5 points to identify a genuine SEO Consultant:

 1. A genuine SEO consultant can show you examples of his work!

 This might either be sites, that the SEO consultant has optimized  for a client, or it might be his own project. He should be able to provide a full ranking report, a link profile and traffic stats for the site. It is insufficient to show you some “number one positions” for obscure key-phrases that nobody uses in the first place.

 2. A genuine SEO consultant does not guarantee rankings!

 Why not? Isn’t that what I am paying for you might ask. No its not. You pay for  positioning your website in search engines to get more qualified visitors to your site and convert a certain amount of visitors into  new clients.

 Instead a good SEO works out a marketing plan with you, based on what he thinks is realistic in terms of performance and based on your budget.

 3. A genuine SEO consultant is not cheap!

 The price for SEO depends on three  factors:

 -        How competitive are your key phrases

-        Your expectations in performance

-        How you want to pay

 This can range from only 2000 Euros per year and in some cases more than 200.000 per year. There is a big difference if you want to be found under “my product + my hometown” or if you need to generate i.e. 200 real estate leads per month to feed a sales organization.

 A genuine SEO tells you what needs to be done to achieve your goals and puts a price tag on his services. He will be able to work within your estimated CPO (cost per order), or the estimated CPL (cost per lead) and he will work closely together with you to achieve those pre-defined goals.

 Often SEO work on a hybrid payment model that is a smaller annual or monthly fee, plus a CPL or CPO  based payment. The more the payment is performance based, the more the SEO will expect to earn and vice versa.

 4. A genuine SEO consultant does not spam!

 A genuine SEO will not use what is  call “black hat techniques”. He will not suggest  methods to “trick” the search engines.

 5.A genuine SEO consultant is not secretive!

 SEO is not some secret voodoo technique, that only a selected few have access to. Its a job that requires some expert knowledge and some time to be invested. Just like lawyers, doctors, business consultants or similar.

 A good and genuine SEO consultant will tell you what needs to be done to achieve your goals and what methods he will use. He can also confidently and without bullshit, answer questions about how search engines do rank websites.

 That does not mean he will train or educate you to become an SEO yourself, but you will at least know what steps he is going to undertake and in which time frame.

 In closing

 These 5 points  reduce the amount of SEO consultants you have to choose from to about 5% of the original amount. Of course, you can always take the easy route and call Smart Media for a quote, to take the guess work out of your search for an SEO consultant.

 Simply call 
+ (34) 665 841 138

Talk to you later

Wolfgang Brand
Genuine SEO Consultant

Gratuitous animation
Flash has contributed to the ridiculous amount of gratuitous animation on the Internet, and – unlike animated GIFs – flash animations do not respond to your browser’s stop button or your keyboard’s escape key. Thus, users are likely to close the entire website down, rather than just a section.

Splash screen renaissance
By comprising smaller file sizes than GIF animations, flash has single-handedly brought back the splash screen, arguably one of the most irritating Internet experiences. Internet users are usually looking for content, and presenting them with a content-free splash screen is a sure-fire way to annoy them and give them good reason to leave. And who can blame them?

Flash websites
Incorporating flash into an HTML page or splash screen is bad enough, but entire websites built with flash are positively evil. First and foremost, flash websites make the browser’s back button and address bar useless, and make book-marking pages inside a flash website impossible. Printing flash pages from your browser won’t work either, nor will intra-page keyword searching. Finally, flash sites disable HTML links’ visited and unvisited colours, and this colour-changing feature is the Internet’s most important navigational cue.

Flash and search engines
Pages that are built entirely from flash – or ones that are heavily loaded with it – suffer from the same ranking problems as frame sites. There is simply not enough content for spiders to determine the relevancy of the site, and no meaningful ranking is ever achieved.

A flash site usually consists of one HTML page (the home page) and all other content is in a flash object. A flash designer’s argument is that the index page is in HTML, which can be read by search engines. They usually say that adding meta tag descriptions will do the trick. Fortunately, we’ve only had one potential client who was naive enough to believe he could achieve good rankings this way.

Google Blog

Another nail in the coffin for flash sites!

If I pay 3.000 Euro for an annual contract for SEO I am paying 60 Euros per week. He concluded he should get 6 hours of work for that.

He seriously expected me  to work for 10 Euro an hour. He probably pays his cleaning lady more then that.

So what does an SEO charge per hour?

SEO’s are not getting paid by the hour. They get paid for their ‘know how’. To be exact: their knowledge  about how to make a website rank, for their sources of quality links, for their intuition, for the experience gained from mulitiple experiments, tests and previous projects.

That’s at least how I see it, and that’s what I base my prices on.

Everytime I take on a new client, he gets an analysis of his site and linking profile and the offer includes all measures that need to be undertaken to achieve better rankings for the site. I don’t stipulate how many hours I need for that.

Actually the less hours I need, the more money I make and the faster the client’s site starts performing – a win win situation.

I explain with this little story:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young.  He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work.  He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do.  After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer.  He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life.  He carefully put his hammer away.

The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

Would be interesting to hear from other SEOs whats their opinion about ‘charges per hour’ ….

