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  • Misleading SEO Services

    Posted by admin on Tue, 01/22/2008 – 01:44

    I’m sure you’re getting tired of me repeat myself when I say that “SEO is confusing” and “it’s a new industry.” I repeat these things because, like many other lucrative businesses, there are a lot of misleading information and services out there. Some SEOs make a business out of providing very poor service, and you should keep an eye out. When looking for a service provider, you will hear a lot of claims. Here are just a few signs that something is wrong.

    We Rank Your Site, But Can’t Tell You How
    SEOs have no problem at all telling you what sorts of methods will be used to optimize and promote your website. Much like a doctor will explain an upcoming surgery, or a real estate agent will walk you through a house. If someone doesn’t want to tell you, then they don’t want you to know about something fishy. SEOs are hired and paid because of their experience and successes, not because it’s difficult. With enough searching, you can find most, if not all of the methods a quality SEO will use.

    All It Takes Is Putting You Search Terms On Your Site…A Lot
    Often times I hear of some company or person advising that, if they want to rank for a certain word or term, then a site owner only needs add that word or term repeatedly throughout the site. The more the merrier. Well, the search engines have gotten pretty good at checking for that sort of tactic. Once they see that, you are likely to not only not rank, but put your sight in risk of being banned from the search engine all together (that’s a bad thing).

    Mass Submissions
    Some SEO companies market their submissions as a service to help your site. Some claim to submit to 100’s or even 1000’s of search engines. I can only count about 15 without looking them up. Where are these 1000’s of search engines? Now, to be fair, a long time ago, this may have meant something, but even then there were only a few search engines. It used to be common practice to submit your site to a search engine so it could find it. However, this is not the case anymore. Let me put it into perspective for you. I’ve been involved in SEO for 4 years as of this writing, and I’ve submitted no more than 10 websites to a search engine. They just don’t need you to do that any more. The search engine spiders are crawling so much these days, I’ve actually purchased a domain name, and had it indexed before I could put a site up (it took about 14 hours).

    $89.95 A Month!
    SEO takes time. It can be a few months before you even see a number of visits worth writing home about. It also takes a lot of work and research to learn and effectively provide SEO services. Small prices with big promises usually don’t end in anywhere but disappointment. I can put this one into a personal perspective for you as well. Take a look at my Freelance SEO page. See where my prices start? Yeah, seems high. And I’m what you would consider conservative with my prices. Some consultants won’t even answer the phone for less than $10,000. To be fair on that though, I only deal with small businesses. I want you to remember 2 things. 1. The bigger the project, the higher the price. 2) My brother is a very successful person. When I was younger, he would bestow upon me tidbits of wisdom. He had a saying that still rings in my ears: “Fast. Cheap. Quality. You can have any 2, but not all 3.”

    I know Someone At (Insert Search Engine Here)
    This isn’t as common as it used to be, but there are times when someone will throw out the name of a search engine employee to persuade you that they can get you ranked from the inside.

    Put White Text On A White Background
    Sometimes, a firm will come right out and tell you they are going to “trick the search engines.” This one’s a little old, and with new ways of designing websites, this method turned into a few other ways of hiding text. The idea is much like the one above, in that you would use a lot of the words on your site that you want to target for rankings, only this time, you would hide them from the eyes of humans, and only let the search engines see them. Again, the search engines know very well the old way, and catch up to new ways rather quickly.

    Now this last one borderlines on “black hat” SEO, but even those guys have moved past the basics. For more on that, Check out ‘Bad SEO, Or Black Hat?’ Don’t be scared, they aren’t as bad as they sound.

  • Tools, Reviews, and Reference

    Analytics/Reporting

    Site Analysis

    • Keyword Density – Checks the occurance and density of terms for a page
    • Spider Viewer – Gives a result of what a search engine might see when crawling a given page
    • Xenu Broken Link Checker – It umm…checks for broken links
    • Rank Checker – Checks rank from DigitalPoint
    • Link Diagnosis – A link analysis tool that examines and provides information on links pointing to your site, the anchor text, PageRank and external and internal links.

