Luke Brown Marketing Blog

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Search engine optimization is like any other business. There are good and bad companies and good and bad clients. Here are a few ways to tell them apart.

Good SEO Companies

Good SEO companies have many attributes in common, either things they do or things they don’t do. Good SEO companies:

* Have a quality website with an Alexa ranking of 500,000 or less (about the top 2% of sites in attracting traffic). If an SEO company can’t drive traffic to their own site, how can they drive traffic to yours?

* Have no problem understanding and explaining that first page rankings for new websites and sites with competitive keywords can take up to one year.

* Understand that SEO is not a one-time project, but an ongoing strategy to get to the first page and stay on the first page.

Bad SEO Companies

* Promise #1 rankings, especially in a short period of time. Google specifically mentions that this is unachievable. If it sounds too good to be true…

* Give quotes without even knowing the website domain. That’s like a doctor diagnosing patients without seeing them or asking them questions.

* Have a one-size-fits-all approach, doing the same tasks for every website regardless of its problems. They know a few things and do it to every website, whether needed or not. They are reluctant to share written communication.

Good Clients

* Share all available information needed for the SEO to do the job, including the domain name, host name, user names, passwords and other information.

* Don’t tell the SEO firm which keywords to use. It doesn’t matter what the client or the SEO company think are good keywords. Comprehensive research will definitively show which keywords work best.

* Won’t send out an RFP (Request For Proposal). The RFP may not address the website’s actual needs. It’s vital for the client to interview SEO companies to generate rapport, a feeling of their expertise, and their plans for improving the website.

Bad Clients

* Tell SEO firms to engage in black hat SEO practices.  A good SEO company will fire this client. In this economy, it’s difficult to separate yourself from a paying job. Most people’s integrity is worth more than that.

* Don’t want to pay until the job is finished. SEO – good SEO – takes time, both to do the work and to see results. There’s no need to pay upfront, but paying 25% of the total after specified milestones is fair for the work involved.

Are there more attributes for SEO clients and companies? Of course there are. These are just a few of the basics. If you have some favorite attributes, share them in the comments section. I’m looking forward to some good stuff!

The cool folks at Wordtracker, who make both a free and paid version of a highly popular keyword tool, recently released SEO Blogger, a free plugin for the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Blogging is a great way to build relationships with your customers, clients and other interested parties. Plus, search engines love blogs which are frequently updated. Writing often (and well) to take advantage of that is difficult, because not not many people are writers, let alone good writers. SEO Blogger helps solve that problem.

When writing a post, SEO Blogger is in the browser sidebar. Enter the keyword or phrase you want to use and SEO Blogger suggests some related words and phrases so you get maximum optimization from your blog posts. It even posts recent search volume. This helps you decide which target market to pursue, based on popularity of searches.

It’s a great method for gaining insight and expertise into the specific keyword phrases people are searching for. The benefits of doing keyword research and optimizing your posts for SEO at the same time are extremely valuable!

Not only does SEO Blogger save you time, it automatically tracks how many times you use a specific keyword, keeping your blog posts from sounding like spam. Even better, it works with all blogging platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type.

Get Wordtracker’s simple 4-step tutorial for using SEO Blogger.