Just want to make one thing perfectly clear. Neither of those things are good seo services. If you visit a website offering this as an seo service, don’t buy into the hype.

When bloggers get comments like; “I really enjoy your blog post and will be back often”, or “Great Blog Post! I was thinking the same thing”, or “great blog! I bookmarked you and will visit to read more soon”, we know it’s spam and we mark it as spam or delete it.

That means you paid for an seo service that actually built you 0 links. Doesn’t sound right does it?

There are advantages to writing Google Knol Pages. Here are some advantages I’ve discovered.

1. Google Knol Pages can help with branding your company name. Building a lot of Google Knol Pages with your company name in the title or subtitle can rank well for your company name in searches and provide useful information to visitors.

2. Google Knol Pages can help with Reputation Management. Much like branding, you can use Google Knol Pages to saturate the search engine with more results for your name, possibly burying bad PR.

3. The links from Google Knol Pages are supposed to be nofollow, but when checking backlinks in Google, I have seen links from a knol page being counted. It’s been rare, but it could help with link popularity in Google and other search engines.

4. Google Knol Pages can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field. Publishing your articles as Google Knol Pages is much more preferable than publishing to article directories.

What are some of the ways you have benefitted from Google Knol Pages?

If you own an online store and you do not add informative articles or operate a blog, you are not really a content publisher. Adding articles or a blog or both makes you one. I’ll explain the advantages of being a content publisher in a moment.

Link popularity is important. If you are not publishing content then you have to go out and buy links or use link building strategies like web directory submissions. Paid links can be expensive and have ongoing costs. Not all web directories give you really good links.

When you add articles to your website, you are publishing content. When you add a blog to your website, you are publishing content daily. With either of these, you can use social bookmarking to go out and promote your content. This brings in direct traffic and will increase your link popularity.

With paid links and web directory submissions, you may benefit for awhile then have google discount those links at some point and then you are back at square one.

Promoting your content is a much more legitimate way of building links that will never be discounted. It’s all relevant to your topic. You are promoting actual content you are creating. You are following the best practices promoted by the search engines.

There are other ways to promote your content. Creating videos and posting teasers on youtube that prompt the viewer to visit your site for the rest of the video or for more videos is another way to get links by promoting your content.

Content is king. When links gained importance with google, many SEOs began posting that link building was more important than content. But building links BECAUSE of your content trumps paid links and url submissions to directories hands down, meaning that content is still king, even when it comes to link building.

To discuss how to build real links to your website through generating and promoting great original content, call us at 786-317-8774.

Article Marketing should be part of both your SEO strategy and your Reputation Management strategy. It can also help you with Image Building and Branding.

SEO Article Marketing Benefits: Each time you write an article or have an article written for you and you submit that article to articles directories, you build link popularity. Webmasters and Bloggers seek good, original content about their topics and reprint your articles on their website or blog. The footer of each article contains links to your website, so each website or blog it is reprinted on is another link to your website from a related website.

Reputation Management Article Marketing Benefits: You need to actively manage your reputation online. The more things you put your name or your company name on, the more results there are for your name or your company name in the search engines. That means when someone types your name or company name into a search engine they will find a lot of results.

If a disgruntled employee, dissatisfied customer, or someone else writes something about you or your company, they are also producing search engine results for your name. If you have been actively creating content and linking to it with proper anchor text, it will be difficult for them to rank well for your name.

Article Marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to increase the number of results for your name or company name. Writing articles that have your name in the byline and your company name in the footer, in the article, or even in the title each month will increase the number of results for your name that you control.

Image Building Benefits of Article Marketing: If you want to create an image for yourself or your company, article marketing can help with that as well. You can establish yourself as a leading expert in your field by writing informative, helpful articles about your area of expertise. The more helpful you are, the more people will begin to see you as an expert they trust.

Branding Benefits of Article Marketing: Similar to Reputation Management, article marketing can help you with branding your name. Putting out a number of articles each month on topics related to your business helps associate your company name with those topics.

I recommend that everyone do some form of article marketing every month. Consistancy is the key. 10 articles per month, plus distribution, only costs you $270 per month and can help you with all of the things mentioned above. Visit Article Content Provider today!

