SEO Consultant - How to Shortlist the Best

How to shortlist an SEO Consultant for my online business

If you're scouting for a SEO consultant or company to perform ethical and effective SEO Search Engine Optimization for your online business, then you have to make sure that you evaluate them correctly. Do not be afraid to ask questions. If you make any mistakes in your selection, that would have a direct impact on your business - to the extent of getting blacklisted. 

Here are some of the questions we believe you should ask before hiring a SEO consultant or business:

About the SEO Consultant / Company

·         How long have you been in business?

·         How many clients do you have?

·         What is the experience of the team that work on the projects. How is the team structured?

Evaluate their work

·         What kind of results can we expect to see? What is the time-frame? How do you measure your success?

·         Could you please provide your success stories?

·         Have you worked with a client in a similar niche as mine?

·         Have you worked on local SEO?

·         How frequently would you provide reports to us?

·         Can you provide references or testimonial?

·         What is the realistic traffic expectation?

·         How will you measure ROI ?

Check Methodology

·         Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

·         How do you decide on the keywords and phrases to target?

·         What are the online marketing services you work on?

·         Do you have marketing experience or just keyword manipulation and back-link building?

·         What according to you is the key factor in SEO?

·         How do you get backlinks?

·         Would you share what changes you plan to implement on my site on a high level?

·         How would you carry out competitor analysis?

·         Do you work on social marketing?

·         How many pages would you optimize?

·         Do you carry out both on-page and off-page optimization?

Asking a set of above questions would help you gauge what they have done for the past clients and if they are capable of ranking your online business or not.  When you evaluate you should also look at their sites. If they know their job well, they should rank well on all SEPRs. Stay away from companies that use ANY kind of black hat methods and who guarantee you ranking in a short time. Doing that would only get you ranked for a few months and then later get impacted by a google animal. 

Remember - SEO is a long-term investment. Do not look for short term gains.

Why are my keywords jumping? Is Google Dance the end of me?

GDS or Google Dance Syndrome is a sickness seen in Google Search Engine when it gets too much of information about a site or it reacts to one of its own animals (aka, panda, penguin, hummingbird, zebra bla bla.. ) in an unknown way. Funny?

It’s not! Only people who have seen their keywords getting impacted by GDS know it all. It is serious and leads to a lot of frustration. When I experienced this for my ecommerce site, I didn’t know what was wrong.

I questioned myself again and again. Did I :

-       over-optimize my site

-       get too many backlinks from somewhere

-       get impacted by one of the Big G’s – animal

-       did my competitors do too well to push me out on rankings

-       someone play malicious

-       I lose my good backlinks

Have you questioned yourself any of these? If yes, chances are that your site is affected by GDS.

WHAT DOES GOOGLE DANCE MEAN?

Let me talk about that in a common man’s language. A keyword on my site ‘satin scarf’ ranked on 12^th position. I woke up one morning and as part of my normal tracking activities, noticed that the keyword jumped from 12^th position to 208^th position in Google. I missed a beat, actually a few. I checked and rechecked if I made any mistake, but the fact was that keyword was far too out. A shift of a couple of places in either direction is natural. It could be because of a number of reasons. A jump that big, means my business for that specific keyword is gone. While I have been waiting for my keyword to come to #1 page, it has vanished altogether.

I wait for a day or two and three and four. The keyword moved sideways but did not get any closer to its initial 12^th ranking. Panic?

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF YOUR KEYWORDS DO GOOGLE DANCE?

Relax. If you have not employed any black hat techniques to get your site ranked in the past, there is nothing to worry. In my case, I was doing everything right. I was writing a lot of good content on my blog, I had products added to my site almost daily, the traffic on my site was increasing every passing day, and the social marketing was improving. I could not think of anything for which Google could penalize me. But I was disheartened. I was frustrated. It was months and months of hard work. In addition to the keyword jumping off, I checked some more basics.

- Google webmasters has no malware or manual actions or messages for my site.

- In fact, there were few positives. A few days later the SEO Analytics Reports were out and the domain authority for my site had increased by 1 place and page authority by 2 places.

- The majestic SEO also showed a slight increase in my citation and trust flow.

So what exactly was wrong? 

NOTHING!

I saw my keywords dance for about 7-8 days and at the end of it, it climbed to position 8^th. As I write this post, I see that the keyword is in the images on the first page of Google. That brings in more traffic than before, because a picture speaks better than words.

