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

There is a Buzz in the air, and it isn’t very good . . .

It seems that in the past few days, Google has changed their PR algorithm, affecting major corporations, webmasters and bloggers alike. In this case, size just doesn’t matter . . . everyone from The Washington Post to Problogger to Engadget to me has been affected by this.

What Was this PR Change All About?
Not sure. The word on the street is that sites are being penalized for selling links. Experts contend that Google has been manually reviewing sites and changing PR as a result of what they find. Has the Big G verified this? There might be evidence, but it seems that no one is 100% certain.

Bloggers and others have been theorizing that this is a ploy by Google to further consolidate power and to force people to use them for advertising, but that’s just one of thousands of theories out there. Until Google comes out and tells us what they have done and why, we have no way of knowing anything.

What does it mean?
I don’t think anyone really knows yet. As PR is one of many factors in Google’s results, this drop, in theory, should have major effects around the globe. So far, it seems, the experts contend that this has not affected traffic or AdSense. On the other hand, as many advertisers and ad networks rely on PR for setting prices, this could have a devastating effect on the revenues of websites around the planet.

Sounds all negative. Are there any positives to this PR Change?
I’ve been reading up on this for 2 days now and have yet to hear anything good about this situation. I have heard rumblings from people that they have seen PR upgrades, but haven’t found any proof. I’d love to hear from anyone who has seen an increase. Maybe we can learn from exploring these sites what has really happened.

What Next?
Keep reading! As time goes on, we’ll certainly learn more about this major update. As Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of search, every move they make can have major effects on everyone online. This is an event that is going to be talked about until Google’s next major move.

Is there anything you can do to avoid being harmed by moves like these?
Common sense would say to rely less on Google for everything, but that is not an easy thing to do. Sure there are other Search providers out there, but until one of them starts to seriously compete with Google, the smart thing to do would be to diversify, but also focus on what we’re all doing to make the beast angry. With so much power in the hands of one company, we are all forced to comply or suffer, it seems.

Important Reading on the Topic
If you’re interested in the topic, these articles should give some insight on the developments I’ve just written about:

• Google Page Rank is dead and has been for quite some time – Robert Scoble
• Google Drops PageRank For Many Sites : Paid Links or New Algorithm? – Search Engine Journal
• Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm? – Daily Blog Tips
• Google PageRank Update and its All Down – John Chow
• Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms – TechCrunch
• Google algorithm tweak spooks WWW – TheAge
• ProBlogger – PageRank 4 – Darren Rowse
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google – Search Engine Land
• Have you been hit with a Pagerank drop ? – gHacks
• Thanks Google – CopyBlogger
• Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad? – WebProNews
• Google PageRank Update In Google Toolbars Worldwide!!! – Aaron Wall
• Nothing Official from Matt Cutts – Yet

Thoughts????

I’ve written in the past about the importance of periodic link reviews, but I wanted to discuss how important it also is to also keep your pages up to date. I was going through one of my websites and noticed that many pages hadn’t been updated in 4 years!

Keep Your Websites Up To Date for Your Users & For SEO Purposes!

When users see that your site may be outdated, they become inclined to go out and find someone who keeps their site up to date. This presents a challenge to large sites with thousands of pages of content like BiggerPockets.com, but that is part of the job! In addition, over time, SEO (search engine optimization) rules change and a site that may have been optimized for Google a few years back may no longer be. Make sure you regularly check to be sure all of your pages have been properly optimized!

This isn’t as important for dynamic sites like blogs, so all you bloggers out there can pretty much disregard this message.

For anyone else with a website, make sure you do keep with the times and periodically review your pages to be sure they are current.

It is hard to go very far without running into a site with entries in Darren Rowse’s latest group writing project; it was a huge hit with close to 900 entries. While it is great that people are linking to one another from this thing, it seems that many involved in the project are simply linking to the entire list of submissions. While I did participate (on another blog) and don’t ever mind new backlinks, I’m a bit disappointed that people haven’t really broken this thing down a bit.

Why link to every post? While many were good, there were some really bad posts in that batch. Do you really want to link to (and give your support to) blogs that don’t make the cut? I went through the entire list a few times to pull out posts that I thought would be interesting or helpful for the readers of this blog.

Here are a few that I felt were actually useful and worth a read (yes, I actually read every internet related post on the list!):

AdSense
• Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos
  Blogging

• Top Five Ways Blog Carnivals Make Blogging Better
• Top 5 Tips to be the next Darren Rowse
• Top 5 Methods to Increase Comments on Your Blog
• Top 5 tips for beating blogger’s block
• Top 5 Best and Youngest Bloggers
• Top 5 Tips for a Successful Link Train
• 5 Things You Should do Before Launching Your Own Blog
• 5 Tips to Break Free From The Blogger’s Bubble
  Blogging Tools

• Top Five Little Known Wordpress Plugins
• Top 5 Must-Have Blog Monitoring Tools
• Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments
• Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use
• Top 5 OS X Dashboard Widgets for Bloggers
  SEO

• The Top 5 Free Search Engine Optimization Tools
• Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO
  Assorted

• Top Five Challenges Newbies Face Online
• Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling
• Five Tips for Running a Successful Online Giveaway

What I thought was most impressive was that many of these great posts were written by fairly unknown bloggers. This is another sign that there will always be great new talents emerging in the blogging world and you must keep exploring to find them!

