The reason it is so hard to hire a SEO staff or engage a SEO company is that there is relatively little understanding on what SEO really is. It is not uncommon to hear the completely opposite opinions and definitions on what the SEO is. Some people bring in the pay per click (PPC) in it, some talk about on page and off page SEO, some talk about link building (now, how do you build a link?). The social media, made things even more complex lately.

So how do you hire someone not knowing nothing neither on what the task on hand is, nor the results that are to be achieved? You are quite likely to fail. If you stick to it, you are quite likely to fail a few times as well.

The same is true if you hire internally or a external SEO vendor.

Do it yourself SEO jobs are the natural result of this situation. You either try to do it yourself if you are a small company, or ask your existing staff to learn and do the SEO tasks for you. That is even more often a recipe for the disaster. You are asking of your staff to do a SEO job that they have not been trained for and have no experience in it. Jet somehow you expect them to succeed?

Hiring for SEO jobs is tough.

The best peace of the advice is to get the best SEO professional you can get – to help you and do the job interviews for you. Regardless if you are hiring an external SEO company, or an onsite SEO vendor, or the person to do SEO inhouse on your payroll. You are far likely to get the right one to do your SEO jobs than trying to asses the candidates yourself (presuming you are not a SEO specialist yourself!).

Still got family and friends ask you what Twitter is? Send them the video and ask them to start the tweets!

T.R. Harrington, Director of Strategic Direction & Product Development of Darwin Marketing, Shanghai spoke about search behavior and internet marketing in China.

Unlike most markets around the world, Google is NOT king in China. Baidu has 68% of the search traffic with revenue growth up to $234 million USD. What makes Baidu unique is that it shows paid search ads before the organic results. For very popular searches you might not see a natural search result on even the first 2 or even 3 pages.

China is second in the world for search activity and the search engine market is still very young. Because advertisers are much less sophisticated, they need simple tools. For paid search, there are much higher clickthrough rates. However, this information, is gleaned, to a great extent, by conjecture. Baidu provides no CTR data.

Because organic results are less prominent or non-existent, The CPC (cost per click) prices increase much faster, between Jan – May (70% in select industries). There are relatively few PPC optimization variables. Traffic estimation tools in China are unreliable.

Search behavior has become massive in China. From an advertiser’s perspective, PPC is a great solution in China since the ROI of paid is much more immediately evident and there are fewer organic results anyway. In Chinese SEM agencies, the marketers have very little experience with direct marketing. China has historically been primarily a brand driven environment. After searching on the Internet, there is no question that people are buying offline. There is much lower credit card penetration, even with so called “E-commerce”. Companies who take orders, by and large, still do it by phone.

Search data is very difficult to come by. Search engines and portals do not give out information about impressions or offer CPM data buys. It’s very difficult to “plug in numbers.”

Few Highlights from his recent speech:

China Search Market:

• 254 million users in China July 08, the largest number of users in the world
• Fewer choices in other mediums, like TV. Because of this users are more engaged in the online conversation.
• There is a very little presence of analytics companies in China. Partly because companies are still hesitant to pay for this service, plus many are still not sure what to measure.
• Cost per Click is still the major measurement, understanding conversion and measurement has not reached the China market yet.
• Taiwan and Honk Kong are totally different markets then “mainland” China. All Chinese speaking areas can not be grouped together. Different tactics and strategies are needed.
• Domains with a .CN extension are considered more reputable and give more weight.

• Claims the largest and most active BBS Community
• Baidu is not like Google
• Has 71% Market Share (Google has 23%)
• Pushing the ads to right side, like Google. Historically, they have been at top, this pushing organic listings down
• Introduces 14.5 products a year
• Wants to be the Wikipedia and Ebay of China, as well as search
• Provides no CTR% for Paid Search advertisers
• Faster CPC price increases (as much as 70% from Jan to May)
• Traffic estimations tools in China are unreliable in China

Buying into SEO is a difficult process. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO, it’s really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.

Many companies looking for SEO help — even those with a decent understanding of SEO — try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

1. What is this firm going to do for me?
2. How much do they cost?

When you’re hiring for a particular position in any business, you’re looking at that individual’s background. You aren’t just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You’re hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house optimizer). By selecting an agency or employee purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.

