence, but you’ll be unlikely to find your site when you try looking for it.

- Dodgy “black hat” techniques. Probably the most concerning scams of all are ones that involve Black Hat tricks, such as gateway pages and link farms, as these can actually damage your website in the long-term. If Google find out that you have used these techniques to manipulate the search results then your site could be penalised and the cost involved in correcting the issue is likely to be huge.
 
One of the other most common scams doesn’t actually involve the natural search results at all. Google Adwords is the Pay Per Click advertising system which allows companies to place adverts above and to the right of the search results. Some devious companies have realised that many people do not understand the distinction between Adwords listings and natural search listings, and are quick to take advantage of this. You will be promised first page rankings on Google but what they won’t tell you is that you are actually paying for this via advertising. Not just any old advertising either but advertising you could easily and cheaply set up on your own. You will often be subject to a high set up fee and an on-going management fee, and after a number of days/weeks/months, the money runs out and so does your traffic. If you are in the market for search engine optimisation then make sure it’s not simply Adwords management wrapped up in a different package.