Menu
Login
Web King or Court Jester?
To begin with, this website looks like it was built by an amateur. It looks more like the website of a children's birthday party performer than a web designer. The music is off-putting to say the least. The homepage prominently features "custom websites starting at $99", but on the pricing page it clearly states that the price is $69.50 per hour, and they recommend a minimum of five hours to start. In order to get a $99 website, it would have to be completed in just over an hour. This is obviously impossible. I also noticed that in addition to web design, they offer search engine optimization services. Being a web developer and SEO myself, this caught my attention, so I decided to fill out the free quote form for curiosity's sake.
I received a phone call from the "Web King" himself later that day. He immediately tried to get me to buy a domain name by telling me that the "really good" ones he had found for me could be taken within a couple of hours if I didn't purchase them right away. That's a pretty sneaky trick if you ask me. It's a good thing I know better.
I asked him if he had W3C validation, and of course he said yes. That was a lie. His code actually has 93 errors and 224 warnings. If you are a web designer, your code must validate. Period! Similarly, if you are an SEO Specialist, you should know how to construct META tags and where to put them. The META tags for this site are invisible to search engine robots because they were placed between the closing head tag and the opening body tag of the document. Nothing should ever be placed between these tags. If you claim to be an SEO Specialist, your site should also be optimized for search-engine-friendliness. Would you hire a contractor whose house was made of straw?
Next, I began asking SEO related questions. The first red flag came up when he told me he uses automated software that submits your site to over 600, 000 search engines. He also charges $25 a month for this software to continue submitting your site. (There are only a few major search engines most people use, and they are free to submit to, so it is a complete waste of money to purchase this "service".) In general, this is a very bad practice anyway, as it can result in search engine spam, which can get a site banned from indexing. Honestly, submitting to search engines is nearly irrelevant now because of the way robots crawl websites. They are usually very good at indexing sites even if they have not been submitted.
Next, I asked him if he could explain SEO to me. He told me there are three elements of SEO - keywords, META tags, and "keyword enhancement pages". This is incorrect. There are many on page and off page elements of SEO. On page elements include the optimization of META tags, alt tags, anchor tags, and anchor text. Some off page elements include link building, directory submissions, social media linking and optimization, etc. He also offers pay-per-click services, which is generally frowned upon. He included Google Adwords as a part of his SEO services, which is more of a marketing aspect, and it is completely unnecessary anyway. You can go directly to Google for this, so why would you pay him to do it for you when you also have to pay for the Adwords themselves? The one that really got me, though, was that I would have to "bid" on my keywords, or pay money to be able to use them in my tags. Also not true.
I asked him what the difference between organic SEO and "black hat" SEO was. He told me that what he does is organic, which couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, his hat looks pretty black from here. His definition of organic SEO was that it is "what happens after pay-per-click works and you don't need it anymore, but this process can take up to two to three years to work”. This is just, plain ridiculous. Is he actually saying it takes him two to three years to get a site to rank in search engines?
His explanation of "black hat" SEO was just as ridiculous. He said it is the “use of high ranking, irrelevant keywords, such as the names of celebrities, in the keywords META tag in order to rank higher”. This doesn't even make sense. There are a number of underhanded, sneaky, and unethical tactics employed by "black hat" SEO con-artists, and the "Web King" uses many of them.
Finally, he claims to be #1 on Google, but I couldn't find any evidence of that. I performed searches for his top five keywords (according to his META tags), and the site is not listed on the first five results pages for any of its main keywords. He told me he could get my site ranked somewhere between #1 and #3 on Google’s first results page depending on how much money I was willing to spend. This was the last in a long line of red flags, as it is quite possible to get a site to rank on Google’s first results page without using any paid services.
Bottom line, the "Web King" is a crook and a joke. Do not purchase any web services through this company unless you like wasting money and don't mind having a website that looks as if a child with no knowledge of HTML designed it. If you purchase SEO services through this company, don't be surprised when your site gets banned by Google and other major search engines.
My advice is to seek a reputable web developer &/or SEO, and do your homework to ensure their credibility. There are many free resources on the internet that will analyze code validity and both on and off page SEO elements. Your business is your livelihood. Don’t trust it to anyone who cannot even pass a few basic code and SEO validation tests!
