The Solopreneur's Guide

SEO (search engine optimization) is a critical component to any online marketing strategy. Its purpose is to help companies attract their ideal customers to their website and incentivize them to take a specific action or actions. When you create your strategy, you need to establish a budget to go with it. So if you were to ask an SEO consultant, “How much does SEO cost?” you probably wouldn’t be satisfied with the answer, “It depends.”

While this response may seem like a salesperson’s trick to raise rates as high as possible, it isn’t. Why? Because there are a number of factors that can affect your ability to get to the top organic ranking on the SERPs (search engine results page). To get a sense of the complexity of the question, how would you respond if you were asked how much it costs to buy a house?

There are a number of questions that probably come to mind before you can answer.

• Where is the house located?
• How old is it?
• What upgrades does it have?
• What condition is it in?
• How many comparable homes are currently on the market in the same area?

SEO operates in a similarly dynamic market. Google alone has over 200 on-page and off-page factors that affect how they index a website and its pages. Some of these elements include:

• the quality and frequency of the content you post
• the keywords you select
• how you utilize them in your meta tags
• the quality and quantity of links you have coming to and going from your site
• and more …

And these factors change regularly. For example, I recently wrote about the Google Penguin alrogithm update. In total, reports indicate that they perform about 600 tweaks every year to improve the quality of the results on their SERPs.

So before you can get an appropriate response to how much SEO costs, you have some important questions to answer, including:

• How aggressively do you want to market your business?
• What results do you expect?
• How saturated is your target market with competitors?
• What are they doing to help them rank highly?
• What are you already doing that you can improve versus what do you need to start from scratch?

To get an understanding of what it will take to help you accomplish your SEO goals, at SmallBizMedia.tv, my SEO, SEM, SMM and PPC company, we start by performing an in-depth market research and analysis of your on-page and off-page SEO s well as those of your top competitors. This gives us the lay of the land and a baseline to use in monthly analysis as your site improves with our SEO strategies.

As part of our on the page SEO market research, we review the following attributes:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Keywords
• Header tags
• Image tags
• Image alt tags
• Anchor text and embedded URLs
• And more

Additionally, we assess the technical attributes of your site that may cause it to load slowly or prevent the search engine spiders from crawling it. We review off the page SEO elements and compare all of this data to that of your competition.

To find out how much SEO will cost you, simply contact us by calling (928) 273-5069 or fill in the form on my Contact page.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

It was just a little more than a year ago when I reported about the roll out of the Google Panda algorithm version 2.2 as Google further attempted to measure user response to the quality of their SERPs. Since then, they’ve made dozens of tweaks to the algorithm. Last week, they released a new version of their algorithm called, Penguin, to identify and penalize sites guilty of “SEO over-optimization”.

Word of this pending change started circulating at the last SXSW when Google’s famed head of their Webspam team, Matt Cutts, talked about the “over-optimization penalty”. Then last week, he made the official announcement that Google will be penalizing those sites that are using “aggressive web spam tactics” for gaming their way to the top of Google’s rankings.

So what does this mean for SEO and your website?

If you’re following white-hat SEO practices and you’re posting high-quality, compelling content, you have little to worry about. And I only say “little to worry about” because the reality is that Google does sometimes get it wrong with all the best of intentions. However, if you are using aggressive black-hat techniques, like keyword stuffing, unusual linking patterns, and spun content with anchor text that links to pages with content that is completely unrelated, then you should be concerned.

This latest update should raise a couple of questions for your SEO strategy.

1. Are you trying to cheat your way to the top?

The bottom line is that if you want to get to the top of Google organically, you have to work for it. If you’re a small business owner and you are considering using the low-cost services of faceless sites that promise to get you thousands of links quickly, realize that these are some of the same services that use spun articles and unrelated links that Google is targeting with Penguin.

2. Does your SEO strategy focus on what makes your target audience happy or does it focus on Google’s algorithm?

As the image at the top of this post indicates, you shouldn’t be creating your SEO strategy based solely upon what makes Google happy. Yes, we all want the great visibility and click-throughs that come with sitting in the #1 organic ranking spot on Google’s SERPs. And yes, you should be aware of the how the algorithms work.

However, have you ever seen content that was obviously created for a machine and not a human reader? These are the posts that have low quality content and read as if certain phrases were dropped in repeatedly, with little relevance, or in a way that doesn’t flow grammatically with the rest of the content.

Google will continue to hone their algorithm to improve their SERPs. What you create to cheat the system today can cost you tomorrow. Plus, some of the gaming tactics are pretty obvious for the people who find your content. What does this say about the quality of your products and services? Even if you get this content past Google, you’ll lose credibility with your target audience for being guilty be association.

BTW - I have to give credit to high_plains_drifter in the Warrior Forum for the creation of the amusing image in this post. Great pic! Don’t get caught in this viscous circle.

3. Are you leveraging other channels to reach your audience online?

Even though Google is the king when it comes to search engines and it can bring your business great clicks and targeted traffic when you rank high on Page 1, Google’s search engine isn’t the only game in town. Your target audience spends time on other sites, including social media platforms, bookmarking sites, video channels, and more. Do you know where your target audience spends time? Connecting with them on various locations online increases your visibility and your credibility which ultimate will increase your odds of improving your profitability.

4. Do you know the difference between white-hat and black-hat SEO?

The rules for SEO change pretty frequently. What you may hear as a “good idea” or best practices today can be obsolete in a few months or could cost you rankings in the future. If you are unsure how to differentiate the two or simply don’t have the time to stay up-to-date with these ongoing changes, it’s best to bring on professionals that do. If you are concerned about your past and current SEO strategies and tactics and want a professional review, contact us.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide

“The only thing constant is change” appears to be the tagline for Facebook. Seems the ever-changing and might FB has decided to do it again. This time, they are altering the dimensions of the profile picture from the 125 x 125 to 160 x 160. Here is a copy of their statement:

“On April 26, we will be updating the size of the profile picture on all Pages. We are letting you know about this small change in advance so that you can update your profile picture on April 26. The new profile picture will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the Page.”

What does this mean for you?

For your personal page, it probably doesn’t matter. For your fan page, it could have an impact. Since you were required to upload a profile picture with dimensions that are 180 x 180, your image will still fill in the cropped box that is visible on the page. If you are only managing your page, you may not have anything to do or maybe, at most, a quick fix.

However, if, like in the image example at the top of the page for Reference Point Software, you have a profile picture that was designed to line up with the masthead image, you may need to alter your image so everything lines up. And if you are a social media firm servicing a large number of clients, plan to work like accounts on tax day. Sure, all of these changes keep firms like us working, but they can get you into trouble too if you aren’t staying on top of your game.

If you want to see the latest information posted by Facebook about profile pictures, go to: https://www.facebook.com/help/profilepictures

So what’s up next from Facebook? Stay tuned. With Facebook’s recent purchase of Instagram and their love of change, maybe we’ll see something there. Only Facebook knows.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan
The Solopreneur’s Guide