Month: November 2010

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Paying Monthly for SEO Services? What Exactly Are You Getting?

Now that you have had your website optimized and you are improving your organic search placement, it’s time to ask your service firm exactly what are you getting for your monthly service fee.

It is not uncommon for a business that has had optimization done by an SEO firm to be paying a monthly service fee of anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a month. But what are you really getting for this monthly service fee? Do you even know?

For $300 a month times 12 months that’s $3,600 a year, not an insignificant amount of cash, it is important to know what you are getting. To find out, it is key that you ask the right questions to evaluate the answers in order to identify if this expense is warranted or is just an income stream for your SEO firm that they are hoping you will not challenge.

Here are the pointed questions you should ask your own SEO firm:

  1. What is my monthly fee paying for? If this is for link work, how many links did you get me last month and the month before?
  2. If this is for your code to remain on my web page and is just a monthly subscription fee to keep the code there let me know this clearly. What happens when I stop my services with you?
  3. I understand that no one can pay their way to the top of Google so if I am paying you $300 a month and $3,600 a year exactly what am I getting for my money? Anything?
  4. If you say you are tweaking my code weekly or monthly for my $300 investment. I would like to see what tweaks you actually did last month and the month before. Were these done only to my home page?
  5. If I stop my services with you what exactly on my home page will be changed if anything?

Pretty pointed questions if you ask me, but questions that you as a business owner should ask and know the answer to, to make sure that you know exactly what your SEO investment is doing. It is important for you as a business owner to know that many SEO firms have this model for pricing and that they do not do much on a monthly basis to help you retain or improve placement after their initial work is done. This is an income stream for them and they just hope you are not asking the questions to pin them to the wall to really tell you, if they even will, exactly what they are doing monthly for you for this payment.

I would be highly surprised to hear that the things that an SEO firm does to earn the $300 for a monthly subscription fee is actually worth the actual cash value if your webmaster billed you by the hour to do the same things. Especially if your SEO worked does not include blogging, content creation, or any changes you can notice on your website. You may simply be paying $300 a month for a “feel good” report at the end of the month to encourage you to continue to pay monthly services.

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Top Social Media Tools for Teams

If you are doing team work on social media accounts what are the most effective tools to use? For me, I like HootSuite, but I have looked at others. This post features three services you may want to consider for your own team’s use.

HootSuite
This is by far my favorite and then one that my team of six people uses to manage clients’ social media accounts. HootSuite used to be totally free, but now has a paid option. For personal users, you can still use HootSuite free, but for business team users such as myself you will pay based on the number of team members. We will soon be paying just a little under $100 a month for access to this online service. But we have many accounts and six team members working on the same account. You can check out HootSuite now.

CoTweet
This is a nice online application that is free as well to consider if you have just one or two team members and need to load multiple Twitter accounts. It does not offer Facebook Business Page features, but great for Twitter. The interface is easy to use and does allow you to review pending updates and sent updates as well as your streams. You can check out CoTweet now. Although I do not like the interface as much as I do the one at HootSuite for small teams using Twitter only this would be adequate and totally free.

I have looked at other applications but this post is about team social media work so TweetDeck although popular is not a good fit as it does not allow team collaboration. If you have one you really like, leave the name and link in the comments.

Please note that HootSuite will pay me a small commission, but only if you sign up for a Pro account.

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Social Bookmarking Not My Favorite Way to Boost SEO

I do like social bookmarking for some clients as a way to build one way inbound links, but I feel that there are better ways for other clients. Social bookmarking works great to build links for website and blog content that is timely, well written, and a hot web topic.

For the majority of business sites that focus on their own services, more mundane topics (although they could be of interest to a specific audience), social bookmarking may simply be too much trouble for the results that it generates. One big caveat is that if you have a well developed social bookmarking profile and many followers, you may have much better success than just opening an account and starting to bookmark away.

I find that if you are going to really invest time in building links a faster more sure way is to write article pieces and syndicate them on newsletter and content sites for others to grab while keeping in your bio block and link information. Even better is to see if you can guest write for a professional organization in your industry. The key here however is that any article you provide must be informational in nature and not focused on your own particular services.

Do I feel that social bookmarking has a place? Yes, absolutely, but it is labor intensive and best used for certain topics, content, and specific clients.

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Test Your hReview Tags to See if Google Will Grab Your Reviews for Google Places

I have been an early embracer of the rich snippet technology as when it was released about a year ago I felt that it would be to my and my client’s advantage to have the coding in place. However if you are expecting your hReview rich snippets to be picked up by Google Places or Google Maps from your website, you’d better do what I did and check your code.

Although my code was correct, for pages with more than one review, Google now requires an aggregate rich snippet tag – who knew! This is how I found out. Use this Google tool to add the URL of your page with your rich snippets and hReview tags. Find out if Google will be picking up your rich snippets. You may be like me; having to go back and quickly add an aggregate review tag to the page listing all your reviews as a number and the average rating.

Here’s the link to the tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets It is called the Rich Snippet testing tool.

With Google Places adding your own website reviews to your Google Places Page, now’s the time to help Google help you by making sure your code is ready to be picked up by the spider.