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

I’m always excited when a month comes to a close because it presents me with the opportunity to look back at what happened last month. This is especially important because I have the opportunity to see how I’m doing in attaining my goals for my sites. In particular, I’m most interested in traffic and financial trends.

Traffic Analysis
In looking at site traffic every month, I go immediately to my AWStats server software to learn how succcessful I’ve been. . .

• Did each of my sites see growth?
• What kind of growth was it?
• Did unique users increase or decrease?
• Did page views go up?
• Were there any major strains on my bandwidth (i.e. was anyone hotlinking to images on my sites)?
• What keywords were most successful in drawing traffic?
• Were there any keywords that fell in the rankings?
• How did the sites fare on the different search engines?
• Did I start to make progress on any one of them?
• Did I begin to lose ground on another?

I haven’t been especially active in tracking the number of sites linking in, the PR of my pages, or my Alexa rankings, because I don’t find them to be anything I can really control. Since I focus mainly on organic growth for my sites, I let the links come instead of undertaking a true link building program. With quality content, the links come in naturally. PR is really meaningless IMO, and Alexa rankings are extremely inaccurate. I have two different sites . . . one typically will rank on a daily basis similarly to another one, yet one of the sites gets between 10 and 20 times the traffic of the other. The one with less traffic that ranks well on Alexa is popular with webmasters and others online – people who likely have the Alexa toolbar or other tools installed on their browsers. It amazes me that this has become one of the standards for monitoring traffic because it is simply so innaccurate.

In terms of blogs, I’ll also look at numbers from places like Feedburner (# of subscribers to my feeds), Technorati (# of sites linking in), and MyBlogLog (number of people who have joined my community) in addition to the basic numbers.

May was a good month! I saw growth in all areas and by all metrics. I can’t really ask for anything else, especially considering I no longer run any keyword advertising programs. I’ll just say that I’m serving many millions of page views a month across the board!

Financial Analysis
The first of each month is also important because it allows me to reflect upon the financial status of my company over the past month. Between direct advertisers, ad networks, and affiliate programs, I draw income from various sources. In any typical month I spend a good amount of my time focused on how I can increase revenues from one or all of these sources. Because of this, I’ve been able to create a company that has seen steady growth financially since inception (with a few minor flat spots).

May was a good month and I’m looking forward to see what we can pull off in June! I guess we’ll find out next month!

Ready for another rant? Seems like I’ve been doing quite a lot of that lately. This time, it is about something that I’m sure all the bloggers can relate to: Corporate Comment Spam. It seems that the corporations have indeed resorted to non other than comment SPAM to promote themselves

In the past 3 days, I’ve had to deal with comments from the flunkies of two large corporations: AOL and the The E.W. Scripps Company, which owns HGTV. I’ve chosen to leave out the identities of the perpetrators as the purpose of this post is to to expose what corporations are up to, not to call specific people out.

• HGTV Comment Spam

  I at least give a tiny bit of credit to the guy who has SPAMMED our Real Estate Investing for Real blog comments twice in the past 3 days. It seems that he tries to relate his spammy commercials to the topic at hand. Here’s the latest (I’ve colored the acceptable part in green and the SPAMMY Crap in red):

  Its funny that you should mention Los Angeles, I live there and you are right on. Since the average price of houses is so expensive the take for an agent is ridiculous. Btw, a $350,000 in LA will get you a fixer-upper. I wanted to ask anybody who is reading this…have you seen the show Bought & Sold on HGTV? I work with them and have been alerting people of the show because I think its worth seeing, if you’re into real estate at all…It basically shows 12 different agents trying to show houses and close the deal. It gives you huge insight into the way homes are marketed and how price levels are decided upon in the Northern New Jersey market – which is one of the toughest markets in the country. You can check out a preview – [VIDEO LINK REMOVED] – It’s on Sundays at 10PM e/p time on HGTV. Definitely worth checking out. It’d be funny to see them do one here in LA.

  I actually erased the first one he did, otherwise I’d also share it with you as well. I sent him an email asking him to immediately stop wasting both of our time (his writing and my deleting) and explained what netiquette was. We’ll see if he comes back for more!

• AOL Comment Spam

  AOL is also guilty of dishing out Hawaii’s favorite meat concoction. First I received a form email from someone at AOL trying to get me to blog about their new real estate section. It was impersonal, badly formatted, and poorly written (formatted as received):

  Dear Bloggers,

  I’m a Promotions Manager for AOL Real Estate, and have read your real estate
  blog. Your insights are thought provoking and often times right on the money.
  I
  would love to get your opinion about an “Inside Stories of…” series we are
  currently running. We interviewed various players in the real estate process
  for
  candid (some harsh) realities of the business. I know you’ve posted about such
  subjects, and thought you could take a look at what we’ve done, and offer a
  fascinating perspective; good, bad, or ugly.