Example: “I need high quality articles of 500 words or more each written with SEO in mind. I am willing to pay $1.50 per article.”

Some go on to say they want 2.5% keyword density while another will say 6% keyword density and others have other density requirements. The Bottom line is, that tells me they are the ones who are dense.

They read some EBook, or whatever, that told them what the proper percentage is for keyword density. No one can give you an exact percentage. Those that do give out advice on that and quote a specific percentage are almost as dense as the people who believe them.

You are not going to get high quality articles written for $1.50. I run an article writing service and my prices are on the low end of the scale at $30 per article. That is extremely cheap for well-written articles. Anything less than that price is likely to be keyword-stuffed drivel that is not worth the time to submit anywhere.

But many people who think they understand article marketing don’t really care about quality. They want a large number of articles with that perfect keyword density they read about.

Here are 10 things you need to understand about article marketing. Obviously, there is a ton of people out there doing what they believe is article marketing who do not have a clue.

1. Target your audience. If you target the American Market for your products and services, then having someone who does not understand how to sell products to Americans and who doesn’t write like an American write your article is just totally worthless.

2. Everything on the Internet is permanent. If you are hiring a ghostwriter then your name is going on these articles with links to your company website. When readers read the poorly written articles that are stuffed with keywords and look like a boob wrote them, they are going to think you are the boob that wrote them and your company’s image suffers.

3. Having articles written and submitting them to directories is not what article marketing is about. This is where most people’s understanding of article marketing stops. Article Directories are there to provide quality content to webmasters who want to use articles in their websites. The tradeoff of giving a link back to the owner of that article is the price they pay for the use of the content.

4. Article Directories are not there to increase your link popularity. Just submitting articles to article directories does increase your link popularity a little. However, these directories are not websites that are related to your topic. Websites that might use that article are likely related to your website’s topic. Therefore, unless the articles are good enough that people want to re-post them on related websites then you are missing the whole article marketing boat.

5. Long-term value. Buying a bunch of cheap articles and doing mass submissions will not give you the long-term value, which article marketing, can and will do if done properly. A well-written article submitted to just one website can give you more link popularity and direct traffic than 100 poorly written articles that are mass submitted.

6. High quality articles have a snowball effect that lasts for a very long time. As more and more websites use the article as content you will see your link popularity, grow. Each of them becomes a related website linking to you.

7. It takes time to see the real effects of good article marketing. The longer your article is out there, the more it is used by other webmasters and the more your link popularity grows. It happens a little at a time just like the search engines like for a websites link popularity to grow. Getting 1000 links to your website overnight can cause your website to rank lowers in the search engines rather than higher.

8. Direct Traffic. If the writer of your article does not know how to sell product or make a rational point that leads a reader to WANT to click the links in the footer, then again you are missing part of the value of article marketing and are wasting your money. Article marketing can drive traffic directly to your website if they are written properly.

I’m not talking about an article that just promotes your website or product. Webmasters will not use those and article directories will not accept them. However, if you wrote a guide to filing a patent and in the article advised they consult an attorney, then you have written an informative article that puts the idea in the reader’s head that they need a lawyer to file a patent. In addition, the links are right there in the footer to your legal services. How convenient!

9. If the person writing the article does not really understand SEO, then you are again missing a major part of article marketing. There is no set percentage that your keywords should appear. They should be mentioned where possible but not in a way that detracts from the quality of the article itself. Reader first, SEO second. Some writers really know how to do this and it is second nature to them to write this way. Webmasters who might want to use it as content do care that it contains the right keywords, but they will not use an article that is written poorly and that is an obvious attempt to spam the keywords into the page.

10. Good writers who understand sales, SEO, and know how to write well deserve to be paid well. If you want quality articles that you are not ashamed to put your name on, then you have to pay for it.

Some of you out there that might read this article really don’t care what they put their names on. In that case, this article is not written for you. Go and keep doing your thing out there. When you decide you really want to try to be successful come back and read this again. Bookmark it where you found it right now, read it in six months, and see if you understand it then.

