The following is the decision maker’s guide to selecting the right SEO service provider. It’s a comprehensive resource aimed at educating website and business owners on the how to shortlist search engine companies and choose the best of them.

Numerous companies from one-man consulting services through boutiques to small, mid-size and large agencies offer SEO services. Qualifying and selecting the right company for SEO is a relatively difficult task for a business owner for many reasons, mainly:

• The SEO industry is not regulated.
• There are a large number of web development, web design and traditional agencies with limited experience and knowledge offering … Continue Reading » How to Choose an SEO Company
  
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Your Involvement
As with any business partner, it is better to collaborate than to dictate. You should know by now that SEO is resource intensive and that it takes time for results. So don’t expect results 2 weeks into the SEO campaign. Schedule regular meetings with your vendor based on your needs – weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Also, businesses should know that their involvement in the process is imperative for the success of the campaign. The agency you select to work with will need content to support the link building efforts. This need will vary depending on your expectations and the campaign … Continue Reading » Your Involvement in SEO Projects and Questions to Ask an SEO company

Proof of Expertise

Ask agencies for case studies, success stories or client references. You should not sign any contracts without reviewing such information.

A trustworthy SEO company will be able to provide case studies without even being asked for them. In most instances, those case studies are publicly available on their sites for everyone to review. However, in some cases, agencies do not publicly share case studies, so make sure you ask for them.

Another proof of expertise you should ask for is success stories. Usually, success stories display some of the most impressive results delivered by a company. This is one of … Continue Reading » Demand Proof of Expertise and Transparency from your SEO service provider

We’ve got this funny message in our Webmaster Tools inbox:

It looks like Google managed to build a time machine now :)

Understanding how an SEO agency prices their service will help a marketing manager chose a partner that charges fair rates, delivers results and meets expectations.

SEO pricing takes the following factors into consideration:

-        The number of keywords you want to rank for

-        How difficult it is to achieve high rankings for those keywords

-        The geographic region you want to target (locally, stately/provincially, nationally, internationally)

-        The current authority of your site

-        The authority of your competitors with the search engine(s)

-        Your expectations in terms of getting quick results

Any SEO agency you interact with should at minimum conduct a keyword difficulty and competitor … Continue Reading » Understanding The SEO Agency Pricing

How much should I allocate for SEO is probably one of the most asked questions by the decision makers, so here we go.

SEO Budgeting

According to Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2012 Report, the 238 companies surveyed are spending an average 36% of their total marketing budgets on digital advertising. Over half of responding companies (54%) are spending under 30% of their marketing budgets on digital channels, and just under a third (31%) are investing more than half of their marketing budgets on digital.

This chart suggests that if you … Continue Reading » SEO Budgeting: Learn How To Properly Budget for SEO

Numerous companies from one-man consulting services through boutiques to small, mid-size and large agencies offer SEO services. Qualifying and selecting the right company for SEO is a relatively difficult task for a business owner for many reasons, mainly:

• The SEO industry is not regulated.
• There are a large number of web development, web design and traditional agencies with limited experience and knowledge offering SEO services.
• There are no standard service fees.

With this in mind and to help business owners with their decisions, we are going to publish the decision maker’s guide to selecting the right SEO service provider. The guide is available as … Continue Reading » Why SEO is a Long-Term Investment

Finally, Bing was one step ahead of Google and provided webmasters a way to disavow backlinks. This is a clever method to let webmasters fight against negative SEO. And it came just in time for one of our client who is a collateral victim of a negative SEO campaign. Thanks, Bing.

To let Bing know which backlinks you don’t want to be taken into consideration into their ranking algorithm, simply login into your Bing Webmaster account, go to Configure My Site –> Disavow Links

You can specify an entire domain, a single URL or a directory:

… Continue Reading » +1 to Bing Webmasters for Disavow Links Feature

How is this for a great example of conflict of interests: Google AdWords allows ads for paid links services and link brokers but Google Search is penalizing (some) for selling links.

Paid Ads for Link Sellers on AdWords

That makes me wonder what’s more important to Google, money or better search results for users?

We all know that the majority of the publisher sites on text link networks do not “nofollow” the links. If they would do, who would buy from them? … Continue Reading » Take the Money, then Slap. Google Style.

Have you ever needed to get Googlebot to crawl a page that was not getting indexed?

Here’s a quick dirty trick: Use the Fetch as Google function in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Fetching as Googlebot In Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you hit the Fetch button, Googlebot will crawl the page:

Googlebot fetched the page seconds after hitting the Fetch button in GWT.

If the page is worthy, it will also be indexed.

To increase the chances of getting … Continue Reading » On Demand Google Crawling