Joe pointed my attention to a recent article posted on Pandia titled, “On outsourcing search engine optimization to India“. I’m including the link so you can check it out at your leisure. This “article”, and I use that term loosely, has more holes in it than a pound of Lorraine Swiss. As a working SEO, I can tell you firsthand that almost all Indian SEO is remarkably cutting edge – for the calendar year 1995.

Since we began offering paid site evaluations last year, several Indian companies have asked us to generalize the issues with their respective sites. I can’t count the number of times those evaluations have led to me write something along the lines of, “The fact that you have no demonstrated SEO knowledge whatsoever yet already offer SEO services on your website is, at best, unethical.”

Apparently, being sponsored by an Indian company hasn’t helped Pandia’s writing staff. The title isn’t capitalized properly and the first paragraph has a grammatical error. More importantly, however, the logic behind some of the quotes the article features is disastrously flawed. This little gem in particular caught my eye: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìOur Chief Marketing Officer, Mr Sameer Sama, is based in New York. Hence its not difficult for him to communicate with ?¢‚ǨÀúfellow?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ Americans.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

I’ve vacationed in almost every country in Western Europe, traveled the Pacific Rim countless times and own a business in China. Not once did “being geographically available” help me communicate one bit. By that logic, I should be able to fly to Mozambique and manage Swahili with relative ease.

On the positive side, there is one part of the article that makes perfect sense, though perhaps not in the way the author intended.

“The interaction between a search engine marketing company and a client is in many ways a mutual learning process. The clients learn about SEO through interacting with the search engine marketing experts, and will therefore (hopefully) be able to avoid costly copy-writing and web site design mistakes in the future.”

I concur wholeheartedly. After all, we have a few current clients who previously outsourced to India and, as a result, understand all too well the importance of “costly copy-writing and web site design mistakes”.

The bottom line is, most homegrown SEO is more expensive than overseas SEO, and rightfully so. I can’t say that all U.S. based SEO firms are legitimate, but it’s not hard to find one that is. If you want paraphrased, stolen content; spammy, outdated linkbuilding methods or cookie cutter solutions to your site’s unique problems, you’re probably better off with an SEO firm from India. If, however, your business is your livelihood and you want to purchase services commensurate with the level of quality you offer your own customers, why take chances?

Outsourcing is a necessary part of business for many industries, but I would no more outsource the optimization of an English language based website to India than I would rely on my own severely lacking Mandarin skills to do business in Shanghai. If you want the best results for your budget, allocate it to a reputable firm with a proven track record.

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