SEO Included ‘Free’ With Your Hosting Account!

Many hosting services now include all sorts of ‘free’ or very low cost add-on services, such as mail, ‘web-site builders’, ‘SEO’ or ‘visibility improvements!’. Despite the ever-present risk of appearing self-serving most of these do not provide good value, especially the ‘SEO services.’

As I’ve explained before, there are two basic flavours of organic search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM): on-page and off-page. And I’ve tried and tried to get clients to understand that on-page SEO/SEM is only about 20% of the battle. It’s important, but it is definitely not going to make a huge difference, especially for start-ups.

The kinds of low-cost or free SEO services that hosting companies offer are strictly on-page. They offer to do some automated things which probably can’t hurt, but can’t really help either. A typical operation is to scan your pages for the best keywords and place them in the header of each page. Two problems with that…

1. Small problem: most search engines no longer care much about anything in the header of each page. All that stuff you may have heard about ‘tags’ is about ten years out of date. It’s like so many medical myths that carry on long after they’ve been proven ineffective.
2. Bigger problem: these automated systems can’t improve the actual content of each page. Modern search engines (Google, Bing) read the contents of each page and determine for themselves what ‘keywords’ matter. If your content isn’t well-written (ie. if it doesn’t conform to best practices for SEO writing) your page will not rank well. And for the foreseeable future there is just no substitute for a human being who knows how to write well so no automation will help you at all.

OK, so we’ve shown that the 20% of SEO machines theoretically could do doesn’t do much. And we’ve stated that the other 80% isn’t part of any low-cost service. Now why is that? Because again, it requires human beings to do. It requires someone who is routinely monitoring your site and then actively getting out into the world to get you noticed. And that person needs to keep at it with new ideas, day in and day out over a period of months in order to build traffic. As I’ve said before, it’s not magic, it’s more like working out. Repetition, repetition, repetition. It’s not a stretch to compare a $2.99/mo ‘SEO program’ as being like one of those late night ‘miracle exercise machines’ that promise ‘great results with no effort.’ People continue to buy them even though common sense will tell you they can’t possibly work. SEO is exactly the same.

Choosing a hosting company based on some free or low-cost service like ‘SEO visibility!’ is probably not wise. At the end of the day, hosting companies are a lot like banks and storage companies. At bottom, they need to do a few very simple, unglamorous things very well and none of them are huge money-makers. So it is in their best interest to sell as many add-on services as possible. Though apparently convenient, the actual value of these services is often not very high.

In short, there is no free lunch. SEO/SEM services do work, but you get what you pay for. These services need to be done by someone who does it for a living. They cannot be automated because the tasks that make a difference require good writing skills and constant, creative work to get your message out there.