Real Estate Forums

Jared · 02-20-2008, 11:13 AM

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.

Jared · 02-20-2008, 11:17 AM

Part Two

4) Paid Link Exchanges

DEADLY: I'm not even going to explore this in depth as I can just as easily summarize it by saying "Google, Yahoo and MSN do not like the practice because its deception on a wholesale level." Paid links basically says my content sucks so bad I have to pay you to link to it. Thats Googles take not mine! Paid links or paid blog post schemes will land you in hot water when some one reports it. If you are in a business where you have actual competition then that competition will notify Google at some point to get you out of a position they want. I'd do it myself if I knew a person were ranked because of paid links in hopes they get blacklisted. Summary, Its a bad practice by any SEO professional and should be avoided.

5) Blog and Forum Spam (not written this way naturally)

Caution: Some SEO services have printed right on their website that part of their service is to submit your links to popular blogs, forums and other exchanges and directories as part of the SEO procedure. Granted back links are essential for search engine success, but the techniques used can be more damaging than helpful if done simply as an after thought in hopes of getting paid.

Because of this we go back to my suggestion regarding copy writing where I state that its not a procedure that can be done at wholesale levels in hopes of paying less for more. This simply does not work. People who do SEO services and do them well spends hours upon hours cleverly and intelligently linking and seeking back links to your site. Good quality forum submission professionals will often charge $1 - $3 per post (100 post minimum) to babysit and participate on your behalf in forums where back links are allowed. To believe that a dozen or so posts around the web is all inclusive for the service of search engine optimization is utter nonsense yet its implied as such frequently.

I've been asked to assess many websites for SEO presence and from the back link perspective alone it was a joke to believe they actually paid for such a service. Considering the claim in the agreement which clearly states "intelligent one way back linking" from sites that matter were included.

Linking begins with something to link to and therein lies the importance of relevance. Linking relevantly is paramount to the success of your SEO efforts.

Since this is such a broad subject I'll explore this in more detail in subsequent posts.

6) SEO friendly pages, links and site design

Important: Its almost funny when I hear people give praise to an SEO expert for his power to get a site indexed using WordPress yet I bite my tongue as not to offend for knowing the things I know.

WordPress among other applications are in fact ideal for search engine ranking and when an SEO expert includes such tools I often give praise to them for making a smart choice for the use of such products. But this post is about keeping them honest before you walk down the road of hiring someone at such an incredible expense.

WordPress and other applications are deceptively easy to employ and almost automatically begin life with many fundamental SEO features already factored in. Its dangerously easy to take credit for SEO wisdom and ranking success of websites that use WordPress or Joomla even where no additional services have been provided that would grant such credit. Its because of this reason that I make it last on my list in this post in hopes that you will read it intently.

WordPress and properly configured CMS solutions like Joomla once installed are ready for SEO from the start. Let me clarify before you jump to conclusion. Each of these applications have many of the fundamentals of good site design already built in to a proven format and structure that the search engines love to entertain and spend time on. Because of this, some SEO's who profit from your ranking may do so as a result of NONE of their work at all. The scary part is that neither WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS is out of box complete for an SEO endeavor. Why? Because the difference is in the details.

I personally employ WordPress and Joomla among other CMS solutions as ideal tools for ranking sites quite and building upon as good foundations. But it never stops at installation and permalink configuration. Professionals who are truly professional in SEO services take what WordPress or any CMS provides and works in proprietary methods of ranking and promoting a site that goes beyond the turnkey SEO firms charge for. Think about this for a moment. Why pay someone for SEO service only to have them do as little as they possibly can in order to dupe you out of your money? Furthermore they do so with automated methods such as search engine submission tools and preformed websites using WordPress and turnkey articles outsourced to Pakistan or India.

Isn't that like handing someone your watch and asking them to tell the time, which they do and then bill you for something that is none of their doing at all? How can you tell the difference between someone who just drops in a solution and one that actually takes part in your domains success by providing an active service? Again, the difference is in the details and a qualified professional will have knowledge in areas not generally known by novices and those differences will be explained to you at time of agreement. Thats how!

Not enough can be said about intelligently selecting an SEO professional and the necessary skills one would have to possess. Black hat scammers and link frauds are born every day and if it is your intention of getting to the top regardless of good practice then hire them. But in the long run, black listed sites are exceptionally difficult to revive once they fall from grace.

I'll write more about this later on as this post will need to be polished up and reflected upon. I had little time to post this so please do not judge it for grammar and spelling and such.

We continue on to the next category....SEO Misconceptions Revisited!

fred333 · 02-20-2008, 12:12 PM

Those are some great posts. Thanks for the tips.

Jared · 02-20-2008, 12:24 PM

Most welcome, I'll add the other three in this series later

Buy New Tampa · 02-20-2008, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jared

Most welcome, I'll add the other three in this series later

I hope so... was about to chime in on some of the finer details you missed

Now I will just have to wait to make sure you have a chance to finish first...

This is an excellent start, keep it up.

Jared · 02-20-2008, 12:47 PM

Yeah I could have ran on forever with the things I've discovered but my next segment SEO Misconceptions Revisited will detail even more.

IDXSEOPRO · 02-20-2008, 01:23 PM

Jared you are administrator here too? cool I see you on so many forums and as usual its a pleasure to read your posts.

I'm curious though about your statement regarding paid links. I think you have that mixed up a bit. Paid links are not bad and some companies make a good living on them.

Are you sure you have the right term down "paid links" because I've sold links on one of my sites on my wordpress sidebar to people before and I've never heard anything bad about that.

Jared · 02-20-2008, 01:34 PM

Welcome to the forums and yes I mean "Paid Links" exactly as you have described them.

I always ask people if they defend the idea of paid links because they get a pay check and still believe they are legit, then please be willing to post a link to their site for the paid links. No one ever takes me up on that request.

Why? because if you have to hide something its not legit in that regard and posting a site that offers paid links would be QUICKLY reported to any number of the snitch reporting sites including Matt Cutts own blog.

The way to see if you really think paid links are legit is to ask yourself if you would be willing to post the link here or anywhere for others to see. My guess is you would not. The consequences are too great.

Buy New Tampa · 02-20-2008, 01:46 PM

But alas... the paid Google links are ok, no?

Jim B · 02-20-2008, 02:21 PM

good information Jared, when looking at things like that, I start to think about how so many Realtors hire a SEO thinking that they can do this for 6 months or a year and then they don't have to do much after that but go to the bank. These are the ones who over time can be out worked, and of course they don't learn much so they have to start paying for SEO again, and end up addicted.