A San Diego SEO professional

Search Engine Optimization as a product.

SEO as a service, is offered from professional (and hopefully good) individuals like myself, as well as from big internet marketing companies, like eVisibility. The level of service also varies, for example:

• The individual consultant is often limited to how much he/she can actually do, and the level of knowledge is limited to what that person knows.
• The big agency can offer a wide range of services that intertwine and make up a healthy campaign. The level of knowledge is vast as there is a team of clever individuals working on the same campaign (at least that’s the case for good agencies).

The SEO Buyer.

As a prospect buyer of this service, one can be quite overwhelmed with the wide range of possibilities, actual deliverable tasks, personalities, cost, and more!

One of the things the SEO buyer starts to realize, as he/she shops around for their future SEO provider, is that different SEO providers will quote different deadlines to achieve a certain goal (usually measured around rankings).

We will get your website ranked in 3 months!!! GUARANTEED!!!

… oh boy…

SEO IS FOREVER!

Dear Mr. SEO Buyer,

Are you serious about thriving online? Yes? Well I have news for you, SEO is FOREVER!!

I understand that if you heard this during the sales process, you might think that the person on the other side of the phone has gone bananas. How can you even consider spending a bunch of money on something indefinitely (or at least for as long as you have a business that needs the internet)?

Don’t freak out, let me show you a different point of view on the subject at hand..

The 6 Months Trial

Once you find an SEO provider that you can trust, make sure that you have enough budget to run a 6 months campaign. You need to give your new partner some time to get the foundation established before you can expect to see any ROI.

After 6 months you should have a pretty good idea as to whether or not this is working for your business. You should be educated enough in the process to spot the weaknesses and strengths of your campaign.

If it’s working, keep going! If you have gotten great rankings and quality traffic, keep going!! Remember, there will always be someone, somewhere, doing the same thing you’re doing and more..

If you’re serious, Mr. SEO Buyer, you can never stop SEO, it’s forever!

–

Photo Credits:

SEO Blocks: Flashdaweb

Sleazebag Salesman: NVISolutions

Without a doubt, Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortener service out there. And without question, what made them so popular is this one social network called… mmm..

what is it called again?.. Oh yeah, TWITTER.

Users who like to share links can really use services such as Bit.ly so that they can keep their messages under the 140 character limit. So it’s good news to know that Bit.ly just announced (on Monday) their new partnerships with Verisign, Websense and Sophos.

The goal of these new partners is to ensure that spam and other types of malicious software stay off the Bit.ly network. The presence of spammy and malicious links is a major problem that Bit.ly is hoping to solve. That grey area of not knowing where you’ll end up after clicking on a link shared through Twitter is just where spammers, phishers and scammers like to be.

Bit.ly’s new parterns are planning to solve that problem in three different ways:

Verisign’s iDefense service will screen IP addresses, domains and URLs based on its reputation database, to find those that “host exploits, malicious code, command and control servers, drop sites and other nefarious activity,” according to Bit.ly general manager Andrew Cohen.

WebSense’s ThreatSeeker Cloud will analyze the content on pages linked to through Bit.ly in real-time to identify and block “spammy URLs, malicious content and phishing sites.”

Meanwhile, Sophos rounds out the equation by analyzing the behavior of potential spammers to “go[] beyond blacklists, to proactively detect spam and malware.”

All I can say is YAY!

Matt Cutts put up a video about how Google deals with Robots.txt files. This will be a good one if you’re wondering exactly how Google sees your blocked URLs, etc…

Google Wave is Google’s new pet project that according to them will do nothing less than revolutionize the way people communicate online. It will go out to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow (Wednesday, September 30th, 2009).

Google Wave is unique because its platform is combining elements from many different online communication tools into one place. Things such as blogs, photo/video sharing, chats, email, documents, etc, will be all streaming in one fluid conversation, or a “wave” as Google likes to call it.

This web application was displayed at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, back in May. If you have a spare 1 hour and 20 minutes, you can watch it here.

The Google team in charge of this project see this as something that will become as main stream as Google itself. To quote one of the creators Jens Rasmussen:

“This should be something everybody uses and something everybody knows”

If you read tech blogs, you noticed the hustle and bustle around this topic today. Many of us want to be part of this beta group but trust me, it is a tight and sealed group at this point. If you’re not in yet forget about it, maybe next time!

Wave has been described as “dripping with ambition” and as a “new communication platform for a new Web.” from places such as TechCrunch.

More to come on this… Are you a beta tester? Tell us what you think!