Finding the Right SEO Specialist

Search engine optimization cannot be overemphasized as it is indispensable in boosting page ranking.

A lot of SEO service providers exist offering an array of SEO services. There are those SEO companies and gurus that are labeled as SEO mentors that either do all the job themselves, or farm out some aspects of the job while, at the same time, supervising after the quality and output of the project.

There are also huge SEO firms and they typically employ a lot of employees who take care of different concerns of the job. These firms, however, operate similar to SEO factories and treat the jobs by bulk orders.

The third kind of SEO firm is a smaller one, which generally has only a few employees and may also farm out different aspects of a certain job. But each client is afforded a personal touch. Furthermore, a lot of the methods are supervised in-house taking into considerations rigid quality control.

Spotting a reliable SEO expert is quite a tedious job. Especially considering that almost everything exists in virtual space, trust and quality concerns seem to bother a lot of clients. This is even made more apparent with the proliferation of fly-by-night "experts".

It would be the advantage of the client if he or she will have substantial knowledge of SEO and can intelligently decide which SEO firm to hire. It's important to be careful so that you don't A) wast time or B) waste money. Here are some guidelines to use in your hunt for the right SEO specialist:

Ask Around

Word of mouth is still the most effective form of advertisement. Ask for feedbacks and comments from people who have contracted with some firms. Was the experience pleasurable? Were there verifiable results?

Examine the Examples of The Sites They Have Optimized

Satisfied clients are the best class of promotion, so never be afraid to ask your prospective SEO firm about sites they have rendered services. If the firm would seem hesitant to disclose examples of sites they have done their services, then that should alarm you with the kind of company you are dealing with. Find one of their projects and take a look at their source code. There are some very basic things you can look for:

• W3C Compliant Code (well-formed source code helps SEO believe it or not and any good SEO team will consult your designer to make him aware of malformations)


• Keyword Stuffing is bad. Good SEO specialists won't over use keywords in meta-tags, or anywhere else. Read more about this here and here.


• Good Copy is essential. If your clients have SEO'ed sites with bad copy (writing) it means that their clients have been poorly informed about the effectiveness of good copy, or that the firm is more interested in the money than the quality of their own work.

Ask Questions

Throwing in some questions with potential SEO companies is a helpful thing, but it can be a daunting task if you aren't particularly knowledgeable on the subject. But don't fret, there are a lot of things you need to know immediately. For instance, you may ask how many search engines they will immediately submit your site to. Ask what sites, if any, do they use for auto-submission?

SEO in theory is a good thing, but bad SEO can burn your site and your wallet. Be smart about who you hire.

Utilizing Correct Keywords

Utilizing the correct keywords is important if you want ito increase traffic to your site. However, it does not mean an indiscriminate use of keywords. Putting more keywords does not necessarily translate to increase in traffic. In fact, page ranking can even go lower with too many repetitions due to developed systems and probes in search engines. Just take note of some strategies in utilizing correct keywords.

The Rudiments of Keywords

Internet searchers on the average key in only three or less keywords when looking for a site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average individual when attempting to use the correct keywords. Go pick three to five of the keywords that will most likely be utilized by the majority. These will be the foundation of your writing.

Simplicity is important. Choose simple keywords and integrate them in your writing. There are tools found in search engines that can help you in coming out with correct keywords.

Typically, page ranking begins to lower if keyword densities reach 8% and above. Web marketing gurus disclose that rankings remain high when articles make use of synonyms rather than those repetitive terms. At most, keywords should maintain within the 3% to 5% range.

Useful Strategies

Familiarize yourself with Meta keywords. Use of Meta Keywords can increase page ranking. Your subject matter will appear more important to search robots because of similarity in idea or terms. As an outcome, this would increase ranking and traffic.

Be more particular in your subject matter. In addition to the three to five words, think of 10 to 15 other important terms that best modify and specify them. To illustrate: if the keywords are "anti virus software", you can put in important terms in the content like "download", "errors", "bugs" and the like. The integration of these words will inform the users that the article is more informational.

Other than the content, the keywords should also be viewed in your Meta description, URL or domain address as well as the title or headline. All these topics will be examined by systems search engines which in turn will aid you gain more visibility in web page outcome. You can assess how well you are performing by investing in tools that show which keywords were really frequently used.