The “What” of SEO

You need to know what the scope of work is when proposals are put together for SEO efforts. That is one reason why creating a SEO request for proposal (RFP) is important.

If you were designing a Web site, or even building a house, wouldn’t you determine the scope of work? So, too, should you determine the scope of work for SEO efforts.

What needs to be done? What is the competitive landscape? What will the SEO firm do, and what internal resources will you put against the effort? Do you have a blog? Can you create one? Can you add copy to existing Web pages? Can you create new pages of content? Who writes the content? Can structural changes be made to your Web site? Will the SEO firm provide link building? Will social media marketing be part of the project?

The “How” of SEO

So, now that you’ve developed a scope of work, let’s assume that two different firms send proposals that look similar. It’s safe to assume that different SEO firms have a different approach/process to how they work.

Does the SEO firm have a process that they follow? Is their methodology for link building ethical? Does the SEO firm work to help you enhance your Web presence, or are they vague in telling you how they will go about their business?

Transparency in SEO is important. If an unethical individual does something to your site that’s against search engine guidelines, you’re still the one responsible for your site’s content, and it will be your site that’s penalized.

The “Who” of SEO

Let’s assume that you’re still looking at two similar proposals. It’s the individuals working on your SEO who will determine the success of this effort.

This is a major reason why some SEO companies charge $300 per month and others charge $10,000 per month. A recent graduate is going to cost a lot less than a 10-year SEO veteran. That’s just a fact.

If you were hiring for any other position in your company, this would make perfect sense to you. For some reason, this is lost when people are “comparison shopping” SEO companies.

Even after considering the “who,” it also boils down to how much of that individual’s time you can afford. SEO companies are a service-based business. They’re selling their time.

Certainly, they will have tools that they pay for (and these costs are shared among the clients), but time is money. And some people’s time costs more than other people’s time. You should also consider all the time that these seasoned professionals have put into research, reading, studying, attending conferences, and otherwise honing their craft.

The “Who” and “How” are Every Bit as Important as the “What”

If you were to hire a company that was less than ethical (their approach to link building was buying as many links from whatever cheap sources that they could find), or put individuals on your project that had perhaps a handful of SEO efforts under their belt, or work was outsourced to individuals that don’t even work for the company that you’ve hired, that is arguably more important to know than the “what.” Keep this in mind as you’re going through the challenge of hiring an SEO company or an individual.

Check references, see rankings for yourself (against keywords that “matter”), get information on the individuals who would be working on the efforts, and talk to the company about their process. Think of this in the same manner that you might if you were interviewing an individual for any other position with your company.

You want someone with high integrity, energy, enthusiasm, a likeable personality, and a good approach to business. They should have a solid understanding of the job that you’re hiring them for, and a plan for success.

By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, Dec 22, 2009

Ethical SEO firms would never promise to guarantee your search engine rankings. PERIOD! Rather they focus on good content, site design and “white hat” SEO practice to help improve ranking results. In my opinion, almost any business that “guarantee” results are scams and these are the companies and services you should STAY AWAY from.

I’m quoting a great article written by randfish, CEO and co-founder from SEOmoz to address this issue.

Reason #1: SEO & Guarantees Have an Abominable History

From 1996 through to today, SEO scams have used “guaranteed rankings and traffic” as a slimy catchphrase to lure in gullible buyers with too-good-to-be-true promises. That association has stained the entire industry and repulsed even businesses that might consider using the “guarantee” label. Just look at some of the questionable messaging used by so-called SEO companies that employ this moniker:

(source) Our search engine optimization software comes with the latest link popularity and web site optimization tools for helping you achieve guaranteed ranking. Here is what the Internet’s best search engine optimization software has to offer:

• Link Popularity & Link Exchange Tools
• Website Submission Software

Automated software for link exchanges and website submissions? If you’ve done ten minutes of due diligence into how SEO is practiced, you’re well aware that these claims venture deep into the sort of tactics that haven’t been effective in the last half-decade.

(source) $399 annual – Guaranteed fast listing on DMOZ, Netscape, Google, MSN, AltaVista, LYCOS, FAST, ASK/Temoa and 100+ other engines and portals! Trace your traffic and guarantee a higher position!

