Why do I insist reciprocallinksarenotdead?
This linked site is ranked in the 90's for "reno restaurant" (general search, not a local search). Probably not a authoritative site on it's topic and definately does not link to us.
The following text is simply filler. My SEO/Marketing firm makes it a point to let our clients know that we set benchmarks for achievement throughout the fist year of their campaign. Currently 70% of our clients are performing better than expected and over 80% are performing at or above expectations. Yes, that means 20% are currently performing below expected levels, but this isn’t necessarily a failure rate. In reality it reflects the percentage of clients that are not performing as strongly as we hoped, but many of them have already shown significant improvement in targeted traffic and ROI.
Here is a link to reciprocallinksarenotdead. But this is something most SEOs won’t tell you, especially those that make pie in the sky claims. They know that they have oversold their service and largely underperformed in results. When our clients call asking about their ranking performance, we give them an honest assessment, which includes letting them know if we feel they should be performing better. We also let them know that their site is being aggressively analyzed, tweaked and linked and we expect to bring them up to perform at or above benchmark levels soon. We are rarely wrong.
We go by the Scottie Principle, based on Scottie of the original Star Trek series, which is all about underselling your capabilities and then overachieving in results. While the client might be expecting certain results in top rankings, you can overachieve by having actually helped them increase their sales and return on investment. If you can do that, top search engine rankings don’t matter as much because the client is busy handling the new sales that they are getting as a result of the optimization and marketing efforts.
I’ll need to go back and revamp my presentation hard copy. It currently contains the full text of the book with key things highlighted to draw my attention to them. This didn’t work because I would often not now the context of the highlight without reading the whole paragraph. I’ll go back and simply boil everything down to bullet points.
I also have to admit that I didn’t read through the material before each class and that is something I should have done… I should have known better. But in all, I received above average reviews from the students.
The VP of a top SEO firm called me about a month ago to tell me that she had done a webposition on our site and was amazed at how much better the site was doing on the search engines. When I told her that indeed it had improved greatly since I went with Pole Position Marketing she said "Oh, you're not with us anymore? Well congratulations on the site improvement." (Click!) They use to use me as a reference and I have been recommending your company 
to the people that have called.