Drop Catchers

This should be old news to anyone using the internet but if you're in charge of registering domain names for your clients make sure they are aware that they know they have to re-register their domain name on a yearly basis. A common misconception by some is that they own their domain names. You're actually renting the right to use it from your registrar who brokers the deal between you and the governing bodies of the internet: ICANN. If your domain does expire, you have seventy-five days to re-register it before it goes up to grabs for anyone.

But what if you or your client don't already own the domain you want to use for an upcoming campaign or project? Well your first option is to contact the buyer and try to broker a price that will be acceptable to your client. The second? Convince them to hire a drop catcher.

A drop catcher is somone who attempts to exploit the three hour drop between 11 AM and 2AM Pacific on last day of the renewwal period. It's then that ICANN removes the registration from the database and they put the site up for grabs to the first company to claim it. The drop catchers attempt to buy specific domains requested by their clients who've backordered them before the names can be snatched up by someone else or the original owner.

Buzzword: Freeconomics

The latest 2008 marketing buzzword, arguably coined by Chris Anderson in his magazine WIRED, is 'freeconomics'. Freeconomics (not to be confused with the 'freakonomics' of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt fame) refers to the gradual increase of market abundance and reduced costs that drives prices of products an services down to zero. On the internet especially, as resources are centralized, costs can be shared among the many reducing costs for all. For a better explanation of 'freeconomics' take a look at Chirs Anderson's blog TheLongTail where he discusses five main 'free' business models:

• Freemiums



For instance, the actual product or service is free, but a "pro" version or upgrade is what fuels growth. Chris sites the 1% rule where 1 percent of your customers support the costs of serving the other 99 percent. Give away the product, sell the upgrade.




• Advertising



There is no better example than Google where everything, every product, every service is a leader to sell advertising to a third party. Free offerings build audiences with specialized interests that may be useful to advertisers who will pay to reach them.




• Cross-subsidies



Where giving away a lead products or services in one area encourages spending in another where costs can subsidize the lost. An example is when bands give away their music to entice audiences to buy concert tickets. Or like big media outlets that are starting to give away information online to encourage spending offline. Or even still people who produce e-books that they give away, only to sell themselves as lecturers, experts or consultants.




• Labor Exchanges



The trade-off of labor is another business model of 'freeconomics'. For instance, this social news media site Digg.com operates on this model. Digg simply provides the means for an audience to submit news which then attracts a wider audience that Digg then sells to advertisers. In their case, the 'digging' through billions of webpages for data and filtering it is carried out by the audience. Digg provides the centralized location and algorithms to filter out spam. It's a labor-trade that enriches both sides in someway.




• Gift Economics



Giving away products or information for some other reason. For instance, giving away knowledge simply for the social statuss of being considered an expert (moderators at 'Wikipedia" or bloggers), giving away products to be recognized for your talents an industry innovator ('Mozilla' and 'Wordpress'), or giving away services to be acknowledged as a benefactor deserving of donations or grants (non-profits like "CARE.org").

IEO - Optimizing Images for Search

Everybody sing along "S-E-I-E-O!!!!!"

By now we all know what SEO stands for and why its great. (If you don't, skip this blog and start with one for beginners!) But a big part of SEO is tagging your photos with the correct contextual information that is needed to get them indexed. Keywords located within the Alt=" " tag of your image code are all a search engine like Google needs to properly index your media.

As it relates to branding you can subtly increase your search reuslts by tagging photos with your clients company name followed by whatever the picture is. For instance alt="Pepsi Holiday Party" or alt="Canon Summer Retreat Picnic". In both cases we are giving search engines terms to index for relevancy ('holiday party' and 'summer retreat picnic') but we're also correlating that data with our client's name. Thus users searching for either mages of summer picnics will include our clients photos.

What we don't want to do is overstuff the alt= field with things like "canon picnic april photos summer photography D80 new product buy" as search robots have learned to eventually filter out tags like these. Less than five words in an alt field is usually safe.

Thus your code should look something like this:



<img src=”http://clientserver.com/images/canon_retreat09.jpg” alt=“canon summer retreat” width=”50″ height=”150″/>




Image search is still an emerging frontier but it can still drive a ton of traffic to your site. Until companies like Polar Rose perfect image search technology, relevancy is all we have to markup our image files. So do it, do it right and happy tagging!