  I’ve included our entire lineup for this original series below. If you decide
  to blog and need more info from me, please feel free to contact me anytime.
  Thanks for your time.

  We’d love to be involved on your site if you’d like to link to our home page,
  [LINK REMOVED] we have a lot to offer in exciting original
  content,
  listings, investing information, and staging/home improvement.

  Thanks,
  ~Name Removed

  After going through my daily SPAM scan, I noticed a message that my filters caught written by the same person, as a comment on my most popular post on the blog.

  Check out Unstructured, the official editor’s blog, AOL Real Estate.

  [URL REMOVED]

  Had I gotten the email or the blog SPAM, I would have just ignored it. In conjunction, the campaign to plug AOL’s new real estate site just hit a bad nerve. I decided to write the author back:

  Name Removed-
  A few things. First, It would be great if you had actually personalized the email you sent me instead of sending a form email that probably went to every other real estate blogger around. I’m surprised that a company of AOL’s financial backing couldn’t consider such an obvious move. It looks poorly upon you and your company.

  While the site you are looking to promote is good, your tactics are nothing but amateurish. I was quite shocked to look through my blog’s comments to see that you’ve also gone and SPAMMED us with your site’s link.

  I’ve had bloggers with 2 weeks of experience conduct themselves with more netiquette and web professionalism. I have no intention of supporting your site thanks to your tactics.

  I hope you reconsider how you’re approaching people in the future.

  Sincerely,

  A few of my friends and fellow bloggers recommended that I CC the email to her bosses at AOL. Sometimes I’m a jerk, but not that big of one. I’m not trying to get her fired; I just want people to learn what is and is not okay online these days.

Conclusion

We all know that people are spending more time online these days, corporations included. Apparently the online marketing teams for large corporations want eyeballs at any cost! I think the “street teams” of old, who kept busy handing out promo items on street corners, have given way to a group of young hired SPAM teams. They’re hitting the social networks, forums, and now, the blogs.

Apparently corporations still don’t understand online netiquette. Way to go! Piss off the whole online blogging community while you’re at it! Little do they know that the backlash from the internet can be fast and relentless (we all saw what Digg went through last week), and by ignoring the established “rules” of order online they are setting themselves for a fall.

Anyone think I’ll help promote HGTV or AOL Real Estate now?

5/11/07 UPDATE: Not a day after I wrote this post, HGTV has gone and sent a different person to once again SPAM our blog. From our comments:

May 11th, 2007 at 8:38 am
It seems more and more people are getting into the real estate business these days, without a clear understanding of how the biz really works. For those of you looking for a better understanding, I suggest checking out the new reality show Bought & Sold on HGTV. It’s a great show about the inner workings of the real estate and the lengths brokers will go to just to get the deal. Check it out: [LINK REMOVED]. I work with HGTV and you won’t believe what happens this season. Good luck, and enjoy the show! Don’t forget, the show airs Sundays at 10pm. I’m sure you’ll find it beneficial! Have any of you seen it yet?

There are tons of new bloggers online every day, and many, if not most of them make similar mistakes starting out. I thought it might be fun to compile a list of some of these. Without further adieu:

The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make
en Español, en Français

Domain & Hosting
1. Not hosting their own blog
2. Registering a blog name (URL) that has been copyrighted
3. Registering a long and difficult to remember domain name

   Style, Design, and Basic Blog Ingredients

4. Keeping the basic template that came installed on the blog
5. Using a black background or one that flashes, blinks, or moves in any other way
6. Using background music
7. Not updating the blogroll that comes with the blog
8. Not using permalinks for their blog posts
9. Not protecting their blogs from SPAM comments with easily installed plugins
10. Under-utilizing easily installed plugins
11. Not including a clear way to contact them
12. Not including a basic About the Author page
13. Not creating a sitemap for Google and other search engines

    Blog Comments

14. Keeping the first post & comment that came with the blog
15. Forcing guests to register in order to leave comments
16. Commenting on other blogs with nothing to say other than “nice post” or some other worthless nonsense
17. Commenting on other blogs and posting spamming their blog’s URL in the post
18. Not commenting on other blogs enough
19. Not thinking through what they comment about on other sites
20. Not responding to comments on their blogs
21. Asking other bloggers to link to their blog in comments
22. Gathering email addresses from people who comment and adding them to email marketing lists without permission (privacy violation)
23. Posting affiliate links when making comments on other blogs

