A Short Course in SEO Marketing

I know that a lot of people charge high prices for their SEO and marketing services, but you may need some background on what it all entails that may help you to understand what is involved and why prices are so high:

First of all there is usually an initial flat rate fee for going over your site with a fine-tooth comb and optimizing every bit of code for SEO purposes. Then there are comparisons with your competitors' sites to see what they are doing with their code, and then your site/marketing campaign is tweaked even more, so as to outrank them.

Then there is a monthly keeping-an-eye-on-your-site-and-on-your-competitors'-sites fee, to make sure that if they move ahead,  we can figure out why, and make your site overtake them again. However, one morning you may find a competitor, who was on page 22, suddenly showing up on page 1...and where the heck did YOU go? Dang! You're now on page 14! But why?

Well, Google has a nasty habit of periodically changing its algorithms and rarely says a word about it. And they most certainly will never divulge how ANY of their algorithms or indexing methods work, since it's all proprietary.

So, internet marketers and SEO gurus keep an eye on such Google trends, and when something happens that causes the rankings to get suddenly scrambled like eggs, the panicked buzz starts, and the experts start speculating on what the change was that mighty Google implemented, and then they react accordingly: creating test sites,  tweaking them in various ways...until the ah-ha moment arrives and they can say "Ha! This is what they did! You now need to... "  So, the professional SEO marketing service providers are paying members of this network, too.

Now add to all this, that you can usually only rank highly on a single keyword,and it's usually a longtail one these days, since all the single word ones were taken long ago and bidding is fierce for them on Google Adwords.. I did my own SEO on my site, and for years I was number 1 for "sequential interlocking articulated wooden puzzles" but I just checked last night, and.now I am number 4, due to no activity on that site for that keyword anymore, as well as others figuring out how to outrank me in their own code now.

Plus, you have to be careful with the % of your keywords vs the rest of your written text. This is yet another part of the algorithms that can change. Get this wrong and you can be sandboxed for "spamming the engine".  Oh, and if you use "black hat" methods or services that promise to get your site on page 1 in 2 days, well, by the 3rd day, you could find yourself banned from Google completely.

So, as you can see, it's very tricky stuff! 

Another thing to consider. Google offers their own SEO services. Sounds good, right? Well, think about it this way: trusting Google to do the SEO on your site for their own search engine is like trusting the medical insurance provided by the hospital you are in.... there can be a severe conflict of interest.  As they change algorithms, and drop your rank, they can keep you tied to them for life, money-wise, to get you back to the top of the heap and stay there...only to drop you again at the next algorithm change which they probably already know will be coming up as they are working on your site. (Oh, and you might want to read Robin Cook's "Fatal Cure" for that insurance comment I made. It's scary what a conflict of interest can do to you.)

But it's not just tweaking your website code that is involved in SEO marketing services. It also involves dealing with Facebook, Twitter, other social sites, different videos everywhere, not just on YouTube, backlinks that need to be from the right places, press releases, blog articles, forum posts, email marketing etc..

As you can probably guess, it is very time intensive to set all of that up in the beginning, as well as keep up with it every month so that the site does not "go stale", You will lose rank if your site "stagnates".  This blog of mine was ranked high in 2010-11 for the keyword "horse" because I posted an in-depth article about horses every 2-5 days during that time.  It has gotten stagnant now, with no posts for months and now I have dropped. And as I said above, my stagnant wood puzzle site is now lower, too. Oh, well. I just haven't got the time to promote either, since nothing is for sale anyway. But they have been good practice for me in the SEO world where I work now.

Anyway, I hope this "short course in SEO marketing" helps you somewhat while you try to decide on who to hire for your SEO marketing services. I'd like to recommend that you check out our company, FrancySolutions.com for all your web design, SEO and internet marketing needs, both online and offline, before making your final decision.


About Crystal Eikanger

Crystal Eikanger is a freelance writer, web designer, video editor and voice talent working as Ei-Kan Productions on vWorker.com as well as other freelance job sites. FrancySolutions.com also uses her services in many ways. She has also been an avid PostworkShop fan and uses it in video production. The Footage Firm is a popular stock footage website that periodically gives away HD and SD video collections as well as royalty free music, After Effects templates, and now Red One footage.