I have been doing search engine optimization for several years now and what has never cease to amaze me are the prices some SEO’s are asking for their work. By no means am I saying that SEO’s are con-artists, but I do believe there are some dishonest firms out there.

When I talk to a prospective client they often tell me about other quotes they have received. They range from $1,500 to $30,000 for the service. Some charge by the month, and usually fall into the same range for a year of service. What I honestly don’t understand is what the difference is. Now I understand all to well that there is a difference between a good SEO and a bad SEO pretending to be an expert. But in my many years of working in ecommerce I have never come across an SEO worth $30K.

Some will argue (and with some legitimacy) that if an SEO can rank your site well, you’ll often see a great ROI, so what’s wrong with charging a lot? I agree to some degree, but I know that the amount of labor that goes into the actual work does not justified that amount. One SEO’s proposal I saw was for $22,000 for 6 months. The package included 100 links, and five pages optimized. I am sure some other work would have been involved, but when you break down the amount of labor involved, you’re probably looking at $500 per hour.

I know many will appose this, but to add credibility to the industry I really think it needs a major association, or governing body that can set standards. This would ensure that there are a set of standards out there, and any legitimate SEO would adhere to them.

Let me repeat, I know there are a lot of good, honest SEO’s doing great work. But I also know, from talking to my clients that there are folks out there charging outrageous fees to clueless merchants who don’t do their homework.

I am interested in what you think? What do you think is fair to charge for SEO services?

Rarely do I comment on political issues in this blog, but this really has more to do with business. I watch a lot of cable news and what really strikes me is how dedicated to tragedy the media seems to be these days. They have been talking down the housing market like crazy, to the point where you have to give your house away in most markets. Oil prices are through the roof, and this too leads the news because it’s more bad news for you to eat up and accept. Well, I don’t accept it. Perhaps I know something all of the talking heads don’t know. Perhaps they are so out of touch they have forgotten the golden rule of capitalism… the marketplace sets the prices. Next time you think the world is ending, and gas is going to reach $10/gallon, please remember that.

I guarantee that gas prices will not drift much pass the $5 mark, if it gets that high at all.  Ok, I can’t guarantee it, because I don’t have that much to offer you if I am wrong, but at least consider the possibility. People tend to believe that the market is manipulated by a bunch of rich dudes in a mansion on the hill. To some degree that may be true, but the market always has the last word. Eventually people will say NO to buying gas at a certain price, and the prices will come down. If your facility made widgets that were in very high demand, you would probably start to push the price up with the demand. However, if you pushed it too high, and people started buying less of your widgets, you would adjust the price. You would have to, or you would be sitting on a lot of widgets. The same rule applies to every commodity in a free market.

Now I am not denying times are tough. My wife and I have had our condo on the market for nine months, and I have a 70 mile commute each day, so I am feeling the pain too. I just am a bit more optimistic than many people out there. Unfortunately, if you’re waiting for the government to help, it’s not going to happen. Anything they could do would be superficial anyway. The answer is in the marketplace, and when the time is right, it will say “uncle”.

One of the most frustrating parts of working in search engine optimization is the time it takes for your efforts to bare fruit. In fact, many of my ecommece buddies have given up on their home-grown efforts, and hired an SEO thinking that it would speed up the process. While there is real value in hiring a professional SEO, this is simply out of reach for many smaller merchants.

As you’ll read throughout this blog and many other blogs there is a countless number of ways to improve your search rankings, and improve your website too. Sometimes, the number of things you should be doing get in the way of growing your business! For example, when I first opened my furniture website I spent countless night-time hours researching different website tips, and studying my own SEO practices. What I lost sight of is that my website needed to grow and improve. I was so busy with learning and researching, I didn’t work on adding new products, writing more product descriptions, improving the images on the site, working on the navigation of the site… all the things a site visitor looks for!

What I slowly came to realize was that there were too many things that need my attention, and not enough hours… what a cliché, huh? Anyway, I decided to create two lists… One list was “Things To Improve Website” and “Search Marketing”. I created goals for myself, so that I could get a little of everything done each night, and slowly grow all aspects of my business.

For example, the “Things to Improve Website” list included all the things I mentioned above. I would pick one thing to work on during the week from that list. Then I would take one thing from the “Search Marketing” list and work on that too. By setting small benchmarks each week, I was able to organize and balance the work I was doing on my website.

