SEO FAQs

A: Since 1995, however the tactics and strategies used today are for removed from those of 1995. The constant shift really keeps SEO of interest to me. As soon as you think you know it all, they move the goal posts. This is why I have a personal commitment to myself to devote at least 10 hours every week in expanding my knowledge and skills in SEO and general online marketing topics and strategies.

A: No one can give you a definitive time, if they do they are simply lying to you to get your business and/or impress you. The time taken to get 1st page results depends on many fluctuating factors such as, level of competition, keywords targeted, “on the page” properties past and current and link popularity to name a few.

I tell my clients to give it 3 months, however so far every client I’ve ever had has been very impressed when they received their first success report after just one month.

A: No I will never use black or grey hat tactics. The risk of being penalised or even banned is to great to risk. BMW used black hat tactics and Google banned them (Google the term “BMW banned from Google to find out more). If Google would do this to such a big name that is also a major advertiser with them, they obviously wouldn’t think twice at banning your website if they found any black or grey hat tactics being used. Never consider using any services that are not pure white hat tactics.

If you wish to find out more on black / grey hat tactics please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization#White_hat_versus_black_hat

A: The plans are rolling 1 month contracts meaning you can cancel at any time. I don’t believe in tying anyone into a service if they don’t wish to receive it. I do however recommend you take the service for at least 3 months to get a good feel for just how powerful the service is.

A: Certainly, please contact me so we can discuss your discount.

A: I do not provide an itemised list of the SEO tasks I perform as this would give away some of my core strategies. I ask my clients to base their opinions on my results as I can honestly assure you they will speak for themselves.

All clients do receive a full ranking report every month detailing each keyword and its current rank in each major search engine and how many places the keyword has moved up or down since last month.

Whilst I do not provide any reports on links gained for you, you can see links that have been accepted by Yahoo! by using the free Yahoo! Site explore tool available at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – simply type in your website into the top bar to see which links Yahoo! has indexed. Please note that all search engines (especially Google) do not show up to date links or all the links they are aware of so please only use this site as a general idea of how your linking acceptance is performing.

A: Search engines (especially Google) do not show up to date links or all the links they are aware of.

You can see links that have been accepted by Yahoo! by using the free Yahoo! Site explore tool available at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – simply type in your website into the top bar to see which links Yahoo! has indexed. Please remember that search engines do not show up to date links or all the links they are aware of so please only use this site as a general idea of how your linking acceptance is performing.

A: Yes, in addition to the UK I also work with many clients in the USA and Australia. If you are outside of these areas and are interested in my services then please contact me to discuss options available to you.

A: Don’t worry, I use several very powerful keyword systems are part of our the research and recommendation service I provide within each plan and I will help you find the best keywords.

A: I try to make myself as available as possible but sometimes I maybe in a meeting with a client, working on one of my own online businesses or simply enjoying some time with my beautiful wife and amazing children. If I don’t pick up, please leave me a message on my voicemail or email me if you prefer with how I can help and your contact details and I will contact you as soon as I can.

A: Simple, automation. I am an automation freak. If it can be automated then I have my team of coders make me a software to automate it.

What I need to be very careful though is to explain that I *only* automate manual repetitive tasks. Automating some SEO tasks can be very dangerous to your overall SEO success and seen as black / grey hat tactics so I never automate these types of tasks.

What I do automate is any manual tasks I would do using macros. A macro just repeats what I would do, as if I were at the computer ie mimicking a human and not using API connections.

For example, lets say I find a great forum about bikes for a client that wishes to promote their online bike business. Rather than just joining and making a post etc to drop in some backlinks, I will study how the forum works for account creation, account confirmation, posting etc and make a macro that I can run at any time to make a new account, new post etc whenever I wish. Sure this takes a little longer than just simply doing it the “normal” way, but if I ever need to post to this forum again I add it to my macro run with the content and run details. This reduces a 10 minute task into 30 second one.

Because of this level of automation I have 100s of virtual SEO staff working for me which is why I get the results of the very large reputable SEO companies but pass the automation cost savings direct to my clients.

When I started my SEO services, a client visiting me saw my computer set up with computers working tirelessly for my clients and said I should keep this automation quiet and charge what the big boys charge. Whilst I understood the business logic, and it was sound logic, what I really love the most is gaining success for small to medium businesses that either don’t yet have the budget to go to the really big SEO companies or are not confident enough with SEO to invest those amounts. I put a great deal of power in their hands at a very affordable cost which in the medium to long term builds up fantastic client relationships which is what I’m all about.

