websense

So, you’ve been charged with the task of generating better search results and you’re investigating your options now. Lets pretend for now, that the only thing you had to consider is natural search engine optimization, for purposes of keeping this post as short as possible.

You have basically 4 options, each has it’s own pros and cons.

• Do the research and work internally.
• Hire a consultant.
• Hire a one man SEO shop.
• Hire a professional SEO firm.

SEO In House:

Chances are that if you have the skills in house to handle SEO, you’ve already made this decision and brought on the necessary talent. I say this because you’re not likely to randomly find true SEO knowledge in an existing web development or traditional marketing department. It really is it’s own skill set.

SEO Consultants:

With regard to the option of hiring an independent SEO consultant or one-man SEO shop (and yes, they can be quite different). There are some great advantages to this option. The first of which is usually cost. There’s a lot to be said for the lack of overhead, and some one man bands do a fine job.

The first step to making a good decision is discerning the difference. What it comes down to, is a consultant is just that, a consultant. They are going to tell you what you need to do or have done. In contrast, an SEO Shop should actually perform the service for you, not just hand you a “to do list”.

So, if you’ve got a lot of web development talent, some pretty good copywriters and marketing folks, a consultant might just fit the bill nicely, assuming your team is willing to do some learning and legwork.

One Man SEO Shops:

Regarding one man SEO Shops, those that actually perform the service; if that’s the route you’re considering I would encourage you to consider your in-house team and determine which parts of the overall SEO strategy they’ll be able to take on. Because at the end of the day, a true SEO strategy is likely to involve a little of each of the following things (at least): research, web development, copy writing, marketing, analytics and so on. The likelihood of finding one individual who can effectively fill all of those roles is very slim. So, when you engage a one man SEO shop, do your best to find out what their strengths really are, and be sure to have a backup plan in place for filling in the gaps. Hopefully, the financial savings on the shop’s costs will offset the work you’ll need to do internally.

Then comes the option of a professional SEO firm. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I am of course very biased in this direction. With that disclaimer out of the way:

Using a Full Service SEO Firm:
The primary disadvantage of using a professional SEO shop will of course be cost. Because they’re likely to have at least 5 to 10 employees, legitimate office space, a marketing budget etc. they will cost more. In addition, another concern you might have is whether or not they might end up working with one or more of your competitors. The bigger they are and the better they are at what they do, the more likely this is to happen.

Now, to the up side of working with a full service SEO shop:

• Skill Sets: As a client, you’re able to tap into several skill sets (research, optimization techniques, copy writing, analytics,etc.) with one simple budget.
• Ability to Implement: A professional shop should be able to not only recommend strategies, but take them through implementation and on into tracking the results.
• Delivery Times: Having a staff of search marketers should give the company the ability to serve multiple clients at one time and expand and contract with the scope of projects.
• Accountability: When the responsibility for the various tasks of Search Marketing is consolidated on one vendor/partner, evaluating your ROI becomes a much simpler process.

A quick Recap:

Hire a consultant if: You’re confident that you have the skills in house, but need some direction.
Hire a one man SEO Shop if: You either have minimal needs, or have some but not all of the skills in house.
Hire a full service SEO Shop if: You either aren’t sure where to start, or you have high expectations and need to deliver results.

Now that I have made the case for when a company should go with an official RFP for Web development projects, I am proud (and a bit relieved) to say that The Karcher Group is offering a sample Web development RFP that businesses can use. The sample can by found by clicking here. All you need to do is download the Word document, customize the text to fit your development project, and you are good to go. Please come back here once you have taken a look at it and leave me some feedback below to let me know if you found it useful and if you have any ideas on how to improve it.

At last month’s SMX Advanced 2007, some of the top names in SEO were asked to “Give It Up” during a panel session and divulge a few of their best SEO secrets. The one caveat of attending this session was that we had to wait one month to blog about it. Well, the one-month embargo has been lifted, and we can now share all the tips and tricks we learned. Check it out — there might just be a tip or two in here that is right for your business.

A special thanks to the following speakers for sharing some of their best SEO secrets:
Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay, Inc), Todd Friesen (Range Online), Mike Grehan (Bruce Clay, Inc), Jennifer Slegg (JenSense.com), Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts, LLC), Mikkel deMib Svendsen (deMib.com), Shari Thurow (Grantastic Designs), Jill Whalen (High Rankings)

Secret #1: Google Grouped Results
• To find the true position of an indented (grouped) result, append &num=9 to the URL and see if the indented listing drops off. If not, append &num=8.

Secret #2: Launching New Sites
• Submit old sitemap to Search Engine’s, then submit new sitemap

Secret #3: View (Potentially) Cloaked Page When “Cached” Link Not Available
• Use Google Translate and translate it from English to English

Secret #4: Trapezoidal Linking
http://www.insearchofstuff.com/trapezoidal-linking-matriflux-with-php/

Secret #5: Duplicate Content
• Use 301 redirects like robots.txt file
• Consolidate duplicate content

Secret #6 Training Clients
• Train on SEO verbiage & language
• Offer free PDFs, white papers, tutorials, etc

Secret #7: Brand Protection
• Establish & protect brand
• Through blogs, videos, podcasts, rss, social media, etc.

Secret #8: Implement Silo Link Structure
• Create a site architecture where pages of specifically related keyword topics are arranged in a literal silo structure
http://www.searchengineguide.com/barone/009352.html

Secret #9: Build a Link Building Spider
• Look for sites one-click away from Google
• Look for sites with super high PR
• With preference for sites that already give link love to patron/sponsor

Secret #10: Define Unique Title Tags on Your Blog that Aren’t Just Based on Post Titles

Secret #11: Cloak Your Home Page
• For bots only, drop tracking tags and other superfluous parameters from the URLs of your links
• Or, if you have search engine friendly versions of your secondary level pages, link to them instead
• Use “user agent” detection and don’t “noarchive” the pages to obscure what you’e doing
• Don’t mess with the content of the page

Secret #12: Link Build Your Existing Links
• Mine your existing backlinks for opportunities to revise the anchor text.
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o
http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/

Secret #13: “SEO Title Tag” WordPress plugin

Secrey #14: Participate in Mark Cuban’s blog (blogmaverick.com)
• It doesn’t use “nofollow” comments

Secret #15: Dynamic Page Titles
• Use breadcrumb trail to dynamically generate page titles
• Use company name at end of title

Secret #16: Change Google
• Get a more realistic number, minus pages not crawled, by changing your Google preferences to “English Only”

Secret #17: Free Analyst Reports
• Search Google for “forrester research grapevine endnotes filetype:pdf”

Secret #18: Logo Alt Attributes
• Optimize the alt text of the homepage logo with competitive phrases
• Do this for every other page

There’s no doubt, Northeast Ohio isn’t exactly a hotbed of technology talent. That creates a real challenge for a growing Web Design firm. Finding new designers, CCS folks and programmers can be a real headache.

While we’re struggling to find enough new talent, the kids that do have some talent and graduate college are heading to one of the coasts or Chicago because they believe that’s the only place they can find a job. Either that or they’re only interested in designing gaming software, in which case we can’t use them anyways. This situation has been dubbed the brain drain. Fortunately our area chambers and some other local businesses are working hard to both keep these kids here, and retrain those who may be ready for a new field.

To do our part, we’ve kicked off the TKG Instititue, which is web development training for young adults that are ready (or almost ready) to enter the workforce, but need some experience in web design or development. Our goal is to grow some talent in our market to first and foremost, serve the kids who take advantage of it, secondly build a workforce for our business and others in the area who need people with these skill sets.