Here’s what a typical week looked like….

MONDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

TUESDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Improve meta tags on category pages.

WEDNESDAY: Improve images for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

THURSDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Check Alt-Image tags, submit site to 3 new directories.

FRIDAY: No working tonight, my eyes are burning and my wife is pissed.

SATURDAY: Check rankings on main keywords, see if Redbox has any new movies out

SUNDAY: (See Friday)

I would highly recommend writing a small schedule for yourself for a week, and see if that helps you achieve more. This is especially beneficial for the small merchants that slave away at a 9-5 during the day.

Good luck! Please leave comments highlighting your weekly tasks so others can see.

Well, it’s one of those slow Tuesdays, when my motivation is a bit low, and the list of things I have to do is a bit high. So today I figured I would think about some different ways to drive quality traffic to a website…

1. On all of your content (or product pages) add a “Send to Friend” function, so a user can easily click a button and email a link to your content to someone else. Every time I have added this functionality for a client, they have received many quality hits from people who never would have found the site. This functionality is a MUST for web merchants to have on all of their product pages. Remember, a referral from a friend is the most valuable and credible way to promote your product.

2. Contests are also a great way of driving traffic. The one mistake people tend to make with contests is they do not make the offer (prize) compelling enough. Offer a good discount on your product or service, and you will get people buzzing.

3. How-To’s make great content. Any time you post instruction on how to solve a common problem you’re going to get a lot of inbound links from other sites, and of course, traffic.

4. My father-in-law emails me nearly everyday with a joke or humorous story he found online. This type of content is always good to get people to link to you, or send your link to their friend. Though it does not work as well for merchants, it’s a great strategy for bloggers. If I had something funny to say, I would put it on my blog, but sorry, I have nothing.

Sharing content on the web is a huge opportunity that your site needs to be leveraging. Sites like StumbleUpon, Myspace, Facebook, and others make it easy and fun for users to share content. Make it EASY for your site visitors to either link to your content, or send it to someone. This is the best way to insure lots of buzz and traffic.

I found this statistic interesting. It was taken from a course that SEMPO offers on search engine optimization, though I don’t have the original source.

CONTENT THAT IS SHARED THE MOST ONLINE
Jokes – 88%
News – 56%
Medical Info – 32%

I am a fairly new user of StumbleUpon but I must say, it’s really cool. If I am bored or want to find something different I click the Stumble button on my browser toolbar, and I’m off! A lot of what you come across is crap, but every once in a while you find something cool.

I have used StumbleUpon to promote my own blog and it seems to be driving good traffic every day. They also have a neat advertising program that allows you to get quick traffic to your site for about 5 cents per impression (not visit).

Anyway, I came across this neat site. It allows you to highlight text on any website and send it to someone. So, if I found something interesting buried deep in a forum, I could highlight the good part, and send a link directly to it. Try it out.

I was talking to a fellow seo guru yesterday and he was telling me about the decreasing relevancy of meta tags in effecting search engine positioning. I strongly disagreed, but you know the old saying, opinions are like a-holes…. everybody’s got one, and they all stink.

It is true, that meta tags do not play as significant a role in determining rankings as they used to. This is because all of the non-credible seo’s were keyword stuffing and adding lots of useless junk in the meta section, so of course the search engines responded.

However, as my graphic shows, your title tag appears in most SERPS, as does whatever content appears at the top of the page. If you are a blogger, you’ll find that whatever your recent post was at the time the search engine robots came by will appear in the SEARPS. For the rest of you, it is unusually whatever your northern most content is. This is why many website will include some text about their website at the very top. This is especially important for sites with a lot of flash or images.

The point here is that you’re not going to get to #1 in the search engines by playing with your meta tags alone. However, you should not ignore their relevance. Be sure to write short, powerful titles for all of your pages, as well as a unique description. Your keyword tag should ONLY contain keywords that are relevant to that one page (not the entire site), and should preferably match some of the words used in the description and title.

Okay, I haven’t posted in about a week. Followers of my blog know that’s unusual for me. So what the hell have I been doing? Well, I learned a lesson this week, so I figured I would share it with my readers (assuming I have any). Plus, I thought a few of you out there may be able to relate.

I was looking to have a site of mine re-designed. The project required some pretty sophisticated PHP programming. I know PHP, but not enough for a project of this scope. So, I decided to outsource this job. I posted an ad on craigslist.com to solicit bids for the project. Almost immediately I received bids from all over. Most designers wanted about $1,000 for the job, except one. This one person who ran a web design firm in India was willing to do it for $400. It seemed like a great deal to me. They had everything… a professional website, a good profile and portfolio, what else do you need? Oh yeah, testimonials! They didn’t have those.

After a few weeks they completed the project. It looked ok, but technically, it didn’t work very well. I had so many technical issues that this past week I scrapped the site and put up my old one! So, I lost $400 to find out that there is value in using a trusted source. I’ve learned this lesson before, but I guess money was the motivating factor in going against my better judgment.

This lesson can be applied to all aspects of life, but it is especially important in ecommerce. Most small merchants cannot afford to have their site down, or suffer from major technical issues. So I say, if you’re going to do it, do it right. Oh, and make sure the bastards have testimonials or references.

One of the most important components of any effective SEO/SEM campaign is keyword research. It also happens to be one of the more tedious tasks out there. In a future post I am going to show you how to create a nice keyword spreadsheet that will allow you to evaluate and grade your keywords. For now, concentrate on your most important keywords and check out a cool tool at Google. It’s called Google Trends.

This is only ONE tool out there for keyword research. There is also the better known, Overture Keyword tool, and several others. Most of these just give you an idea of traffic for each particular word. What I like about Google Trends is that it breaks it out by geography, which allows you to effective geo-target with your Google Adwords account.

As a marketer I naturally dismiss the concept of something “selling itself”. I have seen ads that claim this car, or this furniture sells itself, which is ironic since I saw that on an advertisement. I personally don’t believe anything sells itself. Even if you sell the best widgets that do amazing things and costs practically nothing, you’re going to have to tell people why they need it. I remind all of my ecommerce clients that NOTHING sells itself.

I remember when I hired a professional designer to re-design my outdoor furniture website. I was so excited because this was the first time that I was the client, and I was getting a professional website! I couldn’t wait to see how the new site performed. I was confident that with a fresh new look and sleek design, I was going to be rich!

Well, needless to say the site did not do as well as expected. I had developed a nice relationship with the designer so I called her about once a week and asked her what she thought I should do. Every week she told me the same darn thing, and it took a while for it to sink in. So, even though I learned this lesson years ago, I thought perhaps a few small merchants out there my benefit from the experience.

So what did she say?

Sell you products! Write in-depth, compelling copy about your products. List features, but more importantly, list benefits. Appeal to your visitor’s emotional need for the product. I had made the false assumption that my products sold themselves because I had a shiny new website with nice pictures.

Remember, nothing sells itself.

One of the most common phrases in the Book of Great Clichés is perhaps, “think outside the box”. Now when I hear someone say that it makes me want to loose it. I am sure all of the great business books of yesteryear promote the phrase like it is the end all and be all of business marketing. However, if you think about it, thinking outside the box leaves something important out. Well, at least when it is applied to marketing.

As a marketer if I am always thinking outside the box, by definition, I am never thinking inside the box, and doing things that are tried and true. How is that a good thing? It’s not, especially for marketers with modest budgets.

What sparked this idea in my head was a client call I had yesterday. We were talking about ways to increase traffic to her website, and as if it were required to say, she uttered those all-to-common words, “let’s think outside the box.” There was silence on the other end because I am sure she expected something purely genius to come out of my mouth, but I had nothing. There are so many sure-fire ways to drive traffic to your website that I don’t want to waste energy or money on out of the box experiments. Bare in mind, I am NOT saying you shouldn’t test different strategies, and get creative. But, I am saying that, if you have a limited budget and need results. This is the boat most small merchants are in.

So, just to back-peddle a bit, I will say I am all for thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing. I love a good creative approach just like the next guy. However, when I am advising someone with a limited budget I will always air on the side of conservatism. When someone only has a few hundred bucks a month to spend driving traffic to their site, I am not going to recommend something new and crazy. A good, well managed PPC campaign is all they need for now. So please, if you are one of those adventurous marketers that are always thinking outside the box, be careful, and remember, the weather is much more predictable here inside the box.