For those of you who do want real quality and want to have all of the advantages that article marketing can give you and who do care what their name gets attached to, just remember that good writers need to be paid what they are worth. I hope this article has helped you understand what article marketing is really all about.

Need Articles or Content written for you?

I go to google and type in link:www.mywebsite.com and get 0 results.

I go to www.marketleap.com and www.mywebsite.com has a total of 3,188 inbound links, 0 in google, and 3,188 in yahoo.

I go to www.linkpopularity.com and get about the same results.

Now, I understand all of that, however, when I type link: www.mywebsite.com into google, (note: this time I put a space after the colon) I get 16,100 results. Now, many of those are internal links, but others are from websites, article directories, web directories, etc. No link farms or bad neighborhoods.

My question is not whether or not I need to build up my link popularity. That’s pretty obvious. But why if those other websites, like www.EzineArticles.com, www.EvanCarmichael.com, www.BlogCatalog.com, etc., which are top notch websites are linking to my website, why do they not show up in a link popularity check?

How do I build links to my website?

There are dozens of different ways to increase your link popularity. But what is the difference between building link popularity and getting links that actually send you traffic and makes you sales? That is the important distinction to make.

Every seo company will talk to you about link building and why link popularity is important. Obviously link popularity is one of the factors in determining how well your website ranks in the search engines, but are the search engines the only source of traffic you want?

Some link building should be done based on the fact that the website linking to you might send you some quality traffic that might buy your products and services. So there are two different types of link building strategies.

Link Building for Link Popularity

This is where you are working to get a lot of one-way inbound links to your website to improve your search engine listings. You can submit to web directories, get other related websites to link to you, build forum profiles, participate in forums and on blogs, do social bookmarking, and other methods to get these links.

Reciprocal Links

These are dead as far as helping your website rank better in the search engines, however, if you believe the visitors of another website would also be interested in clicking over to your website, then reciprocal links are still valuable. This is link building to increase the number of traffic sources for your website.

Buying Links

Again, almost dead for building link popularity for the search engines, but buying a link on a related website to attract their visitors to your website has value. It becomes another source of traffic to your website. Make sure the place that sells you the link uses a no follow tag to link to you so google doesn’t think you are trying to buy link popularity.

Buying Advertising

This is a buyer beware situation. There are a lot of websites that are real proud of the value of ads on their website. What I mean by that is many people overcharge for advertising.

Example: You have a real estate website and sell real estate in Georgia.

There is a web directory for real estate websites that is broken down by state.

They tell you that it will cost you $300 per month to be added to the Georgia real estate section.

Then they tell you they get 10,000 unique visitors every day and they have proof!

Wow! 10,000 people will see my listing? Nope.

Ask them how many unique visitors they get to the exact page your listing will appear on and ask for proof of that. Then ask them how many people click listing on that page daily.

Let’s say of the 10,000 people that visit that site, 200 actually get to the page with your listing on it. Of those 200, 20 actually click links. Now consider how many other georgia real estate websites are listed on that page. Let’s say there are 20 including yours. That means that likely this website listing will get you 1 click through to your website daily. Are you willing to pay $300 per month for 30 visitors? That’s $10 per visitor.

This was just an example of how you need to analyze the website you plan to buy advertising on before you spend the money. Negotiate once you analyze the data. If it doesn’t seem worth it, don’t buy it.

If you think the stats look good, put in a unique identifier on the link. Like; www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org

Everything after the ? mark will not affect where the link goes, but in your stats, when you look at pages visited, you can see how many people visited www.yourwebsite.net?adsite.org vs how many visited www.yourwebsite.net.

Do not let it discourage you from advertising though. Advertising can help you build your brand on the web and can bring in some very good traffic to improve your sales. Just buy smart.

Now that your website is built and you are sure it’s ready to receive traffic and convert sales, you are ready to go out and get some people to come visit your new website.

How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?

That is the most asked question on the web. Everyone wants more traffic and there are a lot of different ways to get that traffic. Some of it depends on your monthly budget for promoting your website, (You do have one I hope), and some of it depends on how well you followed the earlier steps in the New Web Business Guide when planning and building your website.