Not only is the listing and traffic guaranteed, it’s guaranteed fast. I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s infamous utterance after a crayon is re-inserted into his brain: “Extended warranty? How can I lose?”

(source)

• We guarantee to keep you on 1st-page results each month, or you don’t pay for that month.
• We guarantee to optimize your website for up to 100 different keyword phrases.
• We guarantee to provide monthly reports that document all of your 1st-page positions.

Many of the SEO companies that do still guarantee rankings have taken the clever tack of guaranteeing a certain number of keywords that they themselves choose. In this fashion, they can select primarily non-competitive terms and have a fairly high rate of success. Whether those keyword rankings provide any serious traffic is another matter altogether.

The point doesn’t need belaboring. Just as time shares have their “free” weekend getaways and used cars have high pressure salespeople, SEO has its own insidious, stereotyped marketing claims that legitimate providers avoid like the plague.

Reason #2: The Search Engines Expressly Warn Against It

I don’t often reference Google’s guidelines on search marketing, but since the page ranks so well for a variety of queries related to SEO and guarantees, it’s virtually unavoidable if a client is performing research about your offerings. This line in particular stands alone:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Even though the context is meant to put it in a slightly different context (”Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or…”), the messaging comes through very clearly. If your potential clients have read on Google’s website that guarantees are bogus, they’re likely to carry that bias with them as they peruse what the market has to offer.

Reason #3: Rankings are Inherently Unstable

If I perform a search for “SEO Company” here in Seattle, then drive 3 hours south to Portland (or 3 hours north to Vancouver) and execute the same query, I’m likely to end up with a very different ordering of results; the same goes for if I were to log into my Google account and get personalized results or hit a different datacenter during the course of my querying. Many searchers have even had the odd experience of hitting refresh on a query and finding the results change or re-order.

Given the incongruous nature of ranking fluctuations and the fact that ranking in a particular position on a given machine at a single point in time says very little about the future or even the present, it’s no wonder that savvy SEO firms stay away from the guarantee.

Reason #4: Rankings are a Poor Metric for Overall Performance

Rankings do not equal traffic. A great SEO campaign should be measured by the increase in search engine traffic and (if the contract also includes site optimization for conversions) the rate at which that traffic performs the desired actions on your site. Achieving rankings is (almost) always a means to an end and not the end itself (the one exception being reputation management campaigns).

If your patrons are seeking rankings for posterity or to boost their egos, they might not be the best choice of clients. Those clients who have a solid business model and great content or services to back it up want the kinds of qualified, interested visitors that come from search engines because they’ve expressed a desire that the website can fulfill. Yes – position #1 will generally get you more traffic than any other real estate in the search results, but plenty of campaigns we’ve seen and even some we’ve worked on have been sabotaged by an obsession with pure rankings.

The metric should always be traffic – increasing search traffic means the SEO is doing their job. Making the rankings of a few top phrases the priority above and beyond the overall search traffic means that goals are out of whack. Don’t forget that 70% of search volume is in the tail of the demand curve – and there’s usually a lot more low hanging fruit to be found therein.

Reason #5: Making Guarantees About Something You Cannot Control Carries Inherent Ethical Problems

Politicians constantly fall into the trap of making promises they cannot possibly deliver on. Luckily, since they’ve let people down since the dawn of government, we’ve set the bar relatively low. This isn’t true, however, in the business world. If FedEx promises to deliver a package by tomorrow, that’s a guarantee they can make because they control the means of delivery. On the flipside, if a camera-maker promises that all your pictures will come out beautiful, that’s irresponsible - what if you decide to point your lens at Gary Busey?

This same principle applies to SEO.

What search engine optimization companies can & should guarantee is that they’ll provide the best advice possible to help your site earn more traffic. They may even guarantee, after reviewing your site, that they can grow your search traffic by at least 10, 20, 30% or more (we’ve done this in the past, at least verbally, when we’ve seen sites that had incredible potential and extremely poor SEO practices). But, SEOs cannot control the search results the way FedEx can control shipping packages or Coca Cola can guarantee the taste of their beverage. The search engines alone are responsible for and privy to the rankings’ methodologies.

