The SEO Girl

You already know how much I love SEO, and believe me, I have a lot of love to go around. While you’re feeling the love this Valentine’s Day, do your part to help the Geeks With Heart movement!

Geek Girls Network™ & Geeky Clean have created a fundraiser to support the Haiti Relief called Geeks With Heart.

Through Mercy Corp, Geeks With Heart has a fundraising goal of $2500 and there’s no minimum for donations. If you can spare just one special cup of coffee, an iTunes download, or a crispy chicken sandwich, donate to Haiti instead. Show Haiti why geeks have heart!

As extra incentive, and not that you need any, once Geeks With Heart reaches $2500, all who donated will have the chance to win a prize from an amazing grab bag of geek prizes!

So donate, tweet it up, put a badge on your website, and tell all your friends and family. Thanks!

Geeks With Heart: http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/geekgirls

If you’re lucky enough to be part of a thriving SEO company, you’re likely going to be working long hours. If you don’t love the industry and the work you’re doing, you’re going to resent it, just like you would with any industry, even if you worked at it just 4 hours a day. I work an easy 50 hours a week at my not-so-easy SEO job, and usually log another 4 hours throughout the weekend. Yet, I’m happy as a clam (okay, not every second, but overall I’m a pretty happy SEO girl).

What sets us apart is that we love our SEO jobs. We’re part of an industry that’s always changing and questioning preconceived ideas, along with being lucky to have some great people in our industry. The days are long and results are never immediate, but loving the work you’re doing goes a long way towards maintaining your happiness level. There’s always going to be those difficult days and even more difficult clients, but have faith that you’re in an industry that’s going places and evolving.

I’ve been told I work too much and that I’m a workaholic more times than I can count, but I still have that smile on my face and excitement to keep going, even after almost 4 years of being in this industry. It hasn’t been easy and clients try my patience all the time, but there’s a big difference from working just for a paycheck and working because you love what you do. I’m lucky to have the latter.

Don’t we all sometimes find ourselves wanting a bit of control in our lives?. I like change, but there’s just certain things that I like the way I like them. You can’t blame a girl for liking a lil order in her life, can you?

Well, it would also make me one not-so-great SEO client. I’ve dealt with a ton of SEO clients over the years, and the ones I’ve had the most success in working with were the clients who allowed me to actually implement the ideas we discussed. I’ve had other clients who loved the new ideas, but were very cautious to actually implement them, and as a result, the campaign did not see as much success as it could have. As long as the SEO Specialist you’re working with is from a reputable company or background, and is indeed an expert, trusting them and giving up some of your control is a must in a successful SEO relationship.

I understand that if you’ve worked with an SEO “guru” who turned out to just be a shadester, you’re understandably going to have a hard time trusting your new SEO Specialist. But starting the new SEO relationship by needing control over every aspect of the campaign is going to result in just another failed relationship. Once you’ve established case studies and credentials, trust your SEO expert, and you’ll both be on to a happy future in SEO land.

It’s time for this SEO Girl to get a bit mushy With Thanksgiving just a few days, I’ve started to think about all the things in my life I’m thankful for. I don’t have a perfect life (nor want one!), but my thankful list is quite long! In addition to being thankful for all the great people in my life, I’m so happy to be a part of the SEO industry, and all the people who helped take me from a copywriter to motivating me to learn the in’s and out’s of SEO. If you work in SEO, especially with clients, you know how stressful it is. Not only are you juggling the many client personalities, but you’re working to implement creative and successful SEO techniques for their sites, usually on less time than you really need! Yet, tackling SEO challenges and succeeding, working with clients no matter the stress levels sometimes, and being able to meet so many intelligent and interesting people makes me so thankful to be in this industry.

We’re in an industry that’s continually changing, with a growing emphasis on a more purer form of SEO and social media that works to engage your audience, rather than game search engines. To anyone reading this, thank you so much for reading, indulging me, and motivating me to keep posting!

How about you? What makes you thankful to be part of the SEO industry?

So say you check out a blog or website and are asked to describe that website in 20 random words. Most likely, your word choices will be a little all over the place, but they’ll probably tie together enough to form a picture on what the blog is mostly about. This is the same concept as a “tag cloud” – a tag cloud is simply a collection of main themes on a blog or website – often seem a bit disjointed, but actually do go together to form an idea of what you mainly talk about on your blog.

