How to hire an SEO Professional, Expert, Service, Guy!
Last night about 10PM I was on the phone with a friend of mine who owns a real estate site in Myrtle Beach discussing a copy of a PDF invoice from a well known "SEO type dude"
Examining the document in every detail I was amazed to see the kind of pricing being charged and some of the claims being casually tossed around when I realized that such nonsense is the subject of many alleged SEO experts claims. Because of this I spent a few hours late last evening searching via google for all kinds of SEO services that appeared to be ranking high and of those I wanted to find which ones had a client base worthy of mention.
Top things to avoid! Bogus claims of an SEO!
Lets look at a list I've compiled over time regarding claims and assumptions made by alleged SEO professionals and those duped into believing such claims.
If your proposed SEO professional mentions or includes any of the below features in their package for your sites success you may want to examine things in a bit more detail before you sign on.
SEO Service Agreement Exhibit A
1) We guarantee you a #1 to #10 position in Google! (or any thing close to that claim)
FACT: Pure bull and anyone bold enough to pimp that lie should be charged with fraud. There is no way a person can guarantee you a position of any particular rank value period. Such a tactic is used by scam artists to get you to part with your money and when a year goes by and you don't rank you and you alone will be accused for hindering the rankings, not the guy that just took you for $10k
2)
We submit you to over ### search engines so you rank quicker.
FACT: If Any part of the SEO package is to submit you to 5, 50, 500, 5 billion, or 5 trillion search engines, toss the agreement. Can you guess how important such bulk submissions to countless search engines really matters? Any guess will do! Here is the answer. NOTHING! Unless your site is in a specific trade that would benefit from being part of offshoot search engines then the only three that matter in bulk is Google, MSN and Yahoo. All the others "MAY" help but automated submissions have proven over time to be a waste of time. So why offer it?
Such verbage in contracts and agreements are fluff and are placed there for lack of any real content. Such contracts with promises to submit you to search engines on mass are first of all easy to prove that action has been taken on your behalf to justify your spending tens of thousands of dollars should an endeavor fail or litigation be pursued. This is a clever technique used to defraud people into believing they are getting lots and lots attentive service by the SEO professional when in fact they aren't. Maybe thats still not clear so lets look at a subset logic using the same argument but this time for hosting to articulate my point.
Hosting is so cheap its almost a give away commodity. Hosting companies will frequently divy up a plan for next to nothing, say $4 a month and in that plan they promise you some super unbelievable amount of space, bandwidth, emails and ftp accounts and you say WOW! I'm in, sign me up and lets get rolling.
So, you click the sign up agreement which cleverly includes "NO PORN, NO FILE SHARING, NO OPEN GALLERIES, NO GAME SERVERS, NO SPAM or Email Blasts" etc and so on. Which pretty much sums up most of the big space and bandwidth users. Then you get your site on a server with 400 other domains, most of them hobby sites built because of the explosion in free ware and open source solutions easily employed by novice webmasters. Now you have 1 shared IP and you share that IP with countless novices each one with potential bad practices like spam or link farm issues and your IP is tossed by the SE's as BAD. You just got $4 worth of service. So too is the bulk SE submissions by SEO professionals. Its a cheap service you can do yourself with dozens of free tools available.
Don't fall into the trap of believing this service is anything but simple nonsense.
3)
Content!
NOTE: Its been said that "appearance is golden but content is king" and thats true. However, content sometimes falls into that fluff page filler category in agreements as an after thought because most SEO's know you are going to ask about it so why not include it. The problem here is that most site owners feel they are not qualified to write good content. Let me explain a dangerous trend regarding this little addition that you should be keen in your understanding.
Any SEO that doesn't include content writing in his proposal or agreement should be questioned as to why. However if it is included but without details, such a feature should also be questioned. Granted copy writing isn't a paramount fundamental to good SEO services, it should certainly be considered in the scheme of the project beforehand and is always a good policy to a well formed marketing plan but SEO services can be performed without it. (Just not happily is my opinion.)
Details should include at minimum; who the copy writer is, the level of grammatical skill they possess in writing, their education and knowledge about the subject mater, and their ability to conduct research based on given models such as exploratory research when a subject is new to the writer. Next, does this writer of content understand things like keyword density and the meaning of exculpatory details or maybe the meaning of expository vs narrative types of writing? A good copy writer should understand the fundamentals of human behavior and should write content with a target audience in mind. Writing is a form of communication that can be interpreted many ways and the clarity of the content in conveying a well structured purposeful message is essential. Consider this little tid bit also;
I've learned in recent weeks that some SEO's that are contracted to perform copy writing services, seem to be following a nasty little trend in recent months where writing projects are posted to freelance sites at an average price of $1 to $5 a piece. Not bad until you consider who bids on them.
Examining a few of these projects where purchasers claim to be big lofty SEO firms with hundreds of clients in the US often start out with a project posting in numbered increments like say "20 Real Estate Articles 500 words minimum". After looking at WHO this "SEO Company" was entertaining for the project I couldn't help but notice that projects were being bid on and alloted to writers possessing skills best summarized like this; "I guud, i da best and cheapist, i write for u" No pun intended with the misspelling but I use this to articulate a point.
How can a writer in a nation who's native language is something other than English going to write anything of value for you at all? Now I've hired writers from other nations where translations are required of "original content" and I usually do so in pairs which works best. But such "original content" being sold to US website owners behest (promised) by their SEO professional escapes me as a good or logical business practice.
Its your responsibility to keep your SEO expert honest. Good content writing is on average $40 per hour and $100 per hour is realistic if research and other considerations are factored in particularly first hand knowledge or experience about the subject matter.
Based on my experience, for an "above average" well articulated article takes me between 2 - 4 hours to assemble yet I charge only for actual writing time which breaks down to about 15 - 20 minutes per 500+ words. Because I know what goes into copy writing, the notion that it can be done for $1 - $5 seems almost laughable.