Scam artists, SEO firms and over budgeted IT projects.

How can it be, that SEO companies are presenting a project to archive significant search engine improvements as 9 month project involving several full time specialists?

I haven’t had any problems to get my articles indexed and top listed within a days.

Being in Brighton I rewrote one small company 26 page website to be more search engine friendly and it was in no 1 position after a week with very competitive keywords.

As I charged £8 ph. from him, he complained that I’m too expensive as others are offering this service for $99.

When the project needs traffic/link building, analytics and monitoring it could be several months part time work to have enough targeted traffic but if your eCommerce project won’t be successful within two months, it’s either non viable or you have implemented something wrong in your strategy and you should reconsider your business model.

But presenting it either 9 month project or $99 service are both scams.

I also don’t understand how IT projects can take 9-18 months to accomplish involving team of programmers, team of testers, project managers, business analysts, etc.

So the programmers job is to produce bugs, testers job is to find those bugs and project managers will argue is that a bug or new feature not yet asked by customer.

This can only be justified by employing incompetent programmers or choosing wrong tools and technology platforms for the project.

After being awarded finalist in the “World Championship of Programming” in 1995 where our challenge was to produce working software product within 48h, I later developed my programming skills to be able to modify my applications for any prospective customer specifications in airports and hotels before presenting it to the customer.

To my surprise, customers in UK and US didn’t accept my approach and expected the project to take 6-9 months team of programmers’ effort to complete.

Asian market (Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia) was somehow different and more open minded. With partners there we usually discussed how to fit my products to local market requirements and what the price we could ask.

To prove, that my programming skills are still available, I started to write a “mobile blogging and publishing system”XML, XSLT, CSS and Perl. I did it after receiving Invest NI grant for £400 to establish myself as “Web Designer” in Northern Ireland within two weeks and hoped to get new customers this way.

To my surprise, I have been again asked stupid questions “How many programmers and how long have worked for the project?”

Living in Brighton (2004-2006) I heard the term “British way to do business”. For me the business has always been developing something most effective way and finding global niche for the creation.
Is “British way to do business” robbing as much as possible to justify their existence?