    Keyword Research Tools

    • SEO Book Keyword Research – Aaron Wall’s own free keyword research tool

    Information Generators

    Reviews

    Books and Print

    • SEO: An Hour A Day – by Gradiva Couzin and Jennifer Grappone

    Services

    • TNX Review Part 1 – My initial review of the TNX text link purchasing and selling site.
    • SEOMeter – Neat little tool to keep track of your Google crawl cycle

    Reference

    • Learning The SEO Factor – This will be the ever-growing online book for those interested in learning SEO. In which, we will cover what are considered the “basics” of SEO, up to some moderately detailed information. Because SEO is ever-changing, so will this book be.
    • The Designer’s Guide To SEO – A quick reference guide to help those not engulfed in SEO as I am. Web designers, developers, casual site owner. Whatever your title, you will find the guide usefull.
    • Directory of Directories – (and social sites) Here, I will do my best to compile a list of decent directories. Though your link-building campaign should not revolve around the practice of directory submissions, there are a few worthy of your time.

  • SEO and Internet Marketing

    Sphinn – http://sphinn.com/

    Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.

  • SEO Factor | Professional SEO, Josh Garner

    Posted by admin on Thu, 11/15/2007 – 14:48 in

    Google Blogscoped reported today that, according to Google Trends:

    “Apparently, people search for the word “Google” on Google more than they do for “music”, “movies”, “flowers”, even “sex”. And it’s happened in the last couple months.”

    Hmmm…in the last couple of months.

    Posted by admin on Tue, 11/13/2007 – 20:31 in

    Text-Links-Ads has a tool in which you can input a URL, and you will be given an approximate worth of a link purchased. For example, you put in http://www.seo-factor.com and it will tell you that placing TLA on my site isn’t worth the amount of time it would take to implement the code. However, there are a few that return funny results, due to the site in question’s status. For example:

    Posted by admin on Mon, 11/12/2007 – 17:09 in

    Posted by admin on Mon, 11/12/2007 – 17:06 in

    With the recent uproar over Google’s request that people report paid text link purchasers, and the penalties that seem to be rolling over a large number of sites that buy and sell links, there’s a bit of fear out there for the site owners that take part in this method. I wanted to give a few tips on purchasing links, and a few things to keep in mind while considering to do so.

  • Affordable SEO Services

    Why SEO?

    Professional SEO services should be thought of as the central nervous system to your website and online marketing campaign. Whether your online presence is a business venture or means to convey information, the point of constructing it and putting your efforts into making it everything it should be is to attract and eventually win over visitors. Without SEO services, you’re site will be left in an unvisited void, the great black hole of the World Wide Web.

    Mission

    To provide an affordable SEO service to businesses with long term goals, leveraging the Internet to help them achieve those goals

    As an independent SEO, I provide affordable SEO services to the business owner to help them get their website to reach its potential.

    SEO Services:

    My small business SEO services come down to 3 major flavors:

    • Priced from $1,500 – This service allows for a strong optimization and promotion of your business’ website on a local (usually state-specific) level.

    • Priced from $5,000 – This will provide your business’ website with a nationwide optimization and promotion strategy.

    • If the SEO you need for your site is of a different sort, or need a consultant to guide your online endeavor, I’ll be happy to discuss options in that area as well.

    For more information and requests on service, please feel free to contact me. You may also get more information on the steps involved by looking over the SEO Service Details.

  • SEOmeter – Neat Little SEO Tool

    As a freelance SEO, I’m always on the lookout for tools to help automate a process. Recently added to my arsenal is this handy dandy free SEO tool by SEOmeter.com. Let’s take a look at what it is.

    SEO Meter allows you to add your site to their list, and keep track of Google’s crawl rate. For those new to the game, Google not only crawls and indexes your site, but keeps a record of it’s last crawl, and how your site looked at that time. This version, I feel, plays a large part in your site’s position for a particular term. Google also implemented this as a means for a surfer to take a look at this older version because a page has changed, or needs to load the page faster (Google’s servers are faster than most, and if you have a slow connection, the cache version of a page will likely load much faster for you).