So my belief is to follow the Google guidelines for on-page and off-page SEO and practice ethical techniques. All Google does is over a period of time, it reassess the site. That could be because of one of its algorithms, or for the fact that you have received some qualitative backlinks that need to be reassessed and then your domain re-positioned in the SERP. As long as the keywords are jumping, you should feel that something is more to happen. Google is not done yet. For my other competitive keywords, I have also seen them being completely out of SERP, even non-existent till position #500. They have come back, some have done better than before, and some have gone down a little.

SHOULD WE STOP SEO ACTIVITIES WHEN GOOGLE DANCES?

What is important is to believe in your techniques, follow the right path and keep working on quality content. I would not recommend stopping your SEO activities when you see Google dance happening. The dance goes on for about 2 weeks. Not working for 2 weeks would definitely bring you a drop in rankings. So just keep working on quality content.

So when Google dances, you dance to its tunes. Coz if you have played it right, you would be safe, not sorry!

Hope this gives you a bit of relief. If you have experienced Google dance, go ahead and share your findings.

Top Forum Backlinks Sites for SEO

Online business, be it a store or blog requires traffic. To build traffic one needs to build authority & trust in the eyes of search engines. That's not easy, that's not a quick fix. One of the important ways to build authority is by adding quality content. Remember what they say - Content is King ! And trust me, it is till date. I have realized that the hard way after making mistakes in promoting my estore. But now that I have learnt, I would like to share a little bit of what I know.

Other than the site being content rich, what is required is that you build trust. That is possible ONLY when trustworthy sites link back to you. While you can get thousands of backlinks by some scarppy tool in a matter of few minutes, that would not help. What would help is building quality links from high authority, high PR sites that would give you a lot of link juice and trust flow. Too techy ?

Let me make it simple. Blog guest post, blog comments, directory submissions and forums involvement are few ethical white hat methods to build backlinks. Yes it is tedious to get links from them. But hard work and patience pays - ALWAYS. It has, for me. Let's talk about forum backlinks in this post. 

WHY FORUMS?

1. They have huge flow of traffic

2. The authority of these domains is usually high

3. The trust flow to links from forum is high

4. You get links from forums after you establish credibility. ( 10-50 posts, 1-10 likes)

5. You get DO FOLLOW link from forum profile to your home page

6. You can include your do follow link also in your signature (after 10-50 posts)

7. They are permanent links

8. The increase your SERP ranks

9. They are ethical

Good enough reasons ? Forum backlinks can help you in a big way. You can register in a few forums and check what kind of trust flow they get to your site in a tool like Majestic SEO. Usually forum links get you trust of atleast 25 to start with. As the links become older, the trust increases.

CAUTION

1. Do not spam the forums. You may be banned.

2. Build links gradually. 2-3 links a day is good.

4. Be helpful on forums when you are answering questions. Be detailed. Be respectful. 

5. Do not just focus on the backlink. Be a subject matter expert.

6. Do not go overboard and register in every forum that you see. Not all forums are good. Backlink from a forum in your niche would have greater benefits.

LIST OF AUTHORITY FORUMS

Below is the list of high authority forums that can help you in your off-page SEO.

1.    http://www.siteownersforums.com

2.    http://www.talkgold.com

3.    http://forums.oreilly.com/

4.    http://www.webcosmoforums.com

5.    http://www.searchenginegenie.com

6.    http://www.techsling.com/

7.    http://iphonedevsdk.com/

8.    http://www.seomastering.com/

9.    http://www.freehostforum.com/

10. http://www.warriorforum.com

11. http://www.cashfindforum.com/forum/

12. http://www.makingimoney.com/

13. http://www.webmastercage.com/

14. http://www.solutions.pro/forums/

15. http://www.sitepoint.com

16. https://forums.digitalpoint.com/

17. http://www.v7n.com/forums/

18. http://www.serppoint.com/

19. http://earningemoney.com/

20. https://www.email.biz/

21. http://articlestars.com/forum/

22. http://forum.graphicdesignblog.org/

23. http://www.seobetter.com/seo-forums/

24. http://www.dreamteammoney.com/

25. http://internetmarketingforums.com/

26. http://www.helpingwebmasters.com/

27. http://www.websitebabble.com/

28. http://www.associateprograms.com

29. http://www.namepros.com/

30. http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk

31. http://www.esyndicat.com/forum/

32. http://www.htmlforums.com/

33. http://www.affiliateseeking.com/forums/

WHAT NEXT?

