5 Tell Tale Signs of a Sub-Par SEO Consultant Or SEO Provider

By Adam Skiba

Within every industry there are bad companies with unethical business practices and poor customer service, and the search engine optimization (SEO) industry is no exception. There are SEO consultants and service providers that are implementing black hat SEO strategies that can ultimately ruin your online reputation. They lack practical and ethical business practices, and focus on spam-like techniques with no regard for sustainable, long term internet marketing growth. Here's 5 signs that your SEO Consultant or service provider needs to hit the road.

1. Failure To Build Personal Relationships

Strategic and innovative SEO providers build personal relationships with their clients to fully understand their business, and to better target the potential prospects in the industry. SEO providers that fail to do so and that focus on emails and written responses during all stages of the client relationship, is a sure sign that they are engaging in alternative strategies to achieve their results.

2. They Let Their Technology Handle Most of the Talking

True solutions come from the voice of technology and the company itself. SEO presentations focused too much on technology demonstrations is a sure sign that the company lacks customer insight in their SEO strategies.

3. They Speak Too Much About Themselves

They jump head long into discussing their capabilities and resist revealing why their SEO skills are superior to the next. You'll find that a true professional and experienced SEO consultant leads with questions when first meeting with you. By listening and understanding your business and potential prospects, a worthy SEO provider will then discuss their specific services and tailored solutions.

4. You Become Overwhelmed With Jargon During Their Pitch

They rely on the smoke and mirrors effect. They fluff up their pitches with buzzwords and credentials and so much industry jargon you're left wondering what just happened. These industry buzzwords are thrown around heavily throughout their sales pitch to cover up their lack of insight for customized strategies that would provide you with sustainable, long term results. A professional SEO service provider should be easily understood and transparant in all their techniques and strategies.

5. They Do Not Demonstrate Previous Case Studies

Every SEO company should have case studies that provide an insight into their services. Ask your SEO provider to back up their credentials with something that shows they've achieved projected results for a company in a similar situation, and a similar competitive vertical.

Founder of SkyMax, a Massachusetts Internet Marketing and SEO Company, Adam demonstrates a true passion for advanced and innovative SEO Service for sustainable, long term growth.

