The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet
seomoz.org
seomoz.org
The best SEO tip is to have a site that is useful for the keywords you're targetting. My website is a boring (design-wise) collection of text, but when people are searching for something on there, it usually comes up pretty high in the results. That's because I'm not trying to make my site "relevant" to people that aren't interested in it.
The comments on his site are funny. "Put me out of business". If all it takes is a two page PDF to "give away all the secrets", then you were inflating the value of what you sold in the first place.
It cost a few thousand dollars for me to attend the morning session, where they told us basically those points on the sheet. Then they answered 1000 questions about people such as 'I heard hyphens are better than underscores in URLs'.
Clearly SEO folks are good at inflating the value they provide.
b) the people posting comments about giving away the secrets are newbies at best.
1. Some SEO's do inflate their value, honestly most hackers here don't need one; our best clients (mutually beneficial) are the ones who have a site, but its old, out dated and not producing like it should. A lot of people don't have the time to monitor their back links, check their title and alt tags and hunt for more links... If you asked anyone I've ever worked SEO for; they would say I've gave them a great ROI
2. Canonical Issues: AKA Keyword Cannibalization, when you have more than one page focused on one keyword. They compete against each other in google, mostly used in reference to the title tag as most CMS's really mess those up.
(edited: for mistake)
Anecdote: at the last place I worked, we had a guy come in for an interview. Bright guy, and came across as being straightforward, but he was really insistent about having an 'ongoing' type of deal, whereas the boss already had read a lot of what the guy knew, and so decided against it. I think the boss might have sprung for a day or two of consulting, but certainly wasn't going to go for anything more than a one-off.
tell me your keywords, I give price for top 5, bottom 5 in G,Y,MSN add all the top 5, bottom 5, together (thats total amount) half down, then half when rankings are achieved for 3 weeks
deliverables
monthly report, (links, on site optimization, off site optimization)
after getting positon the amount due would be the second half of total price, then if you wanted there would be a maintenance package of $x or $X /mo to keep gaining links and thus stay on top.
*if your rankings can't be achieved you get your 1/2 down back. - in this model also includes transparency of links and methods also education of client, no hold barred Q&A anytime phone call etc...
a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit.
b) not providing a service that is going to work in the long term - doing black hattery to bomb them into the top 5 for a few weeks is going to get them dropped in rankings in the long term.
c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam.
What's wrong with that? Ranking for a very generic keyword such as "widget" would definitely require much more time, effort, and money than ranking for "easy blue widget".
"c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam."
Where did you come to the conclusion that off-site optimization is spam? Link exchanges, directory submissions, etc, are not "spam".
- charging different for different keywords is called capitalism; some keywords are BMW's and others are Kia's now go tell bmw they can't charge more
I don't pretend to know all coding, don't pretend to know all SEO; don't fear other's skill sets.
I don't claim to know all about SEO, but the basics are incredibly simple. I do know there is an abundance of people offering services like this, and they like to spread a lot of FUDD.
That said, I'd have a rough time understanding why anyone would do SEO consulting full-time. Is there that much money in it? It seems like it would be a good side-project but if you were really good at it, it seems to me that your time would be better served running e-commerce sites, blogs, whatever, driving traffic to it, and generating more slightly more passive income.
There are few tricks, and just common sense concepts of having proper return codes, redirection and site structure.