About a week ago now, Wealth Masters International hired out SEO expert Ryan Nelson as Vice President of ‘Internet Strategy’ and launched a new website campaign ‘wealthjournals.com’.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for those unfamiliar with the concept is the optimisation of a web presence to dominate search engine rankings for particular chosen keywords.

SEO is an entire industry unto itself so I won’t go into further detail, suffice to say that in a business sense, SEO generally refers to manipulating the top search results for your business in your favour.

Naturally that’s the intention of WMI in launching WealthJournals but after browsing the site… surely pages of article fluff isn’t the best way to go about promoting your brand?

WealthJournals has been launched with the intention of ‘assist(ing) WMI Consultants with both online and offline credibility‘.

This falls in line with the purpose of SEO but rather then launch an entirely new website wouldn’t it have made better sense to revamp the already existing ‘WMI Today’ website into a more fully fledged article portal?

The bar WMI have set in launching WelathJournals is quite high, with WMI President Karl Bessey stating that WealthJournals ‘is going to change the way people use SEO‘.

A quick browse around the website however reveals that WealthJournals is nothing more than an attempt to rank for Wealth Masters International by producing what I like to call ‘fluff articles’.

Fluff articles, like this one on the ‘development of the internet’ for example, have little relevancy or value and are instead loosely linked to and used to market something else.

This is done via subtle links leading you back to the business opportunity (in this case WMI) or banner advertising.

They’re even using it to try and bait people looking at alternative business opportunities.

One Wealth Journals fluff piece on Herbal Life starts off quite flattering but then claims WMI’s marketing is better before linking to the WMI business opportunity again at the article’s conclusion.

Your standard ‘you came here looking for information on X, but instead I’m going to try and sell you Y’ SEO marketing tactic. Annoying for your readers and questionably effective.

WealthJournals is full of these types of articles and as such comes off feeling like a directory of articles written by faceless corporate shills, or more accurately probably by Ryan Nelson’s ‘personal SEO team‘.

The thing about SEO is that a lot of it has to be organic. Simply creating a website, calling it your ‘branded SEO program‘ and then stuffing it with articles that link back to WMI business opportunities doesn’t make it so.

The reason?

Well try to think why anyone would stumble across the WealthJournals website.

Sure, WMI management would hope that they’d do so in searching for information about WMI but the reality is with such little substance on offer (which is partly due to the lack of a need for an article directory on WMI in the first place), sites like WealthJournals aren’t really relevant to anyone.

Search engine crawl bots and internet indexers on the other hand, maybe. But in a business that deals with human to human interaction all that work might as well be for naught.

The expected outcome of WealthJournals is to instill brand confidence in Wealth Masters International, and as a standalone site it does a pretty poor job.

WealthJournals is the first project to be launched in what WMI are claiming to be ‘the first of several internet projects for the company‘.

Hopefully they’ve put a bit more thought into the rest of their internet strategy projects.