Guerilla Marketing at Its Finest - Your Quick Guide

What is "Guerilla Marketing"? Guerilla marketing is a way to promote your website without having a large budget. It consist of anything and everything to get the word out about your website, product, or service. When beginning your guerilla marketing campaign it's important to list all the methods and tactics you intend to implement. So, I'm doing it for you. This article will cover mostly off page optimization and I am assuming you already have a website ready to promote.
1. Let's focus on getting your website indexed by the major search engines. One of my favorite places to get a huge list of website directories is at Directory Critic. Just choose their General list and sort it by PR. Higher the PR the better. You only need to do the free submissions and you do not need to participate in the reciprocal link most of these sites offer. Start submitting by the highest PR first. I recommend doing about 100 directory submissions if not more. You should also submit your website directly through bing, Yahoo, and Google. Although it's not mandatory to get indexed it will not hurt. It can be a good idea to verify your site with each search engine using their meta tag verification method.
2. Now we will dive right into some video marketing. Head on over to iStockphoto and sign up if have not already. Here you can get royalty free photos, videos, illustrations, audio, logos, and much more. For video marketing your are going to search through iStockphotos videos and find a relevant video. It's going to be pain with no text, don't worry. Just find one that is relevant to your market, website, product or service. After you find a video go ahead and purchase it, you really only need the lower quality version. This should cost you about twenty dollars. Now you need to download windows movie maker if you do not already have it. It's extremely easy to use. Just add some relevant text or even audio if you like talking about your website, product, or service. The video does not have to be perfect. It just needs to get your point across. The more important part is going to be your meta data. The meta data tells the search engines and the video sites what the video is about. This is also vital in getting this video to the top of the search engines. For clarification meta data is the text you will be submitting with the video, not the text in the video. The title should have the main keywords you want to target and show up in the search engines for. Your description should be somewhat compelling like a mission statement or sales pitch. Last but not least is your tags. Most video sites accept between 10 and 12 tags. The tags should be your main keywords and other important keywords. After are satisfied with your video and taken the time to write some good meta data you are ready to start submitting to all of the video sites. I do mean all of the video sites. Do yourself a favor and do some Google searches to find a large list video sites. You would be surprised that sometimes it's not the big ones like YouTube that rank well.
3. Article marketing is a very good way to promote your site. If you are not a writer this is no problem. Just outsource it. You can find good cheap writers on places like elance. Be sure they supply a free sample for you and that it is not too choppy. The going rate for outsourcing articles at this time is between 5 and 10 dollars per 700 word article. Be sure to write up a solid agreement between you and the writer or outsource company. this agreement should state that you own all rights to the articles and it is not to ever be distributed by them without your permission. After you have chosen a writer or company you will want to collaborate with them on some topics for a list of articles to be written. The articles should be relevant to your website, product or service. Purchase as little or as many articles as your budget can handle. After you receive the articles be sure to proof read them for quality and run them through copyscape to be sure they are original. Now be sure to add in one link within the article with good keywords as the anchor text. Then prepare your a short author credit with a link back to your site for the resource box the article directories use. Now you are ready to submit. You do not need to get too carried away with submitting. I prefer to do the top ten to twenty article directories. You will gauge the top ten to twenty by their current PR. After you have your list be sure you have the time to submit them all at once. The reason for this is that all article directories run your articles through copyscape or any other plagiarism detector before approving it. If you don't do it all at once your article will start to get indexed on other directories and it will look like there are many duplicates out there. This can sometimes turn off the person in charge of approving the articles, making it less likely that your article will get approved.
4. Social networking and social media sites are important to utilize due to their high page rank and search engine visibility. Utilizing the full potential that social media/networking sites have to offer can be a very time consuming and a tedious task. This article is not about gaining traffic through social networking but how to clog the front pages of Google with your content, products, and services to gain reputation and authority.
First, start doing your homework by doing a Google search to find a nice sized list of all the major social media/networking sites. It's up to you how many you want to do, but I usually just do the top twenty.
When picking the social site you want to utilize aim for the one with the highest page rank. After you have picked the top twenty or so social media/networking sites you want to use, you are going to want to start digging through your hard drives. Find as much content, pictures, videos, ad copies, taglines, slogans, articles, and whatever else is related to the website you are going to promote. You are going to want all of this information ready to go.  Alright, now we start on our long list. I will try to generalize as much as possible as I really do not want to explain every social media/networking site one by one.  Note: You may want to use a throw away e-mail for this job as you will get plenty of spam and junk mail. 