Above is the list of high authority forums. Start building you backlinks! Be honest and ethical about what you are doing here. Although the intent is to get backlinks, once you become active on forums, it is addiction. Remember the set of practices that you need to be cautious about.

If you like this post remember to bookmark it and share with your colleagues. If you know of any other forum that gets you high trust, please leave it in the comments for others to take benefit from.

Free SEO Tool – TOP 7 SEO tools

SEO is the bread and butter for any company wanting to have its presence felt on the internet. A lot is dependent on on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

Here is a set of free tools available that could give you a decent report on on-page and off-page SEO for your website.

1.       SMALL SEOTOOLS

2.       FREE SEO TOOL

3.       SEO MOZ

4.       SCRUB THE WEB‎

5.       RAVEN TOOLS‎

6.       WOO RANK

7.       TRAFFIC TRAVIS

Here are best practices to improve your on-page SEO. On-page SEO techniques improves the site ranking on google search. This leads to more organic traffic to your site, resulting in more page views / conversions.

Site Authority - Check Domain Authority

What is Site or Domain authority ?

Site or Domain Authority is a measure of how a website will perform in search engine rankings.

A site with higher domain authority would rank higher than others having low authority. The quality of back-links is one of the key factors that impact the authority of the site.

How to check Domain Authority ?

Here are a few tools that you can use to check your domain authority. Most of them are free and some are free for a limited usage.

Increase in domain authority would improve your organic traffic. Most traffic would result in higher conversions. DO NOT ignore domain authority.

1.    Moonsy

2.    Robin Gupta

3.    Open site Explorer

4.    Out Reachr

Read similar other article - Does Domain registration Length impact SEO.

Google page ranking tools

Page rank is a measure of a website's importance. Google ranks a website based on various parameters. Page Rank is a relative indicator of a website in the range of 1 to 10.

One of the ways to improve the Google page rank is improve the on-page SEO.

Here are some of the free tools where you may check the page rank of your site.

1.             PRChecker

2.       Check Page Rank

3.       Robin Gupta - multiple domain page rank checker

4.       Check Page Rank Free

5.       Small Seo Tools

6.       Jotttr

7.       I Web tool

8.       CJIS – multiple domain page rank checker

9.       SEO Centro

10.     Page Rank Checker

Check Google page rank schedule for 2013.

Google Page Ranking

Google page rank updates happen every quarter. The Google page ranking schedule update for 2013 is as below.

Page Rank first update

                January 30^th 2013 to February 2^nd 2013

Actual : February 4^th 2013

Page Rank second update

                June 30^th 2013 to July 2^nd 2013

Page Rank third update

                September 30^th 2013 to October 2^nd 2013

Page Rank fourth update

                December 31^st 2013 to January 3^rd 2013

Here are some tools to check Google page rank.

Sites like Craigslist

Craiglist founded by Craig Newmark in 1995. It is an absolute interesting business serving the local market. Over the years, the site has refused to change its minimalist design and easy-to-use posting system. Although Craigslist is not as popular as it was a decade ago, it remains a popular and successful site.

This success of craigslist has spawned many imitators over the years. Most of those sites like Craigslist have failed before anyone knew they existed. Still, there are a few sites like Craigslist that serve a similar purpose.

Here is a robust list of free classified sites like craigslist and who have a market share in buy, sell and trade in local market.

    1.   Backpage

    2.   Oodle Marketplace

    3.   Patricks Post

    4.   ClassifiedAds

    5.   US FreeAds

    6.   Recycler

    7.   Domestic Sale

    8.   OLX

    9.   Adoos

    10.  Hoobly

    11.  Bookoo

    12.  Shopgoodwill

    13.  Krrb

    14.  Sell

    15.  Ebay Classifieds

    16.  Geebo

Which is your best place to buy, sell or trade in local market.

List more sites that are similar to craigslist, if you had a great experience with them.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk and Groupon.

Sites like Groupon

The success of Groupon is known to all. The company started with the thought of community buying where a group of people come forward to buy a product or service in bulk, thereby making a saving. Group discount, daily discount or deal of the day is Groupon's business model.

Post Groupon, a lot of business have established with a similar model. Some have made a mark, while some have not been that great a hit.

Let’s take a look of some top coupons sites that have seen success in Group Buying Business Model.