A: I accept all major credit and debit cards as well as BACS, Standing orders and international wire transfers.

A: No. Unlike most of my competitors you are not “renting” the links, accounts and content I create and publish for you. Instead, everything I create if yours for life, I will never remove this content.

For example, lets say you have your account for 6 months and I build up 100s of accounts, content and links, if you stop the service I will simply stop adding more, I will not go and remove this work. A lot of companies do this, however I believe you are paying me for a service and if you wish to stop it would be unfair and unethical of me to go and take back that work for which you’ve already paid for.

However, when clients see the success I gain for them, closing an account isn’t a conversation that happens ;)

A: I will need:

1. Payment & signed monthly rolling contract

2. Top 10 features of your product and service with the top 10 benefits of these features

3. Around 2-4 hours of your time in the first week to be available on the phone and in front of a computer for meetings we will need to create and confirm the SEO strategies

4. An email address on your domain such as webmaster@ so I can confirm accounts that I open quickly without interrupting you. You can see everything I do on this address.

A: If this is the case there are several options depending on just how bad the site is...

1. We leave the site as it is and SEO with any changes. 80% of the time I see a site that needs changing we can either do the critical aspects for you or if you can’t have the site improved for any reason it’s not the end of the world, it just means slower SEO results but I can still get results.

2. I provide a detailed recommendation report for you to give to your web developers to make the changes. I will also work closely with them to ensure everything is done as required and to assist if required.

3. If you don’t have a current web developer or would like another idea of the cost to do any work required my full service web agency would be delighted to provide a no obligation quotation for this work.

A: Certainly, please make sure you join my free SEO affiliate scheme to earn some commission so I can thank you for the referrals.

A: Certainly, I am very flexible and anything can be changed as often as you require.

A: To help explain this, let me show you first what not to do with your keyword strategy.

Lets say you had 8 keywords to choose and you sold many different types of product from your website so your keywords were...

Cars
Boats
Phones
Toys
TVs
Radios
Games
Beds

If this mix of totally irrelevant keywords where SEO’d the work done and “power” would be spread over 8 unrelated “themes” or “topics”. Therefore taking much much longer to get great results because the search engines will thinking, “is this about cars, or boats, I was going to give X power to this site but I’ll split that power between all these topics so rather than make one topic powerful I’ll make many topics only a little bit more powerful”.

A much better strategy would be to create relevant themes “batches” like this...

Primary keyword: cars
Secondary keyword #1: search for cars
Secondary keyword #2: find a car
Secondary keyword #2: cheap cars
Yes the one original keyword “cars” uses up 4 keywords now but the advantages of this strategy are...

1. The primary will get ranking higher and faster

2. The secondary’s give power to the primary

3. The secondary’s will also rank thus gaining additional traffic sources

Doing this strategy in batches and then once the batch is ranked at the desired position in the engines moving onto the next batch, then the next batch and repeating this will gain much faster results for the original 8 keywords over the first strategy even taking into account that some of the keywords have to wait until other batches are ranked high before they have any SEO work done on them.

This is why I use my primary and secondary keyword “batching” strategy which is a very powerful keyword strategy that delivers great results.

Also unlike some of my competitors that charge for a set amount of keywords, my plans are based on how many keywords I am actively working on. For example, once a batch is at the top of the search engines, that is replaced with more keywords so over time, even with the bronze plan, you will rank high for 100s of keywords.

A: No. Unlike some of my competitors who charge X/month for a fixed number of keywords, the keyword limit in my plans refer to the amount of keywords I will actually work on at that time.

For example, if you had the silver plan you have 20 keywords (5 primary and 15 secondary’s) at the start that I would work on. Lets say in 2 months time 8 of the 20 are now at the top of the search engines, those 8 are replaced with another 8 keywords. A few months later 15 more at at the top of the search engines which means the client now has 23 (8+15)keywords at the top of the search engines. This way the monthly cost remains the same but over time more and more keywords are added to gain more and more targeted traffic. So, unlike some of my competitors where you pay X/month and *if* they get you to the top of the search engines you have to pay more for more exposure, with my plans you get increased exposure by more and more keywords all the time. The success builds even more success. This is why my client retention rates are so high.