Subscribe Feed (RSS)How to Quickly Screen an SEO Company in Less than a Minute
September 21st, 2008 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Advertising, SEO, Search Engine Optimization.What does a SEO Company Do?
I know, it sounds like a simple question, but someone who doesn’t know what an SEO professional does is likely to get screwed by some con man looking to rip him off. Most people will do a few minutes of research and find out that people who help others with SEO exist to help others climb in the search results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.
Last year, I wrote an article about how to work with SEO consulting companies, but after the events of today, I wanted to riff a bit more.
Last night I was contacted by the representative of an SEO company who was looking to help another company with their site’s optimization. He wanted to advertise on one of my sites and I quoted him the price. In response, he told me that the budget was tight and offered me a price that was 11% of our rate. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and got the following response:
If you really don’t want to accept $200 for the couple of minutes of work it takes to put up a[n advertisement], then that’s your decision.
Well no, I don’t want to take $200 for an ad position that is worth $1800. Does he expect to buy an $100,000 Porsche for $11k? It was simply a ridiculous request, and as someone who works consulting people on website optimization, he knows full well the value of advertising; it is not about the time it takes to place the ad, but about the value of the ad itself. The NY times could place a full-page ad on page 2 that I design, which would take 5 minutes of their time, but that position would probably be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. People simply AMAZE me!
What to Look for in an SEO Company?
Start by looking at their website. This is usually the fastest way to write off an SEO company. After getting an email from the guy, I decided to swing by his website to check it out. He was smart enough to never mention the URL of the company that he was trying to advertise, because I would have shared the following with them.
His website consisted of 3 pages: Home, Services, and Contact Us
The “Contact us” page didn’t work. The other pages were missing meta tags for keywords and description. By spending less than a minute on the website, I would have told anyone interested in hiring them for SEO to RUN! If the company you’re looking to hire isn’t fully search engine optimized themseves, why would they know how to help you any better? There is of course, more to SEO than simply adding META tags, however, on almost every occasion, when I find that there is some SEO that is doing a poor job, it turns out that they skip their own tags. It is a good screen to use to cut out the crap.
How do you Check Someone’s META Tags?
This is very simple, even if you know NOTHING about making websites or HTML. Just go to the menu bar of your browser and enter the VIEW dropdown — you’ll find either “Source” or “View Source”. When the source page opens up, you’re going to want to look for the HEAD tag, which is simply the word Head surrounded by brackets. Somewhere after the head tag and before the BODY tag, you’re looking for tags that start with META NAME.
Here’s an example of what the Meta Tags look like:
<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”SEO, META TAGS, search engine optimization”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”This is a description of the page using keywords”>
If you don’t see anything resembling the code above on their pages, then you know it is time to run.
Summary:
Had the customer of the company that contacted me, done the above before hiring the firm, they would have seen that they were not cut out to consult on SEO. If you don’t practice what you’re slated to preach, then you shouldn’t be charging folks for your services. Additionally, you don’t want to insult potential partners by offering them 11% of their going rate, because that might lead to a blog post about your nonsense . . . luckily for them I’m a nice guy and never mentioned them by name.
Tags: Keywords, meta tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, website optimization
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Nice article, and very true!
Great post Josh.
It is amazing how people who will contact you about advertising will then berate you for charging too much. It is not like you cold called him!
Hey Tom! Thanks for the comment. I’d love to find out what they are charging their customers for their top quality service. I’ll bet it is not cheap!
SEO companies all seem to be a little bit “smoke and mirrors” to me, so this is a good post.
I tend to go with the rule that if a SEO company contacts YOU, then they are possibly not that good.
A good SEO company will have plenty of clients reaching them through good results and word of mouth advertising.
I agree with you completely, Essex. In this case, the company contacted me because they were trying to sell a link on one of my sites, but if they are out cold-calling to get work . . . RUN!
An SEO company without seo in their META NAME=”KEYWORDS”… lol
wow, that is unbelievable, I actually think that you are being too nice for not publishing their name. It may help others to know who to avoid (even though you gave great tips on how to avoid!)
But yeah, wow, they are ridiculous. . .
Cheers!
Liam
[...] Joshua Dorkin presents How to Screen an SEO Company in Less than a Minute. [...]
Very true, If you want your keyword to rank in SERP, Start doing SEO..
SEO is a very in demand jobs now a days. If you want to get more traffic and be no.1 in search engine, try SEO..
I hear ya, Liam . . . I guess they didn’t piss me off enough!
Wow. i think the SEO companies should read the post more then the client.
I know, it sounds like a simple question, but someone who doesn’t know what an SEO professional does is likely to get screwed by some con man looking to rip him off. Most people will do a few minutes of research and find out that people who help others with SEO exist to help others climb in the search results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.