Wolfgang Brand

Most previous updates did cause big changes in rankings, simply because the changes were about the way Google ranks sites. This update however seams to be about how Google will index sites in the future.

What is the difference?

When Google changes an algorithm, then it implements or changes stuff that determines how your website ranks. This could be the way the value certain links, or like in “jagger” evaluating reciprocal links. Changes about how they INDEX a site is entirely different: It means how the get the data and how fast and in what way they process such data to be shown in results.

This changes could actually have an impact on search results. Why? because if data a collected and processed faster then before, more data is available in the results and as a consequence rankings might vary. Matt Cutts from Google said in an interview that they try to keep the search results the same or at least similar like before.

Now, that was the theory

Google actually provides a testing version to the new system and asks users and developers for feedback.  You can find it here:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

I did some testing on the sites I am optimising. I did find some minor changes in the rankings for which I have no explanation as yet. I will have to dig deeper into this. My first thought was about anchor text being used more as exact phrase match, but I have not evidence yet to support that.

The site that has lost a little under generic phrases ( bars fuengirola)  is www.fuengirolascout.net and on the winning side are www.arribaestates.com and www.fiestaproperty.com. The later much to my surprise.  I have not done jack shit on the site since ages. The opposite is the case: I actually removed links to that site.

Any observations?

If anybody made observations about changes in your own rankings, please post them here. I also would love to hear theories about why certain sites rankings change.

Here some questions that I have seen people asking:

• Will content get indexed faster then before?
• Did they change the way the rank sites as well or is it just a matter of time until things settle? Or is caffeine just a structural change?
• Will fresh content, like on blogs, will get even more favoured and indexed faster, not only on wordpress but across all blogging platforms?
• Will loading time effect ranking after caffeine?
• Will user behaviour be a factor?

I don’t have the answers yet and would welcome  discussion about it.

Regards

Wolfgang Brand
Smart Media Spain
SEO & Media Consultant

Emails such as this often appear in my inbox:

“Submitting your website to search engines may increase your online sales dramatically. lf you invest time and money into your website, you simply must submit your website to search engines, otherwise it will be virtually invisible to prospective customers. If you want people to know about your website and boost your sales, the only way to do that is to make your website visible in places where people search for information, such as search engines”.

What you aren’t told in these misleading emails is that submitting your website to search engines has very little to do with search engine rankings. In fact, submitting your website to search engines doesn’t even guarantee it gets indexed. Most traffic to your website is generated from the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Therefore, submitting your website to thousands of search engines will be a waste of time and money. Even worse is that your website might get accidentally submitted to AFF websites, which almost certainly guarantees that it will be banned from search engines. Rather than push you up the rankings, thousands of these search engines use your information for future promotions – meaning more pesky spam crammed in your inbox.

Ways to submit your pages

1. Don’t submit your pages at all. Instead, allow the search engines to find your pages through links on other websites. Ironically, non-submitting is by far the most effective way of submitting your pages – and the least stressful!

2. Submit your pages through the free add URL pages of the search engines. The downside with this, however, is that search engines claim that over 90% of all submissions through free add URL pages is spam. And you don’t want your website lost with all that lot!

3. Use Overture’s Site Match to submit your pages to Yahoo!’s family of search engines. Site Match is a paid inclusion-and cost-per-click program that ensures your pages are highly visible by including them in search engines such as Yahoo!, FAST, AltaVista, HotBot and more. Site Match can get expensive though if you have a number of pages to submit.

4. If your website is new list it in a directory such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) or the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). Then find some websites that will agree to put links from theirs to yours. Visit the Search Engine Guide (www.searchengineguide.com) to see if there are any search engines and directories that cover your website’s topic area.

Take the stress-free approach to search engine submissions and:

• link to all of your important pages from another page on your website
• get inbound links from another website to yours
• let the major search engines find your pages by themselves
• monitor your progress

Please note: You may be using an SEO company like Smart Media to handle your search engine submissions. Does this mean you’re paying too much for these SEO services? No. SEO work is extremely complex and time-consuming, and a good search engine optimiser will help make your online business a success.

In conclusion

So many website owners and SEOs make search engine submissions look much harder than they are. Don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes!

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

Some engines simply counted the number of links coming into a page (inbound links), but Google took the idea further. Each inbound link comes from a page which itself has inbound links. The more inbound links on the linking page, the more important that page is and, therefore, the more important the link to our page is.  So Google gives more weight to inbound links from important pages that it does to inbound links from lesser pages.

Google is the world’s number one search engine, and currently provides the results for around 80% of all the searches done in the world. Because of that, it is vitally important for any website that relies on search engine traffic to do well in Google. Ranking  well in Google means making the site ‘important’ in Google’s eyes and, to do that, the site must have good inbound links – as many of them as possible, and preferably from important pages (pages with medium to high PageRank values).

