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Here’s a great video taken at WordCamp 2009 of Matt Cutts, sharing some SEO Tips for Wordpress users:
Thoughts?
Tags: matt cutts, SEO, Wordpress
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!
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.
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:
Thoughts????
While on vacation, I met a great guy — a friend of a friend — who had a website developed for his company. When he found out that I worked in the internet business, he began to ask me a few questions about how things work, SEO, and then some. In building his website, he hired a design firm that did a great job. He was not satisfied with simply having a website and found a company that could do SEO (Search engine optimization) work for him to help his site rank for certain keywords.
They had been working for many months together. The SEO company kept billing him and he kept paying. Unfortunately, since he had no idea what an SEO consultant actually did, he could not verify that they were doing a good or effective job. He asked me if getting a handful of leads over a few months was good, and I responded that it was not. This led me to become curious and visit his site.
I was shocked!
The company did not do even the most basic of SEO work for him. His code was not optimized, whatsoever.
This happens every day to countless people around the world. People calling themselves SEO experts charge people an arm & a leg to get their site ranked in the search engines. Many of these companies have no idea what they are doing.
I recommend making sure you use a company that you have been referred to. Make sure they can provide references. Find out what keywords those references wanted to rank for and see if they rank for them. Contact the owners of those sites and ask them questions. A very quick hint if a SEO company is worth their salt is to see what keywords they rank for. Ask them. If they can’t get their own sites to do well in the search engines, do you think they will be able to help you?
Be sure that there are a set of expectations established before signing any contract. You must have in writing EXACTLY what you expect this company to do. They should be willing to provide details on how they intend on working with you and helping you out. If they do not, STAY AWAY! If they won’t answer your questions, STAY AWAY.
Basically, be extremely careful when working with any SEO company. There are many legit ones out there, but if you don’t do your part and investigate the companies you work with, you can find yourself paying out the a** to a company that is doing nothing for you.
On the other hand, in a more ominous story, apparently, Google doesn’t think it has invaded our personal lives enough, and wants to delve deeper. In a story I learned about from Drudge, the Financial Times interviewed the Google guys and they revealed their EXTREMELY FRIGHTENING plan to take over the world:
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I’m absolutely more afraid of Google then I am the US government under the Bush/Cheney regime. If the government knew as much about everyone as Google did, we’d all be up in arms! I already discussed how they use private data to get better results from Google Blogsearch in the past, and this is just another step towards a complete invasion of all of our privacy. Sadly, people are embracing their efforts instead of fighting them.
Do you really want any one company to know that much about you? It is indeed a Brave New World and we don’t even realize it!
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!):
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!
Joshua Dorkin
I'm the founder of the website BiggerPockets.com, and have been creating websites for over 15 years. The purpose of this blog is to share some things I've learned about the internet, business and life.
