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

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

SEO is FOREVER!

My Pandora activity widget. I was playing around with it under my Pandora profile. They actually posted this here straight from there, and it was scheduled to be posted 8 hours from now. Kinda weird, but interesting at the same time..

Anyway, here’s my Pandora widget activity… Maybe someday it will make its way to my sidebar, we’ll see. (maybe when they stop advertising ATT on it!)

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Pandora Widget

In the last year we all saw the Universal Search feature change the way people search in Google. That was a big change, but not as big a change as what’s about to come. 

Universal Search blended results from multiple databases such as images, videos, news, etc. You’ve seen it, here’s an example below: 

What’s about to happen is an even deeper blending of information, and the end-user will have more options to filter and find more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

The full story can be found at Dullest.com’s blog, and we should start seeing this roll out in bits and pieces during the next several weeks.

Image courtesy from http://www.dns.com.tw/

This Dance will make many SEOs out there re-think the way they build their strategies and drive force them to optimize for the various channels from where data will be pulled from.

This could result in a greater amount of spam control in sites like YouTube, and directories from Google such as Google Local. Unfortunately not all SEOs are nice and create relevant, useful and positive content…

With that said, this is a change for the better and I’m personally looking forward to this new environment – better catered to the end-user. 

There will be more and more details coming about in the following weeks, but make no mistake that it’s coming

If you have any questions, drop me a comment and check the “Notification” box so you know when I answered

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Ready for a Google Dance? Google is Ready!

The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) strikes again. I posted a video by this guy in the past, about pay-per-click management, but if you haven’t seen him yet, here’s another chance. The lyrics are good little guide on things to keep in mind when doing a redesign and/or a new design.

Watch the video and read the lyrics, comment your thoughts

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Designing SEO friendly code

For those of us that were unable to attend PubCon 2008 in Vegas, Google has released a video by Matt Cutts which recreates the “State of the Index” talk he did there.

This is a summary of what Google did in 2008 and what they intend to do in 2009.

It’s a long video, but worth the watch! There’s a slide version if you just want to skim through this.

Enjoy

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

State of the Google Index – by Matt Cutts

Image via Wikipedia

I was talking with a friend about how a higher amount of contextual links, from pages with lower PageRank, are better than fewer links from pages with higher PageRank but not much context. He was having a hard time grasping that idea. The perfect scenario would be to have both, but if you need to choose where to put focus, I would go with context and relevance first. Don’t make the mistake to get caught up in the PageRank maze. A lot of people still do. PageRank has its importance, but it isn’t the ultimate measuring stick.

Contextual links are a better choice because they are providing links from pages with material that is very relevant to the destination pages within the destination site. It’s also good to have many different sources so that  the Googlebot will see those links coming in from different IP addresses, and will see that many different websites, located in several different parts of the country and world, are linking to the same relevant destination and around the same topic of the keywords and content used in the final destination. That’s contextual linking.

Ordinary links acquired from higher PageRank sites can do their job, but they will always lack some relevance, and the focus is usually very narrow. Take this for example:

The screenshot shows the footer of a PageRank 4 website. The links are loosely placed here. You can see that while you have a few links that are in the same topic as the home page (it’s a site about fish), you have others that have nothing to do with it like “English and French Bulldogs” and “Party Poker…”

A link such as this can be hard to get, maybe because it’s expensive or maybe because you can’t find the webmaster. If you’re only going for a few of these you wouldn’t get as much return as you could get with a higher amount of links that are contextual links, like the ones displayed in the screenshots below:

…and from different places, geographically identifiable by IP, and in the case below, also by language…

This is my two cents on why going after relevant, contextual links goes a long way versus trying to score fewer in between links and only worrying about PageRank.

By the way, this is the first post I’m writing using Zemanta.. I’ll write more about it on the next post, it’s a cool tool

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Contextual Links

PubCon Vegas 2008 is coming, and I’m starting to reach for my wallet to secure a pass. PubCon is put together by WebmasterWorld, home of some of the coolest threads in the Search Engine Marketing world. Not THE coolest because there are other places just as resourceful, but I do listen to the buzz at WebmasterWorld daily. Besides all of the technical stuff that will be discussed there, the awesome networking opportunities and Search Engine representatives, it’s VEGAS baby, and you can’t go wrong with Vegas! (But you CAN, you CAN go REALLY WRONG with Vegas! hahahhaah)

Plus I’ve been doing pretty well with my little Blackjack game in my iPhone, and that could mean disaster when I get to Vegas and reality slaps me in the face!

Any of you marketing people reading this thinking about attending? Let me know…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Join the Geeks in Vegas!