There’s tons of tag cloud generators out there, and I recently used Wordle to generate a tag cloud for The SEO Girl blog, only the very best blog out there, of course (just nod along). The larger the font in a tag cloud, the more often you talk about that topic or theme. For The SEO Girl, I’m big on “SEO” of course, another was “industry” which makes sense, “blog”, “search”, and “PageRank”. Nearly all the words in my tag cloud related to the search industry, so it looks like despite my rambling posts, I’m on track! I encourage you to do the same with your blog or website – it’ll allow you to get a quick snapshot on the theme of your blog posts to be sure the big topics on your blog are actually what you want them to be, and if the keyword phrases you’d like to rank for on your website show up in a larger font in your tag cloud, chances are you’re on target with your SEO keyword targeting. Happy tag clouding!

Check out The SEO Girl blog’s tag cloud, courtesy of Wordle. Note how “love” is inside the “S” in SEO – how true for me!

I was doing some research today on what SEO companies out there are charging for their services. I found a great article in SEOmoz called “How to Price an SEO Campaign” – excellent job highlighting what a good SEO company will do for your site, and the SEO services you actually need for your site. Of course, it’s SEOmoz, so they can charge quite a bit more than a regular old jane who’s plain fantastic at SEO.

But! I did a Google search for “SEO services”, just for a quick pricing glimpse, and was oh-so-discouraged at what I saw. I did see a few reputable companies in the first few pages, and hats off to them, but then there were the companies who promised “search engine submissions”, “blog and forum comments”, “free directory submissions”, and “meta-tag rewrites”. There was even one company who charged $1K for little more than a simple Website Grader SEO evaluation! The horror, and it’s not even Halloween yet!

Rather than choosing a company that says they’ll get you SEO results fast and cheap, look for companies that not only will advise you on on-page and off-page SEO best practices, but will actually implement those practices. You’re a busy website owner, and you need a professional who will do the work and do it right, even if it’s going to cost you a bit more. Invest the time and money into doing it right the first time. If you don’t see results until month 3 or 4 into your campaign – that’s a good thing! That shows they’re implementing ethical SEO techniques and getting search engine attention over time, rather than buying 100 paid links and washing their hands of your website.

Remember, quantity does not equal quality. Going with a company who presents you with an impressive looking report filled with all the blog and forums they spammed with your link, the free directory submissions they submitted your site to, and a few links they bought for you on spammy sites has relatively little value. Go with a reputable company who spends time crafting creative SEO content, manually contacting only a handful of sites each month for link building with a personalized email or phone call, maintains a blog and writes interesting posts, ensures your site is optimized correctly, and maybe even does a bit of social media is the way to go. Their time is likely worth more money, in the $1-2K per month range, but it’s money spent wisely.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a bit of debate in the corporate side of the company I dwell at over the importance of establishing PageRank as a measure of SEO success. PageRank certainly has its place in our industry, but I’m more of the “establish a desired increase in non-paid search engine traffic/keyword traffic” as a success metric. Here’s my reasoning, in a nutshell:

• PageRank is great when determining the quality of a site to connect with for link building or checking out how your competitors are fairing, but a high/low PageRank doesn’t necessarily translate into increased traffic/revenue. A website thrives or dies by the amount of traffic coming to it, and focusing on PageRank, a metric that doesn’t have an exact correlation, just doesn’t make sense to me.
• I’ve had instances where I’ve checked a client’s PageRank only to see it giving me a “0″ PageRank when a day ago it was a “4″. The next day, back to a “4″. With a metric ultimately controlled by Google and so accustomed to variances, it’s just not reliable.
• A high PageRank can be the reward of a great SEO campaign, but not the “end result” a site owner wants to see. As a site owner, you want more people coming to your site as a result of the fruits of your SEO labor, not just an uptick on a tiny green bar.
• You’ve spent time creating a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website, with valuable resources and interesting information on the site. You’ve also spent considerable time in drumming up the site’s grand opening by syndicating press releases, buying ad space, and using social media effectively. You get thousands of visitors the first month the site is up, yet your PageRank continues to be “0″. Other sites in your industry have much more antiquated, difficult to navigate websites, yet have a higher PageRank, and their Compete.com data shows you’re in the traffic lead by a long shot. Now, how much do you care about PageRank?

I’m not discounting the validity of PageRank, I just feel its place is not as a success metric. What about you? How do you feel about using PageRank to determine the overall success of an SEO campaign – yay or no? I promise I won’t bite

I was so touched and inspired by a comment on my previous post, “5 Tips For Managing an SEO Team”. Yavor Milchev wisely commented, “I think motivation is also a very important ingredient. Motivation is very easy to lose and once people lose it, it gets very hard to get it back. I have seen people do amazing things with little knowledge and experience simply because of their devotion and strive for success.”

