Search Engine Optimization Spain

If you have recently approached online marketing agencies for SEO quotes, you may have been surprised by some of the quotes. Why are they so expensive? To answer this question and in keeping with our policy of transparency, I am going to take you through the process we use to calculate a quote.

But I thought SEO was supposed to be "Free" traffic?

Well, if it was simple to rank a site for a particular keyword, we would all be very rich indeed.  The simple truth is: wherever there is money to be made from organic search rankings, money has to be spent to compete with the existing top ten.

You didn´t really think it would only cost 100€ a month to rank number one for a keyword that generates thousands of euros a month, where all of the top ten have been spending several thousand euros a month for the last few years, did you?

1 – Which keywords?

First, we take a good look at your website to see what exactly you are offering, and come up with a list of keywords. You may have provided a list of keywords, but very often (about 90% of the time) the keywords chosen by the client are less than optimal choices because:

• They are too broad.
• There are not enough searches for that particular keyword for the effort to be worthwhile.
• The user intent is wrong. For example, a searcher will look for “buy dvds online”, whereas the company may want to target the keyword “sell dvds”, because that is what they do.

So we use the Google Keyword tool to get a rough estimate of the search volume.

2 – Estimating keyword difficulty.

So, now we have our keywords. How can we estimate how easy it will be to rank a site for this term? We run it through a tool that pulls the top ten results for that keyword. For each site in the top ten, the tool works out the number of links to the domain, the domain authority, and several other metrics to calculate a keyword difficulty of 0-100.

• A keyword difficulty of less than 30 means it will be fairly pain-free to rank the site within a couple of months.
• A keyword difficulty of 30-50 is more of a challenge, and will either take more resources or take longer to rank, or both.
• A keyword difficulty greater that 50 is a very competitive keyword, and will take some serious heavy lifting to rank.

So, based on past experience, we now have a better idea of the scale of work needed to rank a particular site for a particular keyword.

3 – Estimating the work involved.

So, looking at the sites in the top ten, we can get a rough idea of how many decent quality links are needed. We use another tool to check the page authority and anchor text used of incoming links, and work out the sort of links we will need to get to beat them. Often, we are looking at several hundred high quality links needed to rank the pages, for each keyword.

What does getting 1 good quality link mean, in terms of work required?

First, we have to create a list of potential link targets. These are other websites/blogs that would be good links. Next, we need to contact these sites, and try and arrange a way to get them to link to us. This usually involves writing some content for them to put on their site. Getting these links in place is very time consuming. We may only get a response of 10-15% of the sites we contact.

Next, we have to write some content for them. If we are looking to get 100 links, roughly 80 of those links will require us to write an article or blog post, and it needs to be of good quality if accepted. To research and write an article takes several hours, so this is a huge undertaking. Multiply this by the amount of keywords you want to rank for, and you can see why the costs start to add up.

So, each high quality link we get to your site can be broken down as follows:

• Search for 10-15 suitable sites – 30 minutes
• Contact the site owners, back and forth via email. Out of 10-15 sites, get one to agree to link. – 1 hour
• Research an article. 1-2 hours • Write the article, and send it over. 2 hours
• Chase up the site owner until the article is online. 1 hour

So it takes 5-7 hours of work for just one good quality link. Multiply that by 100, and you have 500-700 hours of work, spread over 3-4 months, and this is just for one keyword!

On top of that, we have to factor in time for:

• On-page optimization
• Analytics and reporting
• Client meetings/phone calls (That´s you!)

Now, for multiple keywords we can cut down on the time required a bit in terms of searching for sites, and research for the content, as a lot of these articles will be about similar topics, so we can enjoy economies of scale.

So how come some companies sent you very low quotes? Well, quite simply, their work is inferior. They may use software to automatically create hundreds of similar articles from one article, which are mostly unreadable and provide little value for SEO. Or, they use software to automatically spam blog comments, dropping links. But these links will not last long, and do not provide a fraction of the SEO value that a good quality link does.

There is a little more to it than this, and the strategy may vary according to the type of site and the industry, but hopefully this little breakdown should help you realize what goes into an seo campaign, and also gives you some good questions to ask your SEO company when it is time to get a quote, but the main thing to remember is:

Think of the value of being on the front page for a keyword, not the cost!

posicionamiento web

Gasp! What a provocative headline! Have I offended you? I surely hope so, because I want to write content that gets people WET. Sopping wet.

What am I talking about? Rocking the boat, of course. Most people would rather fall quietly into line, and not draw to much attention to themselves. They think they want to be noticed, but are terrified of shaking things up, breaking the mould, ROCKING THE BOAT. Myself, I like to rock the boat so much that people fall in the water and get soaked. Because swimming is fun. Once you are in the water, you realize it is quite pleasant. If you can´t swim, you should learn, a whole new world will open up. A sense of freedom, a new perspective.

I challenge you to do one thing today outside your normal comfort zone. Take a risk. Speak out. Take a flying leap into the unknown, take a graceful swan dive into your new future.

SEO virgin

The first time you meet her, you are anxious. Looking in the mirror, you fiddle with your titles for the fifteenth time. Will she like my content? Is my code clean enough?

Finally, she arrives. Gives you the once over, looks you up and down. You are intoxicated by her beauty, her power. The first meeting is brief, she hardly gives you the time of day. She doesn´t seem that interested in you, she hardly looked at any of your pages.

You wait for her to call again. Days go past- nothing. Not a sign. You try pinging her, nothing. Still, you carry on adding content, building links, in an effort to make yourself more attractive to her.

Just as you start to give up hope, she turns up again. She is interested this time. It seems she likes what you have to offer after all. She is looking you in the eyes, all coy. Sending you some sweet traffic. She seