These efforts being implemented by YouTube does not only aim to acquire financial gains but also for the social video network to become a large factor in the field of online advertising and marketing which could provide a huge driving force to its partners and advertisers alike while the users are also benefitting from such gains.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. You ask them how page titles affect search engine rankings and their eyes glaze over.

Apparently some SEO companies these days think that SEO = Link Building, god knows how they came up with that ridiculous idea but it was probably from some cult article about how ‘Google was different from all the other search engines’ that was published in the 90’s.

You cannot succeed with link building alone, and I would actually go as far as to say that you can succeed without it altogether – so what does that say about its value?

2. The office is totally silent, and people who talk are given the evil eye.

A healthy office is an office which communicates, it’s a group of individuals who are all trying to achieve a common goal together. If the office is totally silent, then it’s simply a group of individuals who happen to be working in the same place – and what the hell is the point of that?

Lack of communication within an SEO company in particular is a sure-fire way to identify a deadbeat. Lack of light-hearted talk also kills morale, and lack of morale affects client work. Do the maths.

3. They give clients advice on SEO, but they don’t actually use their own advice.

These are proabably my favourites, when you find SEO companies who advise clients to update and add to their site content frequently… but they haven’t updated their own content in about 6 months. They advise clients to blog every day with meaningful and relevant content, but they themselves have a neglected blog filled with guess what? Link building spam! Or if you’re really lucky you might find a company who advise their clients to construct dynamically generated page copy, and then replicate that copy across multiple domains – but mysteriously they aren’t too keen on implementing this practice on their own website.

4. 80% of their employees have worked there less than 2 years.

SEO isn’t exactly the most exciting of industries so it’s understandable that people may move on, but when the turnover rate is so high that the company has a full set of new faces (other than management of course) every year, then you know that something is wrong.

5. They employ a high number of ‘work experience’ students, and people with no qualifications.

How is it that you are paying premium prices for SEO but you account manager doesn’t have a background in professional website design, usability or interface consultation, internet marketing, standard marketing, or web development?

If you’re paying £500-£1000 every month for a few hours work, then how is it that the people doing the work haven’t had anything more than on-the-job training?

The Moral of The Story?

Recognise shoddy work! You wouldn’t hire a builder with a crew full of teenagers with no exerience who can’t answer your questions, so why not apply those same standards when hiring an SEO company?

Look for people and companies who are active within the industry, and when I say that – I mean actually active within the industry, writing an interesting and up to date blog and being referenced by top SEO sites. Not ponsing about because they’ve been nominated for a bunch of local business awards, thinking that this somehow makes them ‘high-profile’.

Get your money’s worth, and avoid the above! – What experiences have you had with SEO con artists? Let me know in the comments below!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. When speaking to clients, they use big terms like ’search engine saturation fluctuation’, and ‘the latest Google algorithm update for it’s supplementary index’

Both of the above are techy ways of saying “your rankings have all dropped and we have no idea why, but don’t you dare think about not paying us”. This is one of the mose deceiptful underhanded tactics in (rather common) use, and is purely employed to scare the client into thinking that there is no way that they could possibly understand the inner workings of SEO.

You wouldn’t hear a designer telling a client that he couldn’t use a black font on a grey background ‘due to line-height restrictions, colour combination inter-relationships, and negative space deviation’. Yet SEO companies know that if they told the truth (IE: “we have extremely limited control over where Google ranks you”) then their business model would be deadz.

2. They have lots of ‘business awards’ posters hanging on the office walls.. but all of them are about 5 years old.

This is a sure fire way to tell that an SEO company might once have been great, but they definitely aren’t any more. A business worthy of awards gets awards, they don’t just continue to be great and suddenly fail to get any recognition. This is most common for SEO companies who started out brilliantly by helping local businesses at affordable rates, but then got some ‘big ideas’, bumped up their prices, and started trying to be a corporation rather than a business.

3. When you call them you get a “he’s in a meeting” response from the person who just had you on hold.

Here’s a piece of information for you – the overwhelming majority of SEO companies aren’t big enough for someone to need to check who’s in a meeting. Chances are that everyone is in one open plan office, and you (dear friend) are being given the fob off (again).