A. When registering you have a couple options when supplying information. It really depends on what your off page SEO goals are. If people are looking for your website then you will want to use your website domain name as your name. If you are like most of us struggling to make some money online then you are going to want to use your dream keywords as your name. Let's say you are in the body building products market and you are promoting your whey protein. You would want to make your first name whey and your last name protein. You will also want to be sure that whey protein is your display name. Be sure to take your profile off of private so it can be indexed by search engines.
B. Most social media/networking sites have the option to customize your URL. Be sure to do this as this option can give you a little bump in search engine rankings. Be sure to stuff your main keywords into your URL as well. Try to have them matching your display name as closely as possible. For example your display name is whey protein try to get a URL with the words whey protein. Often times the good URLs are taken. Here are some other options to try to get those keywords into the URL. We will use MySpace as our example.
MySpace.com/wheyprotein
MySpace.com/whey-protein
MySpace.com/whey_protein
That is just a small example of what you can do to get your keywords in the URL. I know places like Twitter will even take an underscore just about anywhere.
C. Upload photos and videos. You should have some pictures related to your website, and you should have some videos you have created and used for video marketing. If not you need to start learning some simple video editing skills. It's easier than you think. Moving forward, you need to upload these videos and photos to your social media/networking account to the proper places. But before you start uploading you need to plan out the tags, descriptions, and titles for these uploads, also known as meta data. Almost all social sites allow for title, descriptions, and tags. These tell the search engines what the photo or video is about. This is a perfect spot to put your dream keywords. Be sure to put your most important keywords in all three of these spots. Tags are a great place for stuffing 5 to 10 important keywords as well. Be sure to write a good description. You can utilize some content you have laying around for this.
D. Many social sites have blogs. This is a perfect spot to write some original content or even paste an article you may have collecting dust on your hard drive. Some of these blogs allow for html code, so be sure to utilize it with a link or two pointing back to your site. Be sure the article or blog entry has some important keywords, and be sure to put keywords in you anchor text of your links.
E. A lot of social sites out there are trying to copy twitter with the short update messages. You might as well utilize it by writing a couple short updates with important keywords. Try doing about 5 to 8 tweet like updates. Be sure to put a couple of links in one or two of the updates pointing back to your site. Be sure not to spam on these.
F. Some of the social sites out there have widgets you can put in your side bars. Many of these widgets consist of text widgets, code widgets, video widgets, and whatever else they come up with. Be sure to really utilize some of these widgets. The code widget is a great one to start with because you can write some keyword rich content and even put a link back to your site in it. The video widget is a great one as well to upload your videos and utilize the meta data. Many of the video widgets allow you to upload videos from popular video sites like YouTube.
G. There are some social media sites like MySpace that basically allow you to create your own little website. Be sure to use the common SEO practices when building this mini site. For example use a keyword rich article and utilize the h1 tag to put some keywords in. Also be sure to put one or two links pointing back to your site with keywords in the anchor text.
H. Be sure to add friends and follow people that are in the same industry or niche. This can help to add relevant and related content to your profile and up the chances of getting indexed and showing up in search engines. Do not get too carried away with adding and following people as this may get you marked as spam and get all of your work deleted. There are some sites like meetup.com that it's good to follow quite a few groups as you will usually show up on their profile as well. This greatly improves your visibility in search engines. You will have to experiment with this one yourself.
5. Pay Per Post is a great way to get some search engine exposure. It's about a 75 dollar minimum to get started. It is what it is. You pay people to write a review about your website, product or service. You can also write the content for them to post as well and ask that they copy and past it. You can usually get your content on up to PR5 blogs for as little as 4 dollars. I recommend having the blogger put one to two links back to your site from the paid post. Though Google does not like paid links I don't see this effecting your website in a negative way. In my opinion there is really no way for Google to know exactly who is participating in pay per post. Even if they did they really cannot make the links hurt you or Google bowling would be rampant. If you are afraid of being penalized by Google you can ask the blogger to included the rel="no follow" tag in the link or just provide the URL as plain text.
6. Social book marking is a great way to get some quick traffic. Though book marking yourself from multiple fake accounts and e-mails is a bit spammy it is still effective. It's up to you if you want to utilize this method. If you choose to utilize it I recommend using and creating multiple accounts through OnlyWire. The same holds true with social book marking. Create strong titles, descriptions, and tags.
7. Posting classified ads on places like Craigslist and usfreeads are also an effective way to show up in the search engines for your desired keywords. Many of the classified ad sites get indexed very well by the major search engines. Again, create a strong title, description, and tags. Some of these classified ad sites accept HTML so be sure to utilize common SEO practices by using h1 tags and keyword rich anchor text.