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

1. According to Forrester Research, Internet-influenced sales generate three times as much revenue as Internet-bought sales. In other words, people prefer to research their purchases online and then go the shops to actually buy them buy offline.
Source: Microsoft Business central

2. According to research company Nielsen, there are upwards of 34 million Britons with Internet connections. And as of May 2002, there were some 185 million Europeans with Internet connections.
Source: Microsoft Business central

3. Recent research reveals 58% of house hunters are using the Internet as a primary source of property information.
Source: HBF Press Release

4. According to a study at Stanford University, people do judge a company’s credibility and professionalism by the design and content of their website.
Source: Consumer Web Watch

5. The biggest markets in Europe for Internet Marketing are; Germany- 21% of all European Internet users are German; the UK – 16% of all European users are British; Italy – 12.9% are Italian; and France, 11% are French.
Source: World Internet Stats

Conclusions

Most businesses in Spainl do not realise the importance of their internet presence and online marketing. In the past, customers weren’t too bothered about this part of a company’s profile, but nowadays it is entirely different. In fact, a good website is the single most important part of a business’s marketing strategy.

While some businesses still try to get around it and attempt to do it by themselves, many now account for a website and Internet marketing services in their budget.

In light of the above, you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I have a website that enhances the professional image of my company?
2. Do I know how to market my Internet presence? If so, why does it not work?
3. After spending thousands of Euros on a website, why am I not getting results?
4. Can I afford not to invest in Internet marketing services?

Think about it; how much will it cost your company should a prospective client choose to go to a competitor because your website isn’t up to scratch, or they couldn’t find it in the first place? It’s a scary concept.

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

• a professional Internet presence is a significant part of the overall marketing plan, and the single most effective way to generate potential customers
• online marketing is substantially different than offline marketing
• people judge a company’s credibility by the content and design of their website
• websites do not work without promotion

By overlooking these key facts, website owners are not placing enough importance on their company’s Internet presence. A common belief amongst website owners is that once they have paid somebody for a website, that is the end of it. And instead of outsourcing the promotion of their website to a professional, they assign the task to somebody they know. The resulting website often look outdated and unprofessional, with hardly any fresh content, but plenty of copy in the ‘about us’ section to feed their ego.

Afterwards, website owners ask: how do I get rankings in search engine results? Instead of going to an SEO expert, they cram the meta tag with all related keywords and phrases and hope for the best. Then they sit and wait for traffic to start pouring in. Time goes by, and nothing. Then the website owner wonders why they built a website in the first place.

Some even research into link exchange, but what most of them don’t know is that they need to link with the competition to increase their website’s credibility. Most of the time, however, they avoid linking to the competition, and instead link every known spam website. More time goes by, and the website owner and his designer remain the only two people looking at the website.

Finally, the website owner decides to contract an SEO expert. Instead of taking the SEO expert’s advice, however, the website owners requests an even flashier website and insists on his own design. The SEO expert is forced to go along with the website owner, and tries to build the website in compliance with Internet marketing standards.

The SEO expert insists on regularly updated content, but the request falls on deaf ears; instead, the website owner’s sole concern is the look and ‘feel’ of their website. The website owners demands that the website be within the top ten Google search results, without updating any of the content.

Now do you see how frustrating it is?

Unfortunately, most companies in Spain using an SEO company do not follow the expert advice they have contracted and paid for.   SEO is time-consuming, ongoing and difficult. If it were easy companies would do it themselves. It requires that you:

• accept that online marketing is substantially different from offline marketing
• accept that you know little or nothing about it
• spend time and effort to develop regular in-demand content for your website
• choose an SEO company wisely
• take your SEO company’s advice on board

Contact us for a free analysis of your website. We will look at different aspects of your website and explain what you need to do in order to make it suitable for search engine optimisation.

Regards

Wolfgang Brand

If you choose the wrong keywords or phrases for your website – or if you choose none at all – then you can wave goodbye to all those potential customers scouring the Internet for your service. It all comes down to simple psychology; if they can’t find your website fairly quickly, then they’ll get bored and frustrated, lose interest and you’ll lose custom.

Whenever we tell clients about Internet marketing and SEO, they bombard us with words and phrases they think sound good. When we ask them why they think the words and phrases they’ve come up with sound good, they usually respond with, ‘Well, that’s what I would use, and what most English people would use.’

Fine, but think about it like this: would you place a 5.000-euro bet on how many people you know would type in exactly what you would type in to find your website? Not so sure now, are you? If we were to use the words and phrases most clients thought sounded good, we’d be placing a bet and hoping for the best. More importantly, it would be a bet with your money.

At Smart Media we leave nothing to chance, and use sophisticated software that allows us to compare more than 248,000,000 online searches to find out how certain phrases are used across a wide breadth of different search engines, and how much competition each has. With each website that we undertake we carefully analyse the type of phrases related to the content in order to achieve maximum exposure and to target the right audience. Ultimately, choosing the right keywords and phrases can make or break the success of SEO.

We then decide with a client what approach they’d like to adopt with regard to choosing keywords and phrases. Some clients prefer to target less competitive phrases in exchange for quick results, while others are more patient and target premium phrases in order to compete with other highly optimised websites. While this method almost always gets better results, it takes a great deal longer and some clients just don’t have the time. But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day…

Regards

Wolfgang Brand