Big Firms vs. Independent Contractors
Companies looking for search ranking improvements tend to think larger SEO firms will provide better support for their sites. That is not always the case. Independent contractors have some really nice upsides.
Pricing:Large Firm's charge a lot more due to the fact there are different departments needed to run the business. Should you have to pay for the sales team or the secretary?
independent contractors only need to pay for themselves. Usually the pricing is about 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of a large firm.
Time Spent on Project:With a large firm you have to understand that your analyst will most likely have 8-20 other clients that they are handling. You are probably allotted a certain amount of hours a month.
independent contractors only take on as much as their schedules permit. Since they are the only ones responsible for your site's success they tend to give you more attention and spend as much time as is needed form the month to reach the goals. Try to get them to give you a road map for each month. This way you have a basic understanding of what you are getting for your money.
Knowledge and Understanding:Large firms with worker drones for analysts usually don't spend much time researching new ideas and keep up with the latest treads. They have too much work to do and are not responsible for that so why should they care to keep up? They might have one or 2 people in the company responsible for keeping up with everything, but can they relay the info in a timely and effective manner?
An independent contractor's life is all about search and if they are not working on a clients site they are most likely on the forums or reading articles that interest them. You really have to have a passion for the business to go solo.
Availability:Big firms will be around 9-5 m-f, but you usually have to schedule something to talk to them and they have so many emails that they can't always get to you. What about weekends and holidays?
Independent contractors give you their cell phones and are always at their computers. It is in their blood to be in front of the computer for the majority of the day and night.
You really have to get a feel for who will be directly working on your project. This is easy with an independent contractor. With large firms you usually only get to talk to the sales team before you sign the contract. That is scary. If you want to trust your analyst you need to talk to them first.
Remember rankings are never guaranteed so there is not much a large firm can promise you that a independent contractor can't.
Keyword Densities: Sooooo Late 90's and Early 2000's
If you are a company looking for SEO services and you come across a firm or individual that informs you they will be working with your pages to match keyword densities for the search engines, you should hang up on them or delete the email.
Search engines have evolved past petty keyword stuffing and top result density matching. The firm is wasting their time and your money if this is one of their practices. There are so many other factors that come into play with SER or the older SEO. Some of these factors are
link popularity, site size, site age,
site theme,
fresh content, etc. The old tactic of matching keyword densities with the top ranked sites is not only ineffective but very unethical. You should always build sites based on your users and not the search engines. If you do this relevantly the engines will come as well. It's a win win situation. This also creates longevity with your rankings and traffic.
So remember it's about site relevancy and not keyword stuffing. Avoid the spam SEO companies who will sell you SEO contracts based on optimized page counts, because this means they are just tweaking the page by stuffing keywords with a sprinkle of SER to sound nice. If they don't talk about site wide development then they are nothing more then a one trick pony... plus their trick is out dated and wrong.
Google Sitemaps and Supplemental Results
Ok it has been one month since Google launched their
sitemap feed program. So far it has proven to really speed up the indexing process, but there might be something else very helpful coming out of this as well.
It appears when you submit a sitemap of a site that has most or all of their pages in the supplemental index you will start to see them finding their way out of this deadly trap. This is great news since there has never been a way to get pages out of this index without renaming the pages.
Case Study:I have a site that was 100% indexed in the supplemental index. After submitting a sitemap to Google's new program, 3 days later about half the pages started to show in the regular index.
The only strange thing was the cache dates were not current. They were newer then they were in the supp index but not dated after I submitted the sitemap. I still feel the pages where bumped out of the supp index and queued to be index by the regular index due to the Google sitemap program.
Additional information:
- Site is only 6 months old, so this could be a factor of getting out of the aging delay/sandbox phase as well.
- Site has always been updated on a monthly basis and links have grown slowly and naturally.
Keep Things Your Own
When creating a web site you tend to think the most information I can put on the site the better. While this makes sense you should be aware of stealing content or referencing content on your pages. This is called duplicate content. No matter what frame you put on it, it will still be the same picture.
Content creation is about expression and visitor knowledge and not about forcing search rankings. Every page should be designed for spreading information. Learn how to
write content for your topic interests.
You will be rewarded for having new fresh content that no one else has. Writing useful unique content is what the search engines and visitors love.
Learn about the
Evils of Duplicate Content