Where Will My Visitors Come From?

Search Engines

The number one source of traffic for your website is from the search engines. Notice I used the plural, search engineS. Do not think that just because google is the biggest search engine that you should only focus your attention on google. All of the search engines can send you traffic that will convert to sales.

Many people say that msn and yahoo traffic convert at a higher rate than google. That may or may not be true depending on your business and what you sell. There are also other smaller search engines you will want to get traffic from.

Search Engine Submissions

To submit or not submit, that is the question. Different people tell you different things about submitting your website to the search engines. It used to be very important to do so, but I have found that having the major search engines find you is better.

How do they find you? Easy, you need a link from a website that is already established and already gets crawled often by google. It can be as simple as making some comments on the right forums or blogs with a link back to your website. Provided they do not use nofollow tags. That is why I said plural blogs and forums. Don’t stop at one.

The search engines will crawl those sites and find the link to your site an follow that link. When the spider gets to your website, it will follow all of the links that go to your other pages if you have done a good job on your website’s navigation or internal linking.

If you find that your website is still not getting crawled after a couple of weeks, then by all means go ahead and submit it to yahoo, google, and msn.com.

I do submit to the smaller search engines for listings because they are not as sophisticated as google, yahoo, msn, aol, and ask.com. You can type search engine submissions into google and find a lot of free search engine submission sites. These will hit a lot of the smaller search engine for you.

ORGANIC SEO is an seo term you should know. This is where the search engines compare the content on your webpage to see if it is relevant to what a user has typed in as a search term.

The more relevant you are to what the user typed in, the higher the search engine will rank you. That is a little over-simplified because your relevancy to the search term is only one of the things that the search engines use to determine how high you rank for a particular key phrase. However, your content is the most important factor in determining how you rank for a particular keyword or phrase. (some seo gurus may not agree. )

Link Popularity is also very important to how well you rank in the search engines for the keywords you target with your content. You need other websites, blogs, and directories also linking to you. Each link is like someone voting for your website.

Link popularity is not about quantity over quality. It is not about websites with high google page rank linking to you. It’s about websites, blogs, and directories with subjects that are relevant to your topic that matters.

If you own a website that is all about getting people to sign up for your gardening newsletter and a bicycle parts website with a pr6 links to you, it is not as valuable as a pr3 link from a lawn care website or probably even a real estate or home improvement website.

The added value to those links is that you are not just getting those links to help your search engine ranking, you are hoping to get people who visit those websites to also visit your website. They are likely the same type of audience you want to attract.

So be smart about link building. Don’t buy into link building schemes that offer to build your link popularity overnight. Don’t buy into reciprocal linking or even three way link schemes. If anything you read looks like it was designed to fool the search engines, it will likely hurt you in the long run.

To get great organic listings in the search engines, put great content into your website and get relevant sites to link to you.

Web Directories

Link Farms There are a lot of web directories out there and not all of them will help you get better search engine placement. Some are what we call link farms where they list just about everyone who submits a link to them. They have no content and they are not related to your website in any way. So links from these link farms are not going to help you.

Free Web Directory Listings can be good places to start. Free does not mean they are a bad place to get a link. Look for web directories that are well-made and maintained and those that are related to your niche or at least have categories that are related to what you offer visitors.

Paid Web Directory Listings does not necessarily mean they are a good place to get links just like free does not equal bad. Look for how much actual content they have in their directory besides just links. Consider the page rank of the actual page your link will appear on and not the page rank of their main page.

Don’t take their word for how many visitors they get daily unless they can prove it. And it doesn’t matter to you how much traffic they get. It matters how much traffic the page your link will be on gets and where your link will appear. Ask for statistics that show you the traffic for that page and if they have anything on how many people actually click links to visit sites they link to.

They may not have all of the information you want, but it does not hurt to ask. If they just refuse to provide any statistics, then buy a link elsewhere. Ask exactly where your link will appear on which page. Don’t just use the auto buy button and hope they give you good placement. If you don’t ask for it they can assume you don’t care.

In the next chapter of the new web business guide, I will be going over pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimization.

The first website I find is BikeUSA.com. Go ahead and click it to open a new window.