    Links

24. Emailing other bloggers and asking them for links
25. Not linking out enough
26. Posting incorrect or broken links
27. Not using their blog’s trackback capabilities to keep other bloggers in the know

    Blog Content

28. Creating SPLOGS
29. Setting high expectations for your readers and then failing to meet them
30. Not learning blogging etiquette or blog culture before starting out
31. Not choosing a niche to write about
32. Not keeping their blog focused on that niche if and when they do choose one
33. Copying the style and substance of other blogs
34. Blogging about absolutely nothing
35. Not proofreading their posts
36. Failing to place themselves and then experiencing blogger burnout
37. Stealing blog content
38. Blogging about something they know nothing about
39. Copying entire blog posts from other sites and thinking a simple link back makes it okay
40. Failing to attribute another blog or website that you got an idea from
41. Trying to blog as some fake anonymous persona like the kids in Ender’s Game
42. Posting uninteresting titles
43. Posting huge blocks of text without using headlines, images, etc. to break it up
44. Posting at an irregular frequency
45. Forgetting that they are writing for an audience, not themselves.
46. Writing things in their blogs that may harm them in the future
47. Committing libel
48. Being unprofessional
49. Attacking other bloggers just to get attention
50. Sharing company secrets or private information on their blogs
51. Giving away too much personal information (potentially dangerous)
52. Not having their own voice when writing, instead using bland and dry language.
53. Not engaging the reader to participate in the conversation (failing to stimulate comments)
54. Blabbing too much without making any relevant points
55. Writing about what everyone else is writing about
56. Holding blog contests and not coming through on prizes you promised

    Blog Promotion & Traffic Building

57. Advertising their brand-new site anywhere
58. Promoting a site with less than 10 posts
59. Using traffic boosters to get traffic
60. Using any methods to get un-targeted traffic
61. Over-submitting their blogs to social bookmarking sites
62. Submitting bad posts to social bookmarking sites
63. Under-publicizing their best posts
64. Not entering Blog Carnivals to start building traffic
65. Not including a link to their blogs in their email and forum signatures
66. Not responding to emails or other messages

    Blog Monetization

67. Worrying about making money with their blog before they even have any quality content
68. Placing as many ads from as many ad networks as they can on their sites
69. Clicking on their own AdSense Ads
70. Allowing just about any site, even unrelated ones, to advertise on their blog
71. Writing reviews of other sites through ReviewMe or other services and doing a shit job of it. Reviews can be bad or good, but they should at least be well written (happened to me today . . . argh!)

    Feeds

72. Under-utilizing their blog’s feed
73. Not having a clearly identifiable and highly visible way to subscribe to their feed
74. Not using feedburner to optimize, quantify, and publicize their feed
75. Using Feedburner chicklet that shows number of subscribers before you’ve got at least 50-100 subscribers
76. Posting a partial blog feed instead of the full contents
77. Overusing feed advertising

I’ve seen a few other mistake lists out there, but most cover things I’ve mentioned above. Here are a few good ones:

Ten Blogging Mistakes I’ve Made
The Top 10 Design Mistakes
Blogging Mistakes Final List
10 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Think I’m missing any important points?

I found an article through Kevin at BloggingTips about how to support your favorite bloggers. This article covered quite a few great points and I thought I’d go into 2 of them with some more detail.

Both of the steps I mention can really make a difference for your favorite sites, and spreading the word about them can make a difference for you as well!

The 2 Best Ways to Support Your Favorite Websites

1. Socialize the Blog or Site
   If you find a site, blog, article, etc. that you find interesting or helpful, one of the best ways to support it is to “socialize” it. Of course, the original form of socialization is word of mouth, but email works great too! Let your friends and family know about the site and tell them to let their friends and family know about it. Many of the most popular websites have all grown on word of mouth campaigns.

   In addition, by submitting it to different social networking and social bookmarking sites, you increase the exposure opportunities for that site. Sites like Netscape, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Facebook, etc. are all wonderful tools for sharing the love. I make it a habit of social bookmarking or Digging any article or site that I think is a great one, because I hope that someone will do the same for me. If we can spread the idea of helping one another out by doing this, I think we’d see lots of great, semi-unknown, sites climb to prominence. There are tons of these sites around, but people don’t realize how easy it is to do their part to help those sites out.

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then Bookmark It! It is that easy!

2. Visit the Site’s Advertisers
   These days, most websites have some sort of advertising. Many webmasters (like myself) support their work online soley through that advertising. While we all become semi-blind to ads these days, it is extremly important that we do our part to help our fellow webmasters by visiting the advertising on their sites. Imagine if even a small percentage of your users happened to visit the ads on your site (provided they are some kind of PPC ads)? Be careful not to overdo it, though. Clicking too often on a site’s ads can constitute click fraud, something you don’t want to do.