4. Your monthly reports don’t really tell you what work has been done.

All too often (and I seriously have seen this a lot of times now) an SEO company’s idea of a ‘report’ is a whole bunch of statistics copied and pasted onto a rather lengthy and unformatted document, but there isn’t a whole lot about what work has been carried out and how long it took.

If you’re paying an SEO company, you’re well within your rights to ask exactly what work is being done and how long each piece has taken. Don’t accept positive statistics as a sign of success – I don’t SEO this blog at all and yet it’s statistics still improve every month because I put in all the hard work at the beginning!

5. They think that link building is ’specialist work’.

I’ve got news for you.. it’s not. Link building is the process of going out onto the big wide interwebz and dropping links back to a website wherever possible. Most commonly on blog comments, forums, and business directories. This work consists of typing in a title, and a url, and can be easily completed by a 14yr old with some motivation and the offer of £20 at the end of the day. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is simply lying.

I Could Go On

And I will in part two of this post, ‘5 MORE Ways To Tell You’re With A Deadbeat SEO Compay’ next month!

SEO is a very closed industry and not rightfully so. It’s one of the few industries where it pays not to share any techniques because if your competition knew about them then they could use them – you can’t patent 301 redirects or title writing techniques.

Because of this it’s become standard to charge a lot and explain a very little – something which I personally don’t agree with. Hence the reason for this blog, to tell you exactly what works (and what doesn’t) without charging you a penny.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great and very open-minded, friendly SEO companies out there but there are a whole lot of deadbeats who only care about your money.

What do you think? Are you working for an SEO company who falls into some of the above categories? Or are you paying an SEO company and you don’t quite understand what for? Let me know in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Here’s the new facebook hompage which has been covered all over the web today, personally I don’t think much of it, but that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner there is a ‘Send Feedback’ link (I’ve circled it with and added a pretty red arrow for those who are a little lost right now). Being the kind soul that I am, I clicked on it to give Facebook a little feedback and wrote them a very kind concise message saying ‘I can haz old facebook?’.

Uh oh.

Let’s recreate exactly what happens when you use the new Facebook feedback form.

First

(spot the irony)

Second

Aaahhh……. good times.

Ten Minutes Later Here’s What I see

Good foresight

So What Lesson Have We Learned Today?

If you’re going to ask for customer feedback, make sure that they can actually send it to you. I wonder how long it’ll take them to notice the problem given that no one will be able to send them some feedback to let them know.

Seen any other ridiculous bloopers recently? Drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The title of your page, be that a blog or any other web page, is the key factor to your SEO effort’s and the page’s popularity.

Take my article on how to get lots of diggs,

I could have titled it

• How I was successful on Digg
• Get 3000 Diggs
• Methods for Increasing The Number of Diggs on a Submission
• Get Dugg Fast!

None of which are particularly bad titles, but none of which are particularly good either.

When deciding on a title (or anything else for that matter) its important to look at the market trends and learn from other people’s mistakes. There’s no need for trial and error when it comes to internet marketing, everything has been trialled, all you have to do is research what worked and what didn’t. Based on this we know that the most popular title elements are

• How To
• Top 10
• Top 7
• Top 5
• Learn To

So lets take a look at the Title I used and break it right down

How To: Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 Hours

What I needed to do was appeal to my two most important markets, Google, and Social Media Website users. Google likes key words, social media users like tabloid headlines.

‘How To:‘ is the ‘category’ of the article, it describes what type of article it is, and it appeals to both of the above markets, hundreds of thousands of Google searches each month start with the words ‘how to’ because many many people use the internet primarily to figure out how to do new things. It appeals to social media traffic because of the content which follows it, ‘How To: (insert something that social media website users want)’.

The next part of the title is the actual ‘body’ of the title, it quite simply defines the subject of the article and what it’s about. ‘Get 3,000+ Diggs‘
In this element I am appealing to Google with ‘Get Diggs’ as this is a valuable search term, and to users with ‘Get a Large Number of Diggs’ which is what all Digg (and stumble) users want! Adding the plus after the number is an important consideration, I could have said ‘over 3,000′ or ‘more than 3,000′ but I didn’t want to make the title too long. (You have about 5 words with which to capture your reader’s imagination before they get bored and stop reading, harsh, but true.)