Now they are number 1 in google for bicycle parts. But I also leaned right away that the link in the google search results page is to http://bikeusa.com instead of http://www.bikeusa.com. Why do we care right? After all they are number 1 for the search term, so what’s the big deal?

By going to MarketLeap.com and checking link popularity with and without the www before the domain name we find that their link popularity is split between the two. A good link strategy would include making sure all of the links out there are to the www.yourdomainname.com instead of without.

Something else we find curious. If link popularity is so important, why does bikeusa.com without the www have 0 link popularity in google while it ranks as number 1 for bicycle parts in google? Now, www.bikeparts.com has only 34 link popularity in google. So how does the site rank so well?

There are many factors that help you rank well in the search engines. Only one of those is link popularity. The problem is that it shows a weakness in the optimization plan that can be exploited by a competitor.

A competitor who devised their strategy for the phrase bicycle parts might build a website that is similar or even better than this one. Then if they build a lot more links than this site has and maybe add more relevant content, they might overcome the number one spot from bikeusa.com.

I’m simplifying things a little here because the full explanation would be way more than a blog post and might bore you to tears. There are other things that a competitor could do to compete with them for that number 1 spot.

Website Analysis

We analyze a site the way a competitor might because we need to turn your weaknesses into strengths. Just because you have a high ranking for your search terms does not mean you do not need an SEO Professional to keep you there.

Title Tags

The title tags on the pages got my attention right away. Title Tags are important.

The main page title tag is Bike USA – Offering over 10,000 bicycle parts and related products, including bikes, clothing, parts of parts.

Then I clicked a link that says backpacks and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

So they have basically used the title tags like a file hierachy. That’s great for the designer so they can keep track of where a page they are working on goes when they finish, but terrible for seo purposes.

On the main page it is ok and even good branding to put your company name in the title tag, IF you believe that people do search for your company name. On the main page it is also ok to use more than one phrase in the title tag as you are not going to optimize the main page for just one search term.

Interior pages are much much different however. You want to narrow the focus of each page to target one or two key phrases. And only two if they are very very similar search terms. I personally would rather optimize each page for one search term, using that one search term in the title tag. There will be similar phrases in the page’s content and the search engine will find the page very relevant for the main search term as a result.

I went to an interior page where they sell bags and seat bags according to the link that got me there and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

Take a look at this search in google for the term Expanded Special Order Catalog

You will see several bike part websites are using the same system to pull the links to those parts from and our guinea pig bikeusa.com is about 5th for that search term. It’s pulling all of that from a database they share with other bicycle parts websites. Nothing wrong with that per say, but what does that tell us?

First it tells us that if we created a better system we could beat many of these bicycle parts websites because of them using that system.

Second it tells us that the first phrase in their title is what they are ranking well for on that page. The last phrase in that long title, bike accessory, they don’t make the front page. That page also does not rank for the other phrases and I’m not sure why they put them in quotes. Not sure if that hurts or helps but I wouldn’t do it.

Going back to the anchor text on the link that took me to that page, bags and seat bags, you would think that was the phrase they should target in the title as well but they chose not to even include it. I would have titled that page Bike Bags and Bicycle Seat Bags or better yet, Bike Bags by itself or Bicycle Seat Bags which would also be relevant for Bike Bags, Bicycle Bags, etc.

Now that page was mostly a links page to narrow down what you are search for to a more specific term. That’s where I found the link that said backpacks and the title is Expanded Special Order Catalog – Bike USA – “Your Online bicycle, bicycle parts, and bike accessory source”

Again that page does not mention backpacks at all. Could have used a title like Backpacks or even Bicycle Backpacks to stay with the whole bike parts theme. You want to use a hierarchy, fine. Use the title Bicycle Parts Bags Backpacks and that would even be an improvement.

Summary

There are a lot of other issues like the filenames for the pages, alt tags for the photos, descriptions, keywords metatag, etc. that I could explore if I had the time, but I don’t and you likely don’t have time to read more either, so I’m not going to go any further with this because it would turn into a book.

