Category Archives: SEO

Search Engine Optimisation and the old, new and different opinions, techniques and advice associated with making it a positive aspect of a website.

Are SEO consultants worth the money?

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I came across a blog article today and was going to write a short reply to it.  It turned into a bit of an essay.  My biggest problem is explaining the big picture concisely enough to capture all the facts and not myself look like an idiot… easily done.

The post I commented on was here:

Are SEO consultants worth the money?

My reply is posted but I have included it below for reference.

Hi kmknight.

I do SEO myself and web design and anything else web related that comes along I suppose. I agree about the rates on SEO being surprisingly high and understand exactly what you are saying about doing it yourself to save money but I will raise a few points for you to consider and maybe this will go towards understanding why the rates can be like this.

1. Target keyword competition
2. changes in requirements
3. Linking quantity of quality
4. Navigation and usability
5. Social networking

1. Getting to the top of the listings for a specific targeted keyword is not easy if the competition is high. The standard method is the long haul of building good quality content over the long term and aiming towards a specific keyword by the end to generate more traffic, visits and return. Its all market dependant and if you check the PCC rates some high target keywords can be as much as 12 dollars A CLICK.

2. Google likes to change and adapt. If your running a business then you wont have the time to stay on top, so a dedicated “SEO specialist” should be on their game and aware of these upcoming changes and be ready to adapt to them. One prominent change coming is the localisation Google is implementing and this will affect many sites and their rankings (again). Business owners will always be looking for reliable people to outsource specific works hence the reaon for the existance of marketing companies, PR firms, designers, developers, builders, suppliers etc. Its all about the service.

3. Getting loads of links may be good. But it might be bad. SEO specialists should be able to find and obtain quality links rather than bulk loads of junk. One decent quality link may take 6 months to obtain but could be worth 1000 junk links. Would a business owner have the time or know how in acquiring this? No. The SEO Specialist should though.

4.SEO is on-site and off-site. Like you mentioned its ok getting 10,000 visits at the end of the day but if they are not buying then the site has something fundamentally wrong. SEO specialists should be able to manipulate the functionality and presentation of the site to ensure that those visits are being maximised to the greatest degree. I have always said I would prefer 100 visits and 90 purchases to 10,000 visits and 90 purchases. It all eats away at the ROI of the business in unseen costs such as bandwidth etc.

5. Blogging and branding are the way forward it seems in the social networking world and carefully structuring a brand around a product takes time and patience. Bad SEO practitioners will use every trick in the book to make a fast buck and eventually be removed or detested because of this. Building a respectable name and reputation is never easy.

For example, on your blog are you using the No follow attribute? Is this comment going to benefit me in any way because it is benefiting you. No follow is one small example of a bad idea that is automatically implemented and has to be removed by the user. Based on the theory that it would deter spam it hasn’t actually worked out like that and actually discourages people from interacting in the web 2.0 environment. I believe that a “real” comment should receive some benefit. It will encourage me to come back and read more on your blog and you gain a loyal visitor who will help grow your blog via interaction. Why shouldn’t the commenter be receiving some “link juice” as repayment for the time they are putting in?

Add all this together and you have a serious amount of variables to consider to adapt to, analyse and develop and while every man and his dog claims to be an SEO expert it is only the very few who have the ability to implement and apply all the required aspects of a Search Engine Optimisation specialist. How much would you value that person if they where helping you to make a serious income?

The biggest problem is the idiots out there who take people for money and deliver nothing or very little in return. (of course some clients expectations are totally unreasonable as well but that’s a different story for a different day).

How to check your sites backlinks using a free backlink checker tool

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Checking the backlinks to your website is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. While it may sound obvious it is something that requires monitoring regularly to ensure that you are getting the best return from other sites who are linking, preferably directly and one way, to you.

Plenty of simple ways are available to check the backlinks to your site and the results you get while performing a backlink check can vary greatly and hence can cause some confusion as to their significance.

To complete a backlink check we can use three different methods to complete the process.

Google Backlink Checker

- Open www.google.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink check result

The information here tells me that I have 6 other sites and pages linking to my full website address. But by clicking the option along the bottom of the page where it says:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 6 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

The new results tell me there are 11 links pointing to my site. The problem is quite are few of these links are my own pages linking to other internal pages and thus wont be generating me alot of traffic but these do help the traffic when it arrives by offering ways of navigating to other relevent content.

Yahoo Backlink Checker

So lets try the yahoo.com backlink checker. Follow the same process as for www.google.com in the Yahoo search bar.

- Open www.yahoo.com
- in the search bar type in:
- link:http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

Results are telling me I have 119 backlinks and 427 “inlinks”.

And finally lets go to the MSN backlink checker. Or rather lets not. MSN.com doesn’t allow you to do a “link:mysite.com” query at the moment as apparently they where being spammed by “bots”. Oh Dear.

iwebtool.com Backlink Checker

Now lets ask a third party. Lets use the backlink checker tool on iwebtool.com:

- Open http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
- in the text bar type in http://www.justinparks.com
- and the backlink checker result

The information here is totally different to the google result as it tells me I have backlinks totalling 322. A handy little feature here is also the pagerank display showing each of these pages and how “valuable” they are in the backlink hierarchy.

Now the problem is, who do I believe? What information is relevent to me and my site?

All of the information provided by these backlink checkers is relevant in my opinion. The reason that the results differ will be down to each backlink checkers method of obtaining the results. For example, Google may only consider a backlink from a ranked page that has a Google PR of 1 or more (this isn’t fact is just to illustrate the point) so all the pages linking back to me are valuable in there own way according to Google.

Yahoo will follow the same format, but Yahoo does not employ the Page Rank system so will use a different method of establishing the links from other sites and may have different filters in place to return the result of backlinking pages.

The iwebtool.com backlink checker is exactly the same as both Yahoo and Google having set parameters against the results returned.

The best advice that can be given then is to review all three of these backlink checkers regularly and simply keep active on the internet, searching for relevant and quality websites related to your information specifically. Also the backlinks will occur naturally as you progress as other people will choose to link to your content (always nice) if they value it and believe it is relevant to them. The process can be long winded but the current internet based algorithms seem to like it and want it to continue.

Until that is they decide that some other method should be used…

Google SearchWiki – personalise your own search results

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An all new feature of the Google Search Results for those users logged into their Google Gmail account. This feature allows you to dictate internally within your account how the results for particular key phrases are displayed. In other words you can effectively create your own personalised “top 10″ search results for keywords and phrases you search for regularly.

This wont affect rankings (yet) but I can see it having an effect once this gains momentum and popularity with users and may act as some kind of “vote” helping websites rank higher when more users have them personalised at the number one position within their own accounts, however I´m simply speculating about this at the moment!

For more detailed information about this check out the Official Google Blog here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html