The final part of the title is the sweetener, the extra little bonus that the reader will get from your article, and the little element that makes your article different from the rest. So in my case this was ‘in 24 Hours‘. The sweetener is purely for your users, Google has no interest in this as a key phrase of any relevance. What this does is set the article apart from all the other articles about ‘getting lots of diggs’ because I’ve added that extra variable of doing it in the space of a day. This adds and element of intrigue. When writing titles, ALWAYS think to yourself – if I saw that title on Digg (or similar) would I want to click on it? If the answer is maybe or no, then you need to rework it. You’ll notice that most of the popular articles on social media sites are really provocative, suggestive, and sometimes just downright wrong. This is because people want to know what content is behind the title!

The example that I’ve used is with a blog title, but you can do the same thing with the title attributes of your website – as they are what appears in the search engine results, and again, need key phrases, and to be ‘clickable’.

A Tip For If You Get Stuck

Pick up a copy of the trashiest magazine you can find, in the UK something like Heat or Zoo magazine is perfect. (these are very cheap women’s lifestyle and celebrity gossip magazines)
Have a look at the titles of the articles, particularly the ones used on the cover – take some inspiration, and apply to your own article/page.

These magazines don’t sell because they have great content, and they don’t sell because they have a ‘limited edition’ mascara brush attached to the cover. They sell because these companies are VERY good at writing titles that people want to know more about.

You may have noticed that this article has absolutely nothing to do with ‘7′ tips for writing killer titles – I lied, but you’re still here reading, and I still presented you the information relevant to the title.

Make your titles spurious to benefit you, just keep them on topic.

Got any other great title ideas? Drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Increasingly blogs are sold to companies not just as a part of their website, but as a legitimate SEO tool to be added on to their website and bring them additional traffic and positions. In order for this to happen however, they do need to actually use the blog, and use it well.

In the spirit of this, here are 5 reasons to subscribe to your clients’ RSS feeds!

1. To See If They Use Their Blog At All
Its all very well telling your client how much they are going to benefit from having a blog and how much traffic it will bring them, but if they don’t touch the damn thing then they won’t be getting much benefit at all. I have a dedicated folder for my clients’ blogs and when I see that a week has gone by and their name hasn’t turned bold in my list (an indicator that a new story has been published) I start sending emails. This may seem like more hassle to you than to them, but if you want to upsell them a higher SEO maintenance package in the future then you need to ensure that you get them results NOW!

2. To See If They Use Their Blog Correctly
I actually once had a client with a band website who on occasion would blog about the weather… Don’t even ask. Because I wasn’t subscribed to the feed, I didn’t realise until about a month later. Make sure your clients are using the right content for their blogs, remember, writing is not their strength and its not what they were hired for, so don’t expect them to know exactly what to write just because it’s their company. Ideally their posts should be an authority on their industry, and not sound too much like a press release, nor a personal opinion, rather an objective concise article employing a journalistic writing style.

3. To See If They Are Using Internal Linking
Too often clients will happily blog away like little rabbits, only for me to come along and find that they have not linked to a single one of the pages on their site. One solution to this (for wordpress) is to use the A-Links plugin, which automatically inserts a link when it detects the use of keywords that you specify. I’m not a fan of this technique as it can often make a good blog post look very spammy, but done correctly it can work ok. Clients often forget to even use their keywords in blogs, let alone links, so its a great thing to check for when you get a popup notification from your feed reader for one of your clients’ blogs.