Finding meta tags is good strategy to hit the competitors. nice post!
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Hi,
The blog is interesting and also helpful, you have given a good idea on hoe to choose a best SEO company. It can help people on what parameters should they select a SEO compant.
Great tips on choosing an SEO service. I have to laugh every time I see a Web Design company offering SEO services as an “added” bonus. Their catch line is usually something like “We’ll submit your website to hundreds of search engines”
Wow, where do I sign up!
Don
Should be an eye-opener for such persons. Nice of you not to have revealed the names but that would have helped others to be cautious!!
I tend to go with the rule that if a SEO company contacts YOU, then they are possibly not that good. A good SEO company will have plenty of clients reaching them through good results and word of mouth advertising.
Most SEO experts only squeez money from people with offline business that aren’t webmasters and just want some promotion through their webs.
But there are still some SEO experts which bring You significant traffic and money spend on SEO brings some serious traffic effect.
I’m glad I do my own SEO. I can’t imagine how you would hire someone to do something that you don’t understand, and therefore can’t check up on. I have been subscribing to Planet Ocean for a long time, and it has helped a lot. Most of the time when SEO people call, they want to submit me to search engines and direct new links to me. But it’s always some sales person calling who doesn’t even understand SEO, so you can’t really ask them any questions. I think the best thing to do is learn it yourself, BEFORE you have your website designed. Most sites can’t be optimized because they were designed wrong in the first place. For instance, your files names have to be right. If your designer calls you product page “products.htm” instead of truck-tires-for-sale.htm, you can’t easily change that later.
I agree with you completely, Essex. In this case, the company contacted me because they were trying to sell a link on one of my sites, but if they are out cold-calling to get work.
SEO companies all seem to be a little bit “smoke and mirrors” to me, so this is a good post. I tend to go with the rule that if a SEO company contacts YOU, then they are possibly not that good. A good SEO company will have plenty of clients reaching them through good results and word of mouth advertising.
That was one of the clearest and straight forward posts about SEO companies i have ever read. I have been burned a couple of times from NOT following your steps
I think this is awesome tips on choosing an SEO service. I have to laugh every time I see a Web Design company offering SEO services as an “added” bonus. Their catch line is usually something like “We’ll submit your website to hundreds of search engines” helps to know more information about SEO company,
There is good information to provide SEO instruction in the post very nice!
Great post! I will certainly print this for everyone at work to review. Keep them coming!
What I think is funny is SEO providers that really promote themselves as being the best yet they have no PR ranking and are nowhere to be seen on google because they only have a few pages indexed and maybe a couple hundred inbound links. LOL .. those guys are everywhere too
As i would like to increase knowledge over SEO it helps me a lot..SEO technology is very important and with proper use, you can rocket your online business success level..
It’s funny how many people and companies act like they know SEO, but in reality since people have so little knowledge about it they don’t know when they’re getting scammed.
There are a number of very qualified professionals in business today that can aid you in coming with the best SEO.
I think SEO companies are useless.You can find the information easily on the internet and it is simple to do the changes required to your site.The most important thing is to write quality content and build links back to your site.
beautiful post thank u …hope alot of people searching for an SEO for their website read that post before doing their search…
Thank you again for that post!
W.D.
Very good points. Fortunately, I know enough about SEO that I can handle most of this myself, but if I ever do need to hire one I will certainly keep this in mind.
I’ve worked with a few agencies, and I find that most reputable ones will offer up samples of their work via before and after placements for a client they’ve worked with.
I’ve then worked with archive.org to determine their changes before and after.
Helped for us.
Oliver Nassar
Can’t say that I really trust SEO companies.
I have had some do nothing for me after paying.
Gary
Nice article. I think before hiring a seo company, you should have some basic knowledge of SEO else there is 80 % chances to be cheated.
Great post! One of the things that really frustrates me is that I’ve been finding that several of the blogs listed in “do follow” directories either don’t exist anymore or aren’t really “blogs” per se that allow comments.
thanx for this post
Thanks for giving such great tips although for most times I still don’t quite understand what they really do for you so I never used them. I heard that Google does not value meta tags as they used to
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It’s funny how many people and companies act like they know SEO, but in reality since people have so little knowledge about it they don’t know when they’re getting scammed.
thanks for informative post
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Very good post. It really helped me a lot.I would like to thanks that master brain who make all this for the readers like me. I really like the tips you have given..Thanks a lot.Looking forward to reading more from you.Keep blogging.
I agree with your post and yes its very helpful. After spending huge amounts on search engine optimisation with many seo companies in UK, I planned to do it myself…after reading several blogs I started doing it ethically for my coach hire, minibus hire, and limo hire home based business I am in and it seriously helped out.