The following is a paid review: The following was supposed to be a paid review, but ReviewMe dot com didn’t pay out as they were supposed to.

When submitting the review I received the following error:

Please ensure that you have provided the link text in your post EXACTLY as shown: <a href=”http://www.apogee-search.com”>Search Engine Marketing</a>

Which, as you can see, I not only did - but I did it in the very first sentence. After four emails to ReviewMe, none of which were responded to, I suspect I will never be paid. I’m leaving the review up anyway as Apogee went out of their way to respond to my questions, and I still believe they provide a useful service.

Founded in 2001, Apogee Search is one of the largest Search Engine Marketing service firms in the US. If you spend money to buy search terms/ads, Apogee Search can help you spend your money more effectively - by understanding that click-throughs on a website mean nothing unless they lead directly to sales.

After looking around the site for a few minutes, one of the first things that surprised me was how much information they were giving away for free. The Search Downloads & Resources section provides a great list of search tools, whitepapers and even a regularly updated list of conferences and tradeshows from around the world. Of those free resources, the one that stood out to me as the most helpful was the Search Engine Marketing Glossary (I had no idea that a “Link Condom” is a nickname for the nofollow tag).

I used their free search engine marketing analysis tool on my own site to test it out. After filling out a short form I was told that I would be contacted within two business days with the results. And I was - by email and phone (though the phone call might have been because I mentioned that I was reviewing their service). The report I received was a break-down on where my site stood across the major search engines, based on the keywords I provided. Patrick, a helpful Account Executive with Apogee, gave me a call after I received the report and explained how and why I (simplehelp.net) ranked where I did. Based in no small part because of the phone call, I would not hesitate to recommend Apogee to anyone who wants to get into advertising their service or product with Google or Yahoo.