Top Coupons Sites

1.    Amazon Local deals – Amazon Local is a daily deals site and is one more addition to the Amazon family of business. It sends daily deals to its subscribers to use in their city and online.

2.    Bloom Spot - Features unique local luxury experiences from top-rated merchants. Exceptional offers for weekend getaways.

3.    CBS Local Offers - Brings you the best local deals and unique experiences in your community. Offers ranges from enticing restaurants to exciting shows and events.

4.    Half off Depot - Provides customer acquisition programs over the internet for local merchants. This marketplace hosts an array of local experiences & services as well as products and travel offers. The offers availability ranges for an average of 15 to 30 days.

5.    Ever Save - Seeks your favorite local activities, restaurants, stores and spa, so you can play, eat, shop & relax for less! From spa treatments to cupcakes, yoga classes to ski packages – Ever Save finds the best deals and delivers them to you - in the form of a Save.

6.    Gilt City – It’s the local lifestyle site from the Gilt Groupe. Gilt City offers memorable adventures & exclusive offers, all at great prices.

7.    Google Offers - Google Offers are from the giants themselves. Amazing deals from local business available to Google Offers subscribers.

8.    In Bundles – Daily offer for ONE steeply discounted gift certificate to something related to food and beverage. The sale only lasts between 24-72 hours.

9.    LivingSocial – We know it all. This is the biggest competitive to Groupon and works pretty much on the same framework as Groupon. This is the closest website like Groupon.

10. Plum District – A site that is by Moms and for Moms. A community of moms connecting other moms to products and inspiration to make lives easier.

11. Saveology- Brings a large spectrum of high quality offers at deep discounts, with both national and local deals. Offers range from movie tickets and batteries to vacation packages and car leases.

12. Savored - Is a Groupon company with focus on restaurants. Not as known as the parent company, but it will get there with strong business model knowledge.

13. Scout Mob - Reachs direct to independent makers and merchants. Bridges the gap between buyers and sellers and removes all middlemen costs.

14. Travel Zoo - Excellent place for travel and entertainment deals.

15. Woot - Woot is an independent subsidiary of Amazon. A great place for community sources deals.

These are some of the Groupon like sites that are creating waves. If you know some more, please share with others in the forum.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk, freebies and samples sites.

Best Sites for freebies and samples

Freebies and Samples are attractive for everyone. While you would find thousands of sites that offer no cost samples or freebies, knowing which are legitimate and which are not means a lot. 

You don’t want to share your details only to get some spam. There are a lot of scam sites floating around, both online and off. 

Legitimate Sites for Freebies and Samples

There are some legitimate websites that offer freebies, and samples and tips and advice to find even more free stuff. The following are the best sites for getting freebies and samples. While most of them are offered worldwide, some are specific to countries.

1.    Freaky Freddie’s – 100s of free samples in various categories. Free samples updated every day.

2.    F for Free - This has freebies for specific countries – Worldwide, US, India, UK. Check the discounts and coupons section on this site.

3.    I Crave Freebies - Freebies, Free Stuff, Free Samples, Coupons, Hot Deals.

4.    Free Snatcher - Expensive Giveaways, printable coupons, store deals and free money and stuff.

5.    Hey It’s Free – Lots of categories to choose from. Regular updates to freebies.

6.    Sample Train – Free Samples in USA and other countries. Surveys, Contests and Coupons.

7.    Shop 4 Freebies – Daily updates. Samples, print and online coupons for restaurants, beauty, facebook giveaways.

8.    Seriously Free Stuff - Free Stuff, Giveaways, and Sweepstakes & Coupons! Updated daily.

9.    Sample Stuff – Great freebies on perfumes and deodorants. Coupons and Paid Surveys. 

10. The Freebie Source – Lots of categories from pet food, weekend passes, free software, cosmetics, and birthday freebies.

11. Known Freebies – Deals for India, UK Australia, USA and some worldwide deals.

12. Wowzila – Freebies from around the world. Check free stuff for India, UK, USA, New Zealand & Canada.

13. Vonbeau - Loads of free coupons every day for kids, men and women.

14. Freebie Shark – Freebies, Coupons, Deal and Sweeps.

15. Absurdly Cool – New freebies updated almost every day.

16. Pumpkins Freebies - Thousands of free product samples and Giveaways. No S&H.

Share which are your favorite freebie sites.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk, sites like Craigslist.