   Even visiting ads that may not be PPC is helpful to websites. Advertisers always look at the amount of traffic they get from a site when considering whether or not they will extend their campaigns. If you do your part by visiting these ads, you help the sites to retain advertisers and increase revenue. You also help the advertiser by finding their site . . . the more eyeballs, the better!

   Remember not to just click on any and all ads. Visit those that look interesting to you.

   Like with socializing, if we can build this mentality around the ‘net where people support one another’s advertisers, I think a lot of people would be a lot happier. The advertisers would get increased exposure (which is what they are paying for) and you’d be supporting the owners of your favorite sites, blogs, etc. If only 25% of a site’s visitors supported its advertisers, I’m sure the resulting increases would be beyond remarkable!

   If you like a site, an article, a blog, etc., then visit its advertisers! It is that easy!

By following these two simple and EXTREMELY helpful tips, you too can support your fellow bloggers and favorite sites, and hopefully they will do the same for you!

Please bookmark this site and help spread the mentality! (click the Share This link below)

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

One of the first things that you’ll need to do when starting a business is to create a logo to represent your company. It seems like this may be a simple thing, but it is often more difficult then you think!

Some Logos Are Timeless

There are certain logos we’ll never forget: Apple, CocaCola, McDonalds, Google, Nike, Target, etc.

I don’t even need to show these, because we all have them imprinted in our minds. Pretty amazing!

I wish I could write a post about what constitutes a great logo. I don’t have any magic formula, but I know one when I see it. Creating a timeless and effective logo is not an easy undertaking. Large corporations often times spend millions of dollars on their brand.

I recently found a great resource to help you out with any logo questions (which actually inspired this post) called the Logo Design Blog. According to the site, the 5 characteristics of a highly successful logo include:

1. Uniqueness
2. Relevancy
3. Appealing
4. Consistency
5. Contrast

For more details, read the post; it goes into detail about each of these characteristics. In another interesting post, the site discusses the various constituents of a logo, which include symbol, sign, emblem, or slogan. It is a great place to start learning more about logos.

What Not to Do in Creating a Logo for Your Company

While I can’t tell you the formula for a great logo, I can talk about what isn’t great. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the real estate world, I have seen countless logos from companies who are all looking to create a brand for themselves. The interesting thing is that at least 90% of these logos have some kind of roof or home as part of the logo. While this seems logical, and we even played with a roof-esque logo, does it differentiate these companies from one another? No.

They all pretty much have the same theme and in my mind, are simply clones of one another. They do nothing to help people recognize the companies.

The Evolution of a Logo Design

I believe that an effective logo is one that instantly provides brand recognition. Lets compare the various iterations of my company, BiggerPockets, Inc.’s logos over the past several years.

This first version of the logo is nothing but disasterous. I thought that because the site was about making money with real estate, that money should be the central theme. This is nothing but an amateurish slapped together logo that does nothing to further our site’s brand.

Here we are making the mistake most companies make when it comes to designing a logo. They shoot for the obvious. Our little blue roof did nothing to differentiate our brand. We were yet another real estate related site . . . nothing more, nothing less.

In the above logo, we started to realize that the roof shouldn’t play as prominent a role. We wanted people to focus on our name, BiggerPockets, which represented what people would get from our site. This began an evolution towards our differentiation.

This logo actually came from one of my high-school students (I taught school for several years). I wanted something fun and unique involving money and a big ‘ole pocket. While this design certainly stood out and let people know more about who we were, it was a bit amateurish as well. We were going in the right direction, but hadn’t quite done it just right.

This final and current logo of the company, I believe, hits the nail on the head. It is certainly unique, and represents who we are. By itself, the iconic man in the pocket, representing how big your pockets can become, is symbolic of our site. I am extremly pleased with this logo, as I feel that it is clean, unique, and expounds a message. Does it have what it takes to become timeless? I suppose that is up to you and everyone else out there!

A Great Resource for Creating Your Logo Design

After I knew that my student was on to something with our logo, I decided to have some professional graphic artists clean it up for me. To do that, I found a great service that everyone should utilize: SitePoint’s Logo Design Contests. All I did was give the brilliant (and not so brilliant) graphic designers on Sitepoint (a huge and amazing webmaster forum) some ideas of what I was looking for, and let them run with it. There were many wonderful ideas put forward, and I was able help the designers modify and clean their logos up until I had somthing I was happy with. The best part about running one of these contests is that it is affordible and you do get many ideas to choose from.