Phillip Bradshaw, inept senior search consultant and "SEO expert", take a bow!

By writing about the inept SEO approaches I often get, I'm dignifying them with more time than they deserve, but I did enjoy this recent one from Phillip Bradshaw, senior search consultant at bFirst, who seems to have form in this area.

"I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, www.currybet.net, during a routine survey of web sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance resulting in an increase in online sales. I hope this information may be of use to you."

Well, since I very seldom sell anything on currybetdotnet (one eBook and some tat signed rarities on eBay aside), the approach was ill-conceived from the start.

"Right now your site has a Google Pagerank score of 6/10, which is probably one of the main reasons why your site isn’t showing up in the first page of the search results."

Now, you see, it depends what they are searching for. If they are looking for me by name, I'm there. And I've always been pretty happy with my modest little blog having managed to accrue a toolbar PageRank of 6/10.

"The final aspect I noticed about your site was page indexing. The more pages your site has indexed with unique keywords, the higher you will rank. Right now, your site has only 2130 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low."

2,130 pages indexed would indeed be low for a site with a huge inventory of stock they were trying to shift through spammy SEO techniques. However, I've published around 2,300 posts on this blog since the first one on Christmas Eve 2002. A Google strike-rate of 2,130 out of 2,300 seems pretty good to me.

But my favourite bit?

"We are in the business of doing three things for your website:
1) Fixing all issues with your website
2) Ranking your site to the top of the search results, and
2) Blowing your online revenue off the charts."

With the attention to detail Phillip just displayed to the numbers in that paragraph, how could I fail to be impressed?