One of my biggest pet peeves has to be how some self-proclaimed SEO experts like to take advantage of your “lack of knowledge” when it comes to the online marketing game… they PREY on your naivety and misrepresent information which then misdirects you to their… well, big shiny red BUY BUTTON.
All because you bought their B.S.
Perhaps the most common one I see over and over again amongst countless number of “SEO hoodlums” (which pop up by the droves every single minute) has to do with how they brag about how they “beat out so many competitors” on the search engines.
Here’s an example:
This is of course a screenshot of a Google search result and what I searched for was “raymond fong”. Now, what a SEO quack would try and convince you is the following…
“Look, I am so awesome at SEO, my website ranking #1 for ‘raymond fong’ means I beat out 2.81 MILLION competitors! THIS PROVES I AM #1 AT SEO!” And then that quack would proceed to convince you to give you globs of money with the false hope of getting you ANY ROI…
Now, what I want you to note here is that the term, “raymond fong” is typed into the Google search box withOUT any quotes (“).
Let me show you what happens when it IS typed with quotes:
Notice the HUGE drop in “competition” from 2,810,000 to 38,700? See, the quotes around your search terms gives you a much more “realistic” measure of how hard it was to SEO for that term (this is just one of MANY variables to take into consideration). This is a more representation of the “competition” the actual marketer may have “beat out”.
Having said that, it is important to note that the true measure of how competitive that market and term has to do with the actual folks who are ACTIVELY SEOing for that same term as well.
So What Do the Quotes Do?
In a nutshell, the quotes FORCE Google to show only websites that have that phrase as it is exactly typed and in that order. So it ONLY shows pages that show that exact phrase, “raymond fong”.
WithOUT the quotes show results that have both words on the website regardless if they are in used as a phrase exactly as typed (“raymond fong”) and regardless if the terms are on the same page. This means if a website has the term, “raymond” on page 1 but the term “fong” is only found on page 17… that website still qualifies.
Hope this was enlightening… now please be careful of quacks 