In just a few minutes, only examining a couple of issues, I’ve found that if a client came to me and wanted to capture the phrase bicycle parts and other associated key phrases, it would not be that difficult to do so. I know I can find a lot of other weaknesses as I dig through the website that can be strengths for my client.

Real Estate Systems are like this as well. They all have the same content basically and use the same system. Someone who exploits the weaknesses of the system and does a better job for their client can beat almost any real estate website using a system they bought from some real estate guru.

If you would like me to review your website to see what we can do for you, call 786-317-8774 or email us at info@seoserviceprovider.com

SEO, Content, and Link Building Strategies that work

Here are the top 10 questions they ask and my answers;

1. What type of monthly reporting will we recieve?

http://www.google.com

Seriously, we do have tools we use to track progress. We can give you progress reports on your link popularity, search engine saturation, search engine positioning for your keywords and phrases, and can do usage reports to track which pages, links, buttons, etc. were clicked on your website.

The bottom line is since hiring us, are you making more sales? If so, then leave the reporting to people that spend all of their time creating really pretty reports.

Reporting takes time. Time better spent on actually marketing your website and working on your website. For a fee I can provide as many reports on whatever you want as often as you want them.

What do you really want to pay me to do? Work on marketing your site or on studying trends and statistics and reporting them to you. We study these trends and stats ourselves and use that information to market for you. To take time out to send those as a report takes up valuable time that we feel is better spent working for you.

2. What type of statistical analysis will it include?

Any kind you want as stated above, but for an additional fee so i can pay someone to make you reports while I do the really important stuff like working on your website and marketing.

3. Will it contain graphics and charts we can use in presentations and to study?

If you insist, yes. You can pay us to optimize and promote your website and also to make you really pretty graphics that you can show off in the boardroom. Again, that isn’t included in our pricing.

A lot of companies charge you a lot of money to do SEO work for you and they include lots of great looking reports, stats, and analysis. Many companies keep these SEO companies on board because it looks like they are doing a great job because “just look at all these really cool graphics and charts!”

The only reason you should keep us or any other SEO company on board is if they are making you more money than they cost. Yes this takes time, so you can’t judge how well they did for your bottom line in just 30, 60, or 90 days. Try 6 months to a year to show real profitability.

If you were starting an offline business you wouldn’t expect to make a profit for at least 2 years. Why would you think online it’s any different.

If the SEO company you are talking to spend more time talking about charts, graphs, reports, link popularity, search engine rankings, etc. than they do about how they are going to help you make more sales, you should continue looking for a good SEO company in my opinion.

4. How long is the contract we will be asked to sign?

None. The day you believe we are not doing a good job for you, get someone else. You should. Performance is all that counts. Good intentions are not enough. Many of our clients have been with us for years because we get results. But even my oldest dearest client should leave me if I stop getting those results.

5. Here is a general explanation of what we need. We want you to rewrite all of the content on xyz.com and optimize it and do some website promotion for it afterwards. Can you give us an exact proice for that?

The answer is no. Absolutely not. I need to know exactly how many pages you want optimized and edited. How many pages we need to add so we can optimize them for some of your key phrases that you aren’t getting ranked for currently.

I also do not know what problems I might run into once I start working on the site. I can give you a minumum and a range of what it could cost. But you have to put up the minimum as a deposit toward the work we do.

Anyone that just gives you a round number like we will optimize your website for $5000 is just making sure they get enough money to hopefully cover their costs then they will spend a certain amount on optimizing your website to be sure that the $5000 is profitable to them. They will not do more even when it would benefit you because they need to make a profit on what they bid.

Once we start on your website, we do everything possible to make sure your website is optimized properly. Many of the pages we do for you will likely come in at more than the minimum price/deposit you placed with us. We let you know as we approach the end of that deposit and the amount of work we think still needs to be done and let you know how much it will cost to finish.

If you tell you you only have x amount of dollars in the budget, we will tell you exactly what we can do for that amount of money. But if you want everything done that we can possibly do for your website, then we have to do that page by page.

Every page in your website needs to be optimized and needs to have a way to close the sale, whether that close is bying something or signing up for a newsletter or membership, or just getting people to contact you and building leads.