4. To Asses The Current Affairs For Your Client
When it comes to doing monthly maintenance for a client, it always involves at least a small amount of external link building. Often finding a subject to write about or to link from can be a pain, especially if your client’s industry is one that you are not actively involved in. Being subscribed to their blog means that you will always have a fresh set of up to date news on what’s going on in your client’s industry (provided that they are following #2)

5. To Capitalise On SEO Opportunities Right Away
Sometimes I’ll see a really good blog by one of my clients come into my feed reader, really well written, great content, great images, and very social media friendly (diggable, if you will). Then I look at the title and my computer-screen-damaged eyes drop in dismay, another crap title! The title of a blog entry is SO important, probably more so than any other factor – hell I could write and entire other entry on blog titles alone! (and I probably will). Make sure your client’s titles are catchy, clickable, and use keywords, and if they’re missing any of those things then get in there and edit them!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Social Media is one of the fastest growing marketing formats in the entire world, and is miles ahead of the competition with the way it can target mass groups of specific market demographics. ‘How?’ you ask?
You have (most likely) at some point filled more information on the internet than a market research company could ever ask for, and you did it out of free will!

In case you’re still wondering…

What is Social Media?
Social media is Facebook, social media is MySpace, its Bebo, its Hi5, its Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Sphinn, Slashdot, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Simpy, Newsvine, Furl, Spurl, MyJeeves, Google Bookmarks, and many, many more. Social media is absolutely everywhere, social media is any site where users congregate and interact with each other.

So How Does Social Media Triple Your Traffic?
Pretty easily. On a social media site; you register, you fill out your profile, and you start interacting people. The type of site that you’re on dictates the type of interaction that you have with the other site users. On Facebook for example, you create your profile and keep in touch with your friends, organise events, and share stories and photos. While on Digg you submit news articles and the rest of the community vote on them based on whether or not they are ‘news-worthy’. While finally on twitter, you post constant 150 character messages on your profile telling the world what you’re doing at that moment in time, and anybody who is interested enough to care that you are eating beans on toast yet again can tune in to your ‘twittering’.

Essentially, all these sites are ways of getting links back to your site, and not just random links, but links on pages that are already getting a high amount of traffic, so you have a higher chance of some of them clicking through to your site.

My previous post on How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 hours highlighted just how powerful Digg can be, I would estimate based on experience that I generated the BBC over half a million page views based on my submission that day.

When I submitted my own article talking about how I got the 3,000 Diggs to this very site, it went mad on Stumbleupon, and I started getting 100-200 unique visitors a day. (not bad for a blog that was only 3 weeks old at the time) and so far just from that article this month I’ve generated over 1,600 visits and just under 4,000 page views.

Here are my stats for the first 10 days of March, 90% of which was down to Stumbleupon referrals.

My RSS Subscribers also jumped up by about 400% and have held pretty steadily since then. The best part is that since the large spike in traffic above, I’ve seen a consistently higher level of day to day traffic as well.

I should note in closing of this section that social media did not triple my traffic. It multiplied it by a factor of about 12.

So How Do You Get Started With Social Media?
Its quite simple really, if you don’t already have a MySpace or Facebook account, then go and get one! My personal favorites are Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. You will notice that I have all of these in a ‘Social Bookmark This!’ link at the bottom of all of my blogs. If you want this for your blog you can download the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.

Remember though, if you use social media just to spam your links, you will get nowhere. Social media sites are picky and choosey and they hate spam, so involve yourself in the community and you will reap the rewards, but you have to put in the time and the effort.

What have your experiences with social media been thus far? Got any great social media sites that I’ve missed here? Drop me a line in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This isn’t a diary, and it isnt a spamfest either, just (hopefully) good honest writing and opinions about the strange, wonderful, and often infuriating world of internet marketing. I plan to unload my thoughts, ideas, tips, and probably some bad habbits here, make of them what you will. If I answer one question, or help one person understand Search Engine Optimisation better, then this site has served its purpose.

If you’re new to internet marketing, get ready for a long and bumpy ride; it isnt easy, it doesn’t always make sense, and sometimes, its just downright boring, but when you hit that number 1 spot in google or you log into your stats package to the sight of a 6% conversion rate and a 200% increase in revenue for the month… it makes it all worth while.

Search engine and internet marketing is pretty varied, some elements are extremely easy to grasp.. others take a good deal more time to get your head around before you fully appreciate how the cogs turn and what influences what. There is an unbelievable amount to learn, needless to say – I personally am still learning a great deal.

But you have to start somewhere… so here we are.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.