Yavor hit the nail on the head, especially as I’m sitting here a bit stressed by my own SEO job. Motivation is a crucial personality trait in SEO. Just think of how many times your team has ensured a site is meeting SEO best practices, worked continually on on-page/off-page SEO best practices, and yet the site’s non-paid search traffic and rankings still aren’t what you’d like them to be. Yet, despite wanting to strangle Google, you persevered, tweaked your strategy, and saw results change and improve over time. SEO is one of the most frustrating, “gray” industries out there, and at the end of a busy day, there’s always things on your mind and ideas for working to improve a site’s SEO.

Yet, we love SEO and amidst the stress, we love our SEO jobs. If you want to survive in this industry, you need to be motivated to succeed, always work to help educate your co-workers, and be dedicated to seeing your clients succeed. We work in a very stressful, sometimes thankless industry, but our desire to keep going and push ourselves motivates us through those tough days and SEO quandaries. When you’re having a tough day, take heart (and a drink at 5pm) – the rest of the SEO industry knows what you’re going through, and we commend you for working through it and emerging as a person satisfied with their desire to push ahead and further our industry.

Heading up a successful SEO team is no easy feat, especially in these times where clients are hesitant to spend money and tend to want to see results overnight. I’ve held a management role at the digital marketing firm I work at for the last few years, and by sticking to our motto of “Change or die”, we’ve weathered the changes in the SEO industry and the economy. We’re always a work in progress, but I’ve learned some fundamental strategies for managing an SEO team over the years.

1. “Change is the only constant” – Heraclitus: All members of your SEO team must embrace this mantra. Sure, the foundations of SEO have stuck around, but this is an industry that is constantly changing. Sticking to the old ways is going to have you losing customers and gaining a bad rep in no time.

2. Skilled Writers: It’s beneficial to have a savvy SEO programmer on your time, but the bulk of your team should be made up of proficient writers. Whether it’s scripting personalized emails to send to potential link partners or writing SEO copy for a client’s site, they need to be able to write cleanly and professionally. Never underestimate the value of a good writer.

3. Divide and Conquer: Each member of your team has their own strengths and weaknesses. Create sub-departments within your team to solely handle account management, SEO copy, social media monitoring, link building, blogging, press releases, etc. You’ll be building up your team’s confidence in their skills by giving them responsibility for their own mini-departments, and they’ll be able to focus on making their realm of SEO that much more successful.

4. Account Meetings – We hold monthly account meetings, where each client’s account team meets for a half hour, evaluates the stats for that month and develops an outline of the next month’s strategy. This ensures the team is in continual communication about how the account is doing, and we have a forum for ideas and innovation in place.

5. Client Check-in’s - You’re not going to be able to please every client, but it’s always best to take the bad with the good and welcome criticism. We check-in with each client mid-way through their contract term and send them a short survey regarding their perception of their SEO campaign’s performance, interaction with the team, and ways we can improve our relationship together. It may bring some issues to light, but knowing what you can do better with greatly strengthen your team.

These are just a few tips – feel free to share more about your experience managing an SEO team, what has worked for managing your team and ideas we can all benefit from!

This is more of a poll than a blog post, but I’d like to see which SEO tools the SEO community is using and why they find them effective. I’m on a quest this week to find a tool that includes the following items, and I’d like to see if I can find a match for my needs:

• Keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Suggestion tool and SemRush
• Link building management, with the ability to add link building contacts, assign them to projects/categories
• Content management, with a “project” folder for each client so we can store their SEO copy and blog posts in their folder
• Social media tools – Similar to HootSuite.com where we can post to multiple client Twitter accounts by logging in to only one master account, see stats on the amount of clicks links in our posts receive. Ability to post to multiple Facebook Business Pages would also be a plus.
• Google Analytics integration/Automated reporting tools – Would absolutely love if the SEO tool had white-labeled reports that pulled relevant data from the client’s GA account
• Keyword tracking – Although we stay away from measuring SEO success solely by keyword rankings, it would be nice to have a keyword tracking system so we can sync up changes in rankings to traffic patterns.
• Google Alerts data – Ideally, we’d like the system to automatically search for mentions of the client’s brand name/relevant keywords, a la Google Alerts.
• Project management – A “lite” project management system built in, allowing users to create/assign tasks, view tasks assigned to them and the timeframe for the tasks

And of course if this was packaged into a nice little dashboard with a bow on top, that would be even better.

Have you seen specific increases in productivity with the tools you’re seeing? What’s on your SEO tool wishlist? Leave a comment and let me know, any and all info would be very helpful.

- Thanks for helping an SEO girl out!

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