In my personal opinion, there are times when I would be willing to gamble a large amount of money on the fact that we could achieve a certain ranking for a given keyword. However, that’s not the same as a guarantee. A guarantee is a promise – a basic contract that necessarily creates an assumption of certainty by the deliverer to the recipient. Anytime you cheat on that logic and make a promise outside your sphere of direct control, you’re walking on shaky ethical and business ground.

Website design is important to the success of any business because 46% of Internet users depend on the design of a website to judge the credibility of the company that website represents, according to a Stanford University study on website credibility.

In other words, when it comes to your organization’s presence online, people judge the book by its cover. If your website isn’t meeting your expectations you maybe up to optimizing your web presence by search engine optimization, search engine marketing, or web re-design.  A combination of the three can get you to where you want to be.

advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple Web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

content network: A group of Web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

inbound link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.

invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many Web sites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a Web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a Web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.

pay per click (PPC): See Cost per Click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called Paid Search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

social media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

Web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

NO

Does Google treat CAPITALIZED and lower case Search Queries Differently?

NO

Something  interesting I want to talk about today, and I would like to update my research from last year’s. The gap seems getting much wider now.

Basically, through searching, I found that Google was treating queries differently depending on whether or not the words in the search phrase were capitalized or not.

According to Google, they don’t treat the queries different:

Some Basic Facts

Google Search is always case insensitive. Searching for [ new york times ] is the same as searching for [ New York Times ].

Only it was far from the TRUTH. George Washing and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN have a difference of over 20,000,000 in search engine results page (SERP) today, as comparing to January this year; the difference was still 1,000,000.

gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN: 8,900,000 in SERPP

george washington: 61,900,000 in SERP

The results looked the same, but you can’t help but wonder why that SERP count is so far off and the gap is even wider these days.

Today, I’m looking at another case study www.ntpwireless.com using the search term

ntp wireless vs Ntp Wireless

SERP were still far off and even returning different search results on TOP THREE returning pages.

I took two screenshots of results to illustrate this as well:

Top Free Seo Tools:

I have put together a short list of some of the essential seo tools I use on daily bases. These tools should be critical to any webmaster and are absolutely free.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a top analytics tool made available to everybody for free by Google. This analytics tool can give you detailed reports about traffic behavior, content visitation, funnel information and much, much more. It’s hard to find a site running without Google Analytics theses days.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tool gives you a good view of what Google “sees” for your site including: crawling rate, crawling speed, backlinks, highest PageRank of your site and more. A must-have as a site owner. If you aren’t leveraging it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

3. Yahoo Site Explorer

Useful to Webmasters with direct access to their site information (after being verified), and can help you assess competitors. Site Explorer is great for link research, but it can also be used to evaluate pages indexed within Yahoo. The “Explore” button allows you to see exactly how many links are pointed to deeper pages on the list, among other useful quick-check functionalities.

4. Rank Checker for Firfox by SeoBook.com

The Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search. Simply type in your URL and the keyword, you will get your rankings from three major search engines in seconds.

5. SEO for firefox by SeoBook.com

Seo for firefox is by far the most handy tool I’ve ever used. There is no other tool out there that could give you the amount of information that this tool does right from either the visited page or the search engine. Perfect for a quicky competitive overview. This tool just has it all. It will give you PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats for any given page with a simple right click. The most amazing feature is that you can export your information directly from the SERPs to CSV.

6. Google AdWords

As a powerful keyword research tool, Google AdWords gives you data on monthly search volume, advertiser competition,  CPC and much more. It also does keywords suggestion which can be  extremely helpful in targeting the long tail keywords.

You might think it’s relatively easy to go to someone’s blog and simply drop a comment, boom…with a link to your web site. Happy ending huh?

Well… this was easy back in the days, but since the comment spam, Google introduced the “no follow” to help bloggers counteract spam. This means that, even though you can put a link in your comment on a blog, the link is given no weight by the search engines. [example: WordPress is default at "no follow"]

This was significantly helpful in cutting down on blog comment spam. However, it also negatively impacted legitimate comment links from getting any credit as far as the search engines are concerned.

So, if you’re looking to generate links that help you in the search engines by participating in blog comments, look at some of these “do follow” blog directories. There is also a handy way of seeing which blogs are “do follow” or “no follow” using a Firefox Web browser add-on called “NoDoFollow“, so you can finally stop wondering about which link is “do follow” and which one isn’t.