    You can see an example of how to get to the cached version here:

    And once you go to that cached version, you will get the page you requested, with the addition of an information banner at the top:

    On this banner, Google tells us when the cached version was taken, and provides us with a link to the current version.

    For The SEO
    SEO Meter already provides a pretty good explanation of what the crawl cycle is and why we would want to know this information here, but simply put, the more often Google crawls your site, the more authority it can be assumed to have. It’s also an indirect reflection of links pointing to your site (the more quality links to your site, the higher the chance of a crawl).

    Where Does SEO Meter Come In?
    I mentioned that I love automation of process. All of this information about a site can be obtained by doing a search or looking into Google Webmater tools, but wouldn’t be easier to just set it and forget it? In this case I say yes.

    Once you add your site to SEOmeter.com’s list, they keep a running record of your site’s crawl cycle for 3 months. This way, you can see any changes and keep up with your site’s progress, or more importantly, catch trouble spots early. So, let’s take a look at SEO Meter’s stats and such.

    We can see the diagram for Cnn.com which shows a steady flow of crawling:

    With the diagram, you can quickly catch any spikes. This is pretty and all, but I like to see numbers:

    Let me try to explain these numbers. The crawl cycle is determined by the last crawl, a 1-month period, and a 3-month period. think “days” with these numbers. So in this example we can see that Cnn.com was crawled just over one day ago, it’s 1-month average is almost 2 times per day, and about the same for a 3-month period.

    The use of this tool is pretty much self explanatory at this point. I don’t really need to say anymore, but I’m a bored blogger right now…so I will.

    SEO Meter allows for the free submission of the top-level domain, but charges $20 for internal URLs. If you run a blog, news site, or very large site, then the fee will probably become worth it. Expecially if they can come up with an API to integrate into your own application to keep trac of all your URLs in one spot. But I have to tell you, free is something you just can’t buy. At the very least submit your URL for bragging rights. They let you generate a snippet to place on your site showing your CC numbers. (Hint: you can even have fun with fellow bloggers by using cnn.com’s code and just put it on your site).

    All in all. Pretty gosh darn neat if you ask me.

    With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.

  • A Copywriting Stiff Breaks His Fastidious Chains

    Today’s post is from a guest, Brenton Crozier. He is a freelance copywriter with whom I work closely on many projects. I asked him to give me something to help promote his new website, and he was all too happy to oblige. Thanks, Brenton!

    A Copywriting Stiff Breaks His Fastidious Chains

    Let the funny free you friend! Have you noticed the transformation in other marketing mediums, mainly television? At one time bottles of cola taught the world to sing and a brash old lady wondered where her beef was. Your favorite cartoon characters were employed to pitch fast food and a catchy song often burned itself into your psyche regardless of what the product was.

    There have always been funny commercials, but humor has become the prevailing modality by which successful advertising operates. One of the key differences from past marketing strategies is the quirkiness or slight oddness that advertisers are willing to utilize. As always, there are exceptions, but for the most part, comedy is king. There are a couple of reasons for this and it is possible to bring some of this clowning home to your copy without sacrificing professionalism or your client’s trust.

    Humor Is Endearing
    Humor has a way of digging itself into our psyche and claiming a piece of our cognitive real estate as home like no other form of entertainment or communication. Think about the movies that you’re willing to watch over and over. Normally, they are comedies. It’s the same with television shows that you don’t mind catching a repeat of.

    Creating sound content that conveys your client’s message is still your chief responsibility. Don’t ever abandon your obligation of creating well-written, SEO-friendly and effective copy that delivers, but you can balance these things with subtle injections of humor.

    Although there are myriad products with brilliant campaigns, Vitaminwater has become a force in their industry. In addition to their good product, they base their marketing message in humor. For example, on their “essential” orange-orange (c + calcium) drink, you will find:

    Ah, orange juice commercials. Funny stuff. Mom cheerily prepares some huge breakfast while the rest of her family sleeps. Sure, this could happen. But every morning? Please. Maybe if mom were heavily medicated, in which case, we wouldn’t condone operating a stove or any electrical appliance.