I make it a habit to support my fellow bloggers through both socializing their posts and visiting their advertisers when appropriate. Make sure you do the same! While linking is great, these things are just as important!

Finally, I’d like to mention that many of the blogs I went through were still using Blogger or some other hosted blog solution, and many others were making some of the most basic blogging mistakes. If you haven’t already, read the The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make so you’re not out there making some of these yourself!

In a guest assignment for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Alister Cameron writes an incredible post detailing how Google Blogsearch ranks your blog posts. Using the Google Blogsearch patent application, Alister reveals some incredible information about the data Google uses to determine the quality of a blog or blog post.

He mentions how it looks like Big Brother, and it really does. It appears as though Google is taking data from not only their search results, but from blogrolls, from the qualit of a site lnking to you, from feed subscriptions on the Google Feed Reader, from chats on GTalk, from emails on Gmail, etc. They then use their fancy algorithms to determine weight and ranking. I’m not sure about you, but it looks to me like we have to worry less about the government spying on us then we do Google. Orwell was somewhat correct, but in the real future, it is big business, not governments that are truly to be feared (thanks Charles).

That said, there is much to learn from examining the article on Problogger, as the insight it provides is invaluable. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark the site, as it is one of the top blogs out there about the “sport” of blogging.

Here are some useful and very cool tools and resources for any webbie:

Maki, author of the extremly cool blog (which I just discovered today) Dosh Dosh writes an extremly thorough article aka The Ultimate Guide on How to Get Your Website Listed in Wikipedia which really is what it says. If you’ve ever wondered about getting some link love from the uber-encyclopedia Wikipedia, this is the place to find out how to go about doing it.

Ever wondered how popular your site really is? There are plenty of sites that measure different metrics, but the new Popuri.us (1169 diggs and counting) helps consolidate all that data. Just enter your url and find out: Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Google BackLinks, Yahoo BackLinks, Live Search BackLinks, Technorati Links, del.icio.us Bookmarks, Bloglines subscribers, WHOIS Info, and DNS Info. If possible, I’d somehow find a way to integrate feedburner info to this, as it has become the de-facto metric for measuring a blog’s success.

There must be hundreds of lists on how to get others to link to your website, but Wendy Piersall guest blogging at Darren Rouse’s Problogger finds the best of the best in The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love. Broken down into categories including The Best of the Best, Link Strategy, Linkbaiting, Relationship Building, and Buying Links, the list covers pretty much anything you could ever think of when it comes to getting links. This will surely help newbie webbies!

Lastly, I wanted to share with you a site I learned about from the self-proclaimed evil one, John Chow’s frequent guest blogger Michael Kwan (that was a mouthful!). I have to admit that I no longer use Yahoo or MSN to do any searches, probably out of laziness, but Google has been my SE for a while now. That might change . . . the new search engine / social engine YouAnimous or AfterVote (calls itself both I think) combines the results from Yahoo, MSN, and Google with stats and the ability to vote on results. It is really cool and I believe, has a lot of promise. Search engines use algorithms to calculate ranking, but that ignores simple human logic. By adding the human element, it seems that results should be more relevant. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Most SEO experts will likely agree that gaining inbound links is one of the most important steps in growing your website. The methods for gaining those links continue to evolve with time. In the old days, we used to email other webmasters and request reciprocal links. That faded as the ‘net grew and people started to SPAM every site around in an effort to get some links. People used link farms and uncounted other techniques to get links. With the advent of blogs and forums, building links has become somewhat easier, provided you have something useful to say.

As the search engines have improved their algorithms, they have maintained one factor in ranking that still stands true:

Links from “trusted” sources are more important than links from newer, unknown sites. With that in mind a quick tip from Darren at Problogger.net explains an easy to get backlinks from these trusted sources. He explains that links from sites with .edu and .gov extensions help increase search rankings.

To get these links, just find forums or blogs with the extension and get involved in the discussion. You will naturally create backlinks to your site with forum signatures and your blog comments. Locating good sites is easy too! Just search for:

“keyword” forum site:.edu
“keyword” blog site:.edu
“keyword” forum site:.gov
“keyword” blog site:.gov

Replacing keyword with the topic you’re interested in, and start posting!

While this is a great “trick”, be sure you don’t start spamming. Any trust you may gain from “respectable” inbound links will quickly be lost if you start pissing everyone off and being spammy.