Each time a user clicks a link in your website, they are asking a buying question. Think of your website as a sales pitch. If someone clicks the about us page, it’s like them saying, “I’m thinking of buying from you, but tell me a little more about your company.” If they click a link to your FAQ, they are saying “I’m interested in your products, but I have a few more questions before I say yes.”

In each of those instances, just like with any sales pitch, you answer their question, then try to close the sale. They click another link/ask another buying question, you answer their question and try to close the sale again.

That’s how sales are made in person. It’s no different with your website. You need someone who understands more about how to sell than how to get what they believe is the optimal percentage of keywords into your webpages.

6. Can you show me some examples of websites you wrote?

This means I am shopping and not really committed to having you write our website content. Showing you a website that sells bicycle parts that we wrote doesn’t tell you anything about writing the text for what you sell. Every website is unique and treated as such by us.

Give us a couple of pages to optimize for you and see what we do with your topic and those pages and that will be a much better example than showing you other websites on topics that have nothing to do with your topic.

Plus we have nondisclosure agreements with many clients and we ghostwrite for many clients. We would break that confidentiality by showing you some of our work. There are even SEO companies that use our services for the actual work while they focus mainly on selling to new clients. So there are a lot of websites we write that we cannot show you even if we wanted to.

7. Can you give me a list of all of your services and prices?

Again, you are shopping. It’s ok to do that, but I won’t give you that full list to show to some other SEO company just so they can underbid what you show them to get your business.

Besides there are many services that cannot be priced until we see the website and get an idea of what you are trying to achieve.

8. Do you guarantee that I will be in the top 10 in Google for my keywords?

Nope. Anyone who does is likely to take you for a ride. No one can guarantee google will do anything except the owners of google. I can show you results we have gotten for ourselves and some clients who have agreed to let us do this and show you that we are going to use the same techniques to work for you as we did for them, but I absolutely cannot guarnatee you a top 10 google listing for your keywords.

Neither can anyone else. We have to study your competition and a lot of other things before we even create the plan that has the best chance of getting a good search engine listing for each keyword or phrase you need.

9. Do you have a money-back guaranteee that if I don’t like what you did for me I can get my money back?

Nope. The people who work for us put in a lot of time and effort to get you making more sales. They get paid for their work. If we work for you, then there is a cost for that. No way to get around that.

10. How long will it take for me to be on the front page of google for my key phrases?

It depends on so many factors it’s like measuring a black hole. Here are just a few.

1. Your competition. What changes are they making at the same time we are making to your website? Are they having someone re-optimize their site right now as well?

2. The level of competition. How many pages are there in the google results for your key phrase? Are there some major players spending a lot of money to maintain their top 10 listing in google? Are there government or educational websites ranking in the top 10? Is wikipedia taking one of the top 10 listings leaving us with 9 to play with?

3. How long have you been in business or owned the domain name with a website on it? Age is a factor. How long have your competitors who rank in the top 10 been around?

4. What is the search volume for that key phrase VS the search competition?

There is a lot more than just those 4 factors to consider, so we can’t give you an answer off the top of our heads. We can give reasonable estimates, or call them educated guesses based on our experience with key phrases we have top 10 listings for VS a similar level of competition and number of results for that keyphrase. But we can’t say we will get you a top 10 listing in x number of months or weeks. It’s not possible.

The reason we get these questions is that there are SEO companies out there saying they can do some of the things listed in those questions above. So people believe that SEO companies can make guarantees about those things. Anyone can say anything to make a sale. Actual performance is all that counts.

Important Note: Notice none of the ten most asked questions have anything to do with sales. Again the clients learn from the SEO companies they deal with and the SEO companies don’t talk much about making sales.

They talk about number 1 google listings. They talk about link popularity. They talk about a lot of technical stuff. They talk about monthly reporting. They talk about and show you lots of pretty graphs and charts. They talk about contracts. When you receive a bid from them you would think a fortune 500 company had the bid written for you.

But look at any of the SEO bids you have gotten in the past and show me where it talks about how they will increase your sales. Most of the time you will not be able to do that. A few SEO companies do. Stick with them whether they have pretty reports or not.