You may already have raised your eyebrows, but this is true! Brand name bulk-seller Wal-mart and Sam's Club got into SEO and SEM services recently. Journalists are writing about this all over the web.

This new venture made many well-established SEO, SEM professionals really angry. Aaron Wall links to it and threatens to fight back by selling Chinese-made US flags for three cents each. Some people are concerned about the return policy.

Lot of people find it ridiculous. Why? SEO and SEM is a highly specialized job requiring a good amount of time to be spent with each client to understand their business. Once they have the idea of the business next comes keyword research, planning ad campaigns, doing all the on-page optimization all over the site, building backlinks for off-page optimization and so on.

A. Search Engine Optimization

Costs $25 per month. What you get are: 

• Offers a tool to create your profile, which is distributed to major search engines and online Yellow Page directories like YPGuides.
• Hand submission of your web site URL to the major search engines and directories.
  

B. Pay for Performance

Although they are saying its Pay-For-Performance on their site, its actually Pay-Per-Click service. Packages start at $50 per month. What you get are:

•  They set up a campaign for you in Google and/or Yahoo, creates your ad, and will send a targeted number of qualified consumers to your web site each month.

It started long ago

Apparently Walmart, Sam's Club trying to put their foot on this industry about two years ago when they started offering Website Building Services to businesses. So its basically an expansion to their existing services. 

Its good for SEO & SEM Professionals at the end

Wal-mart and Sam's club got huge small business client base. And most of those small business owners have none or very little idea of SEO and SEM.

From what I see Wal-mart & Sam's Club is offering with a service, will pretty much fail to do much good to their clients. Why? As I mentioned earlier successful SEO and SEM requires much more research and time they are offering. As a result of buying these services small business owners will be more aware of the SEO and SEM services. So Wal-mart and Sam's Club is doing the awareness job basically. And eventually it will open more business to mainstream SEO and SEM professionals.