Be sure to submit your articles to the Article Directory Project

Maximize Your Website Value by Developing and Maintaining an Online Marketing Strategy

Many companies have made their profile online these days. Not just companies, but the impact of internet technologies have also allowed any individual being online. From a blog to social media like Facebook Twitter and YouTube. Why I mentioned these are simply because internet has infected our daily life like virus. Most of us can't even live without connecting online.  In Indonesia, we have experienced fast growth in active users, mostly by mobile users. Based on a survey by Internet World Statistic, internet users in Indonesia has grown to 1000% in the last eight years from year 2000 - 2008. I'm keen on getting the 2009 statistic research as I believe it should be the fastest compare to years before. And rest assured, this percentage will increase vastly in years to come.  Now, with those information above, imagine how huge is the available market. For people with knowledge in marketing and PR, they should be able to read that opportunity and quickly getting the company online. call up a web design firm to build the website.  But after they have a website, what's next? Most of the time, they leave it there in the nowhere of the internet world. This type of website has no value at all. Even updating contents frequently (like news) is not enough nowadays. We are competing against thousands and millions of similar websites all over the world. How do you think their website can exist in the list?

We need to think of some strategies. There are many more we can do to optimize the online marketing impact. Yes, it requires lots of effort and a relatively high cost in maintaining but believe me, you'll earn that rewards.  Online marketing strategy is not a one time work, but it is a long-term development with lots of idea and concept involved, application design, monitoring, evaluating and maintaining.  I'd like to think of a website as a human body that needs food, sport, lifestyle, getting in touch with the environment, etc. Filling ourselves with food only won't make us live a healthy life. We need more than that to maintain.  Same thing goes for a website, an online media that needs maintenance in its life. Let it filled with useful contents, offer interactivity to visitors, let them love the experience of being there, etc. Oh yes, that 'Experience' is essential. Think of one website that you happened to visit lately, Did you like what you see? Did you feel good when browsing its pages? Did you get something from it? And lastly, would you come back? If your answer is 'yes', that website has successfully developed its experience. Visitors will keep coming back because they need to and feel worth to visit again. And in the end, this will improve the rank in search engine.  Of course not all of them has that good memory to remember the address and directly type in the URL in address bar. They will most likely fire-up Google and search. If the rank is high, they will find it easily. Anyway, it is also not good to just let search engine do the work itself. The company needs to maintain and remind the visitors too. Put on RSS feed and let them subscribe to email newsletter (with terms and conditions ideally to coop with anti-spam act) are two basic features.

Don't forget the social media as well. Gathering community online and build up positive thoughts of the company and brand.  A whole lot of strategies need to be conceptually developed and maintained to maximize company's online investment. Having a website only is not enough. It will definitely be a wasted investment. Nobody comes, nobody likes it or even worse, nobody knows it exist. If you're an entrepreneur, I don't think you're gonna do that investment too.  Wahidin Wong is an experienced online strategy consultant with more than 10 years involvement within the industry. Founder of Beegamax Creative, a creative design and online marketing strategy firm based in Jakarta, Indonesia. You can find more insights and design tips on his website or get updated from his Twitter.

Small Business Online Marketing - Things We Can Do to Stay on Top of the Marketing Game 

There are probably a lot of articles that we have read about small business online marketing but because we are living in a world wherein the manner and ways in which we market our business online are bound to a lot of changes when we least expect them, we need to keep ourselves updated with as much knowledge as we can get in order to get the results that we have hoped to achieve.  Here's a list of things that we should do in order to stay on top of the marketing game.
1. Be more focused at what we do. Internet marketing is indeed a complicated task so much so that we need to be even more focused at what we do. We need to be more serious about making money. Marketing our business for profit should be our ultimate goal.
2. Integrate executable marketing strategies. Internet marketing is not as hard as we have imagined it to be if we know how to create executable marketing strategies. It is important to know the strategies that are suitable for the kind of business that we are running. More often than not, most of the strategies are suitable or can be customized to work for any kind of business. All our marketing efforts should be geared towards promoting our business and creating the best web presence or online visibility. We might have to re-think on our web site and its contents.
3. Go into outsourcing. If we know that we have a promising business because we have also tested it on a smaller scale, we can try outsourcing some of the tasks that can be delegated to a virtual assistant. Usually, outsourcing some of our tasks would allow us to focus on more important aspects of our business and it won't cost us so much because we have a lot more things accomplished in a short period of time.
4. Monitor, keep and stay updated with competition. Competition is something that we always need to be wary of. We should not allow our competition to get past our business. In case, they are already ahead of us, let us always be ready with some of our marketing strategies to stay always on top.  The main goal that we would like to achieve for our online business is to have all the things that we have worked for translate to more and better profitability. Of course, this goal is not always easy to achieve especially when we are still new to this world of small business online marketing. In fact, some have successfully learned marketing their businesses the hard way, like going through a needle's small hole.

Free Video Reveals the #1 Secret Most Small Business Owners will Never Know About Generating Leads and Making Money on The Internet. Have some ideas on Small Business Online Marketing and learn them well from Mark Kreyman, a successful web promoter, at http://www.iChooseToProsper.com

Getting Started With Google Analytics on Your Newsletter Website

If you're just getting started with Google Analytics what you want to focus on is setting up your conversion tracking. Within Google Analytics there are things called 'goals' that you need to set up. You set up one goal for your opt-in and one goal for sale, if you're structuring your site like we're recommending here.
The goal for opt-in is to track the number of people that actually subscribe. So, whatever page that they're taken to as the thank you page for giving you their name and email address on that forced opt-in or squeeze page is what you want to set up as one of the goals to trace the number of views of that.  Then, from your sales letter, when people subscribe to your newsletter, the thank you page from that needs to be set up as a sales goal, so you can track the conversion rates on the opt-in and on the sales.  Once you're tracking those then what you want to look at within Google Analytics' data is all of the different traffic sources that are coming to your website. Watch the conversion rate trends by traffic source.

