Evaluating SEO services

At 2Geckos we manage 74 area websites and are always looking for better ways to promote our clients websites, shopping carts, blogs, RSS feeds, and other web-based media.

 

My latest test was with Attracta www.attracta.com

They have an attractive / easy to navigate website, they offer several free services and moderately priced paid SEO and Marketing Tools with support for multiple websites.  The next day I was contacted by Glenn Titolo, with a low pressure sales pitch and flowed up with more information and a 1yr free premium service.   I then listed 30 of my managed websites to evaluate the effectiveness of their services.

 

We use Google Analytics to track visitor statistics, this allows us to do a traffic comparisons with previous months & years and referrers (incoming links from other websites).

 

We began Oct 6th as of today there have been only 4 hits from their web crawler and no change in traffic. Attracta’s Link Building service states that there should be 3 backlinks to my website.

 

They have a submission tool that submits sitemaps to the major search engines.

·         Yahoo has not accepted sitemaps or website submissions for more than a year. Their webmaster tool tells you that they use the Bing search engine.

·         Ask.com no longer accepts sitemaps, http://submissions.ask.com is no longer available.  your website will only be scanned if you include a link on your website.

 

I’ve contacted Attracta about my concerns but they have not responded.

 

I’m disappointed but would like to believe that they are improving their services and will keep a few websites listed on their service to monitor their SEO tools for a few months.

 

I will continue to look for cost effective services that can deliver on their promises and keep learning about SEO.  Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science, businesses are always trying to game the system so Google and other search engines have to become more and more sophisticated to detect them.