SEO Experts

I’d like to thank everyone. This is turning into a very informative thread.

jpepper, you might want to consider targeting more specific niche keywords – specific breeds, specific types of training. The traffic will build slowly that way and hopefully if you provide good content it will also give you the chance to build more incoming links so eventually you can take on the more general “dog training”. Of course, the great thing with a blog is that the way you do that is to….get blogging.

I was just wondering… How is it that the SEO companies can ‘guarantee’ and deliver (I assume some do?) top rankings? If inbound links from high ranking sites have the biggest impact, what do the SEO companies do? Do they operate some type of link farm? But the link farm would have to be high ranking as well. I remember checking the inbound links from a website that was optimized by a SEO company and I didn’t see very many links using the Google link query. Any insights?

Check the fine print in the guarantee. What do they guarantee? How soon? What do you get if they don’t perform? Are they located in a jurisdiction where you could collect if you had to enforce the guarantee? Is the fee for their service large enough to justify going to court to collect the guarantee?

If I were ever to use an SEO company, I wouldn’t worry about a guarantee and I sure wouldn’t buy from somebody who spam emailed me. I would go to the top 4 or 5 search engines, type in “search engine optimization” and pick the company that showed up in the number 1 or 2 spot the most times. If they can’t do it for themselves, what are the chances they could do it for me?

tomhanna – I agree 100%. I’m not considering a SEO company. Really I was just curious what techniques they use. They can’t all be crooked, can they?

The guarantee is theoretically possible if it’s a money-back guarantee or some kind of performance-based payment system. For instance, if you don’t get to no. 1 for X competitive keyword within 6 months, they give your money back or 50% off or something. No one can guarantee how high a page goes on Google or any other search engine they don’t own, because the search engines are all run by companies that have interests other than helping out SEOs or website owners–like pleasing the people who use them to find the most relevant sites.

What often happens, as the other posters here are implying, is that an SEO company will guarantee no. 1 rankings for a very uncompetitive term, i.e., a term that no one or hardly anyone ever searches on, and whose number-one result currently is not competitive (low PR). I could guarantee you number-one rankings for “dog grooming products anchorage alaska” or something like that. Most often the people who buy into these things are complete idiots at least in the field of web business, and are satisfied when they get to number-one for their business name or some uncompetitive keyword, and just curse the internet when they don’t get customers.

As for how do you get links on high-PR pages: it’s simple, you buy them. There are sites like linkworth and textlinkads that facilitate these sales. For a prominent link on a well-trafficked, highly relevant PR6 or above homepage you are easily looking at $1000/month, though truth be told you might be paying that much in pay-per-click charges if you used Adwords to get on that page.

You can also get a link on a PR 6 webpage, at least temporarily, by blogging. Many blog homepages have PR 6 and many of them will put a full post on the homepage, which often includes links to other websites.

I wouldn’t pay $1000 a month. Content is key. Good content and somebody will link to you. Find the folks who are blogging about dogs because it’s a hobby and if they have questions about dog training, comment appropriately offering your expertise. With “nofollow” being the standard now in comments, the comment links won’t help, but the exposure will eventually get you real links in those blogs. Remember it doesn’t have to be a PR 6 blog by a dog trainer – if it’s a PR 6 journal by someone who owns and writes about their dogs, it’s still “relevant”.

Wonderful ideas. Thanks a ton Joel.
I was asking about https://blog.taragana.com/

I took your advice to heart and already made some changes. More are coming soon.

Thanks again ??

> and remove site wide links, as they delute the PR of
> individual pages.

What would be considered a “site wide” link by Google?

“site wide” means a link that’s on every single page of a site, such as the link to WordPress in the footer of every single page of many wordpress-powered sites.

Google will likely discount site-wide links because it’s obvious in that case that the link is offered as something other than a resource to visitors, such as a simple “powered by” link. Google only values links as a proxy for quality and relevance, and so if a link is just a “powered by” link, it probably was not chosen by the site owner, which means it is less likely to be a measure of quality and relevance.

Also, by sitewide links you might mean navigation links, the links to supposedly standard pages of a website that appear in a bar on every page. These aren’t so bad so long as the links are to pages you want to appear high in search results. You’re likely wasting pagerank with links to contact, privacy, legal, etc., and so if you can get those links in a format that search engines do not follow (supposedly, javascripting the link does this), you will only be passing your pagerank to the pages yuo want to pass it to. “Dilution” refers to the fact that the classical pagerank algorithm divides the pagerank of a page by the number of links on the page when deciding how much pagerank to pass to the linked page (in reality, it’s no longer a simple division like this but something with scales and steps). So, if you have ten links on a page with a PR of 6, you will likely let each page you link to have a PR of 5 or 4 just on the basis of your link. But if you have 100 links on a page with a PR of 6, the linked pages might only get a PR of 3 (assuming they were linked to only by that one page and not others). There’s no known exact formula (that’s a closely guarded trade secret), but that’s the general idea.

Thanks Angsumann,

Unfortunately I can’t see your site when I go to it…it’s blank…why’s that? (using firefox here).

Thanks for pointing it out. It is fixed now.

I am facing this problem that WordPress is consuming significant processing cycles so as to make the site very slow. To speed it up I use wp-cache 2 which significantly speeds up the site (read < 1% cpu even at high loads).

However it has the unfortunate side-effect of sometimes blanking the pages. It is very very painful. I plan to create a cron job to periodically check the site and delete the cache if the page is blank; haven’t got around it yet.

angsuman – you may want to checkout LightPress (https://lightpress.org/wpff-intro). May help with your performance issues??

@jpepper

Thanks. I will.

BTW: It is not my performance issues but my blog’s ??

And the reason for that is that I use way too much queries than is healthy and haven’t spent time optimizing them.

Even though on-the-page keyword optimization isn’t nearly as important as it used to be, it’s still worthwhile and I think it can make a significant difference in competitive search terms for MSN, and I know for a fact it’s a very big factor in non-competitive keyword search rankings in all the major search engines.

You’re not talking about the “meta keywords” tag here right? I thought that meta keywords tag (like angsuman uses on https://blog.taragana.com/) is basically dead, with only askjeeves and hotbot actually using it.