Heres my situation im a webmaster, i have had 10s of failed websites due to my newbish ways in the past as im sure everyone does to start - now i have done little to no SEO on these fialed sites and really am a SEO newb - i understand the basic stuff So i am a elite affiliate marketer and have earnt some nice funds and invested in 2 nice websites that ive built! Both these sites have BIG potential and i have done hardly any SEO on either apart from keywords and metas etc on my forum and baught around 200 backlinks SO heres my problem - i have money to invest in SEO but only really one off fee! So im asking exactly what i should be asking for on oDesk and exactly what sort of price i should be paying then i need advice on exactly how i can follow up this work and what i need to do monthly without spending to much money so do i get someone to do basic on and off page SEO and then work on backlinks? How do i get the backlinks monthly? please just guide me through this for a real newbie! thanks alot!
First of all, you can start by reading some useful threads that can be found in this forum, or google some info on SEO to learn the basics, so you know what you are doing, and if you hire someone you know what he is doing. Onpage optimization isn't very difficult, just google "onpage optimization tips" and you will find useful info on this. There are some useful tools and wordpress plugins for this such as SEOpressor, which can make your life a lot easier, just browse around old threads on other forums, make some search in google, it isn't a big deal once you learn this, it shouldn't be a problem. However, once you've done your research, if you feel uncertain about something, you can ask me, I have been doing SEO for quite a long time and I can help you if you have any doubt on this. Then, off-page optimization is a little bit more difficult for those who are new to SEO. There are different ways to build backlinks, from different sources, and different strategies, some more effective than others. This requires some time to learn, and it can be a tiresome task. Creating links manually is a pain, and takes loads of time and dedication. You can take the hard way and learn by yourself all the backlinking strategies and create the backlinks by yourself, or you could take the easy way and outsource it, however, if you are going to outsource this I recommend you to first make some research, the price and quality varies. Assuming you will go both ways, (you want to outsource and create links by yourself right?), I recommend you to start by doing some research. Forums are good places to buy services, where you have feedback from other users to look at and you get close contact with the outsourcer (the forum poster) since he would be frequently around the forum. Compare services, prices. You can find things cheaper in some places than others I have seen people selling at $400 services that sell for $10.
Depending on your niche, & depending on what your goal is, the timeline of results will be different. Also your goal changes the results to aim for. Do some quick competition research. That way when you talk to an SEO firm, you'll already know the or some of the best keywords to go for & the competition they'll be facing to help you. The information provided from Google's keyword tool is not enough to choose the right words. Competition research on the results themselves is necessary to pick out the right keywords at the most effective time in the campaign. There are methods of roughly estimating the amount of traffic that you would get from a keyword if you were ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or what not in search results for that phrase. Choosing keywords is all about choosing the right ones to compete for. The question becomes; could you get ranked in the top three results for that keyword? And; how much time & effort would it take to get your site ranked for that keyword? For new websites, most of the time its a good idea to go after long-tail keywords with the lowest amount of competition & the highest amount of searches. However, it has to be within the criteria of low competition which takes some research. I will tell you of the process that I use for choosing keywords for short & long term campaigns because the two are different. What are you trying to accomplish? I'm assuming that you are trying to get a new website on an SEO campaign. I will explain my proccess from this assumption. On page SEO should use your most relevent keywords of all competition levels within the code of the site from the start. Once a website gets enough rank from the long-tail keywords with less competition, it is a good idea to start link building with medium competition keywords as well. It takes a while to get there. It takes even longer to be ready to backlink for high comp keywords. Go through Google's keyword tool & sort by competition - lowest first. Make a short list of the ones that meet a certain number criteria. This number should vary depending on your niche & what you are trying to accomplish. 1,000 is a good number for me to explain with. Once you have a list of say 10 of the lowest competition keywords with at least 1,000 local searches you are going to want to go to Google, search & anyalyze the results for those phrases. You want to choose words that have the highest amount of searches with the least amount of competition in the top 3 results. You'll have to use an SEO tool to see the compeitition of the searches. I recommend SEO Book's extension for Firefox http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html. It'll help with the keyword choosing proccess by showing the strength of ranked sites that you'd be competing with. This will help you determine the amount of time it would take to rank for that keyword. Go to Google with the tool turned on. Put in a keyword & press enter. The results in Google will show up the same, but underneath will be competition information from the SEO Book service. I use conservative numbers. Assume that you can make 20 relevent links per day. It has been shown that 40% of the time users will click on the first search result. 15% of searches will go to the second search result. 8% of searches will go to the third search result. The rest is distributed throughout the page. For example, if the first search result has a page rank of 2 & 1,400 backlinks supporting then you could beat it at that rate in 3 months. This would be considered low competition. That means that, if it is a keyword with 1,000 local searches per month, you could get 400 visitors a month from ranking for that. With a conversion rate of 1%, you could make $400/month with a $100 product from that one keyword. Best wishes, Crys Celine
If you looking for SEO company. There usually charges base on keywords and base on PR you want . Usually the keywords more popular , they will charges higher. If you request to Top PR 5 , ofcourse it will charges higher. They usually will charges $ 500 for 2 to 10 keywords. And do check that do have guarantee or not. Because non of SEO company will ensure they able to make it !!!! so do check on money back if they unable to do it for you in the period of time. Ofcourse for yourself, you also need to do hardwork to get backlink such as submit article, press release and directories. Focus on your onsite content, make sure it is quality content and do have good structure and lay out and use appropriately with keywords.
Thanks guys - so i am ok at finding keywords however i really am not sure how and whats the best method of off page SEO and gaining backlinks once my on page work is complete?
Gaining good quality backlinks also depends on your niche. The types of people you will find on oDesk and to a large degree this forum will offer the standard methods, directory submission, article submission, social bookmarking, blog commenting... these four are pretty much the default vanilla methods that get talked about to death. Just head over to the link building forum and read through the first page thread title's and you will see that this is pretty much all that gets talked about. There is no one method which works or doesn't work. Like your 10s of failed web sites, the same applies to building links. Some methods work great for some niches and some don't. What I tend to do is look at my competition and see what they are doing. If the top 5 web sites in my niche were all doing article marketing plus one or two were spitting out some great infographics each month, this is what I would first try to emulate and then go on to improve it by adding some of my own methods.
hmmmm so i have decided to post a job on oDesk asking for on page SEO what exactly should they do and for what sort of price? I will then do off page myself, how can i tell quickly if the methods im doing are working?