This is a critical thing that very few people do, but it will help you determine within your own marketing if a particular campaign is effective or not. A lot of people will look at their global conversion rate and that will give you some decent information.  However, to make decisions that you can take action on within your business you need to know, by traffic source, what the conversion rate of that individual traffic source is. Not all traffic sources are created equal and not all traffic sources are going to convert equally well for you.
If you're driving pay-per-click traffic to your opt-in page you might discover that traffic from your Google AdWords campaign might be converting at 40% to opt-in.  If you look at your Yahoo campaign and discover that's only converting at 20% that tells you that you need to make some tweaks and changes to your Yahoo campaign. Either improve the keywords you're targeting there or try to get it to better match Google or, perhaps, just for whatever offer you're making, traffic from Yahoo is just not as targeted as qualified as traffic from Google.

Once you have those goals set up, look at your traffic sources and your conversion rates by traffic sources to determine where you want to spend more money or invest more time driving traffic.  Bret Ridgway is co-founder of the Newsletter Formula. For your copy of the free report "7 Ways to Make Money with Newsletters and Continuity Programs" visit http://www.NewsletterFormula.com

The Online Business Check List For the New Year 2010 - Money Makers 

Be prepared and get ready for making money in the New Year 2010. The following check list is designed to give you the edge over those who jump in unknowing, why? Well. It's just Like when you go for a picnic, you want to pack all the things you need. You don't want to find that you forgotten something later on, or for that matter, find yourself lost on your way to where you plan to picnic. When it comes to online business, knowing what is needed and understanding why you need them, can and will, determine whether you will Be Successful or not.
So with the interest of saving time, lets get started...
The Right Mind For The Job
There is a lot of talk about how the Internet can make you fast, easy cash. How that anyone, no matter where they're from, what business background they have (if any), or whatever skill they may own, can now simple turn on their computer, type one or two things into it, and then, sit back and watch the money rushing in.
Well, even though this is true to some ends, if you go into online business with the above talk stuck in your head, you run the risk of over looking what is needed to make a business work.
And what is that?

• First off, the understanding that no business makes money without "work". Yes, it maybe easy work, but prepare yourself to put in the hours.
• Learning business secrets, strategies and techniques can be the hardest part of online business for some. There are many reason for this of course, the phrase "fast cash" is one. Newbies get stuck on this all the time. They buy how to information, race through it, and then wonder why they're not pulling in the cash.

Learning how to be successful can take some time. Meaning, once you buy how to information, take your time and "learn". Read all the information, don't skip though it and think you know how things are done. You didn't know how to do it before you bought the info, by only reading half of it, you'll only know half of it.

• Think like a successful business person. The first business opportunity you pay for out of your own pocket, should be the last time you spend your own money. Your business should pay for itself. If you need more money to buy other information to grow your business, then you should of made that from the first business opportunity you bought into.

For Example: You buy information on how to make money through article marketing. You should "at less" make $300 a week from that. With the money you make from article marketing you buy other helpful information, services or software that boost your sales too $750 a week, and so on until you make the income you want.
The Right Online Business

• The right online business is one that already has people spending their money. When it comes to quick cash and a long lasting income online, do not re-invent the wheel, only sell information, services, or items that people already want.
• You don't really need to know about what your selling these days, but if you do know and understand a niche, topic or subject that is selling well, it can only make your business life easier when it comes to selling it. Food for thought.

Everything In Its Place
As your online wealthy grows so will your business, websites, blogs, articles, or whatever your Internet marketing methods may be. Having some sort of filing system will help when finding all your goings on, like, user-names and passwords, hosting accounts, in and out goings (accounts), a list of articles you've written and where you posted them, etc.
Now because of the Internet being the way it is these days (hackers, spyware, viruses), storage of this information should not be kept on your computer. You could use a offline computer, external hard drive, flashcard, or CD.
In a nutshell
What you need to make money is:

• A computer
• An Internet connection
• A level head
• The willingness to learn everything you need to
• To act on what you learnt
• To choose a business model that already has people spending their money
• And to keep organized

Dan Murray is an online business reviewer. Meaning, he reviews products and services in the online business world. Most of his work these days is found at Business Options No.1, an informational blog that offers articles, tips, how to's, and advice within internet marketing and on-going web business.
Now if you're looking for what the big money makers of 2010 will be, check this out... Money Makers 2010. Plus, a 7 step plan to making your first $30,000 in 4 too 5 months.