    For those of us who don’t live in an orange juice commercial, there’s still a way to get your morning nutrition. This product has calcium and lots of vitamin c, so you can get your day started right, minus the whole stepford mom thing.

    Vitamins + water = all you need. For best results, stick it in the fridge. The inside is natural. The outside is plastic.

    The Effects of Wit
    Humor does so many great things. First, it humanizes a product. People don’t feel as much like a captivated, consuming lemming when advertising is void of buzzwords and sales pitches. Although a great product that delivers is the ultimate selling point, humanizing your content or copy with humor creates a connection that transcends the typical seller and consumer relationship.

    Tickling someone’s funny bone is a magnificent way to create a buzz. Typically, when you read a label, pamphlet or even website, you’re not hurrying to share it with your friends and co-workers. However, if you read something funny, your inclination is to do just that—share it!

    A marketing campaign that successfully infuses humor creates fans. Fans will actually look to see what you’re going to do next and will spread the word about your product or services.

    Lastly, utilizing your sense of humor gets you excited about your work and translates into enthusiasm. Enthusiasm often results in embracing your project with the dynamism that separates it from the rest. So what if you’re simply not funny? Stick to writing copy for lawyers. Badoom ching!

    With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.

  • First Impressions Count

    Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you own a business, or are advertising it all the time; even when you’re not at work. Especially in an industry that requires so much customer oriented attitude, you should be very mindful of the perception you are putting forth.

    I’m going to tell a tale of 2 companies. Both are marketing themselves in a very usual manner, using their vehicles to promote their company, providing constant exposure of their name or brand while in transit. This is a very common display, but carries with it another level of attention. In the span of 24 hours, both of the drivers in these cases made a mistake though.

    Case 1 – The Real Estate Agent
    On the way home last night, I found myself driving next to an SUV owned by an independent real estate agent. The truck was nice, clean, and the vinyl advertising looked professionally done. But the, I look at the license plate. It read “2WILD4U.” I thought, “gee, if I were buying a house, I wouldn’t want someone “wild” to be in control.” This is a very daunting process to a lot of people, and most would want someone to help them along in a professional manner. I wouldn’t want a “wild” person handling the such a serious task.

    Case 2 – The Car Dealer
    On my way to work this morning, I was cutoff by a nice Mercedes. Now, I’m a somewhat passive person, and getting cutoff during the drive in the morning is really nothing new. I’m sure I’ve cut someone off in my driving history, and pointing fingers now would be a little hypocritical. The problem here was the advertisement on this vehicle. It was for a very known and major Mercedes dealership. Normally I would just write it off as one of the salesmen or a rental, but again, the plate came into play. It was a vanity plate with the name of one of the major holders of this company. Now this is a bit more of a serious matter, as this family is well known. Their commercials play constantly on almost every radio station. And again, I found myself questioning if I would buy a car from someone so inconsiderate.

    In the scheme of things, both of these cases aren’t what one would consider a big deal. However, I imagine that if both of these people were to realize that they were indeed advertising, they would likely reconsider their license plate and driving habits respectively.

    So remember, when your name is on something, especially when you aren’t directly involved in its delivery, consider all aspects of any impressions that may be given off. You don’t want to lose a client before you get the chance to attain them.

    With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.

  • Learning The SEO Factor

    During the whole Shoemoney circus, it became clear to me (with the help of Halfdeck) that we SEOs, especially us bloggers, should concentrate on more important things that feeding into the bait tactics of nay-sayers.

    For eample, we should be looking for ways to come up with better education for up and coming SEOs, new business owners, and hopefully one day some sort of standardization by way of SEO certifications.

    To start my commitment to this idea, I decided to create an SEO eBook. It’s nothing fancy, and if you have a decent understanding of what SEO is and some of the basics, most of this eBook won’t be of use to you (there will be more later). This is really meant for the brand new SEO or business owner looking into the application.

    More importanlty, I don’t want to be the only one writing this thing. I would really appreciate any input by other SEOs, with credit given of course.

    With that, I would like to thank Halfdeck and XMCP for their input. So, check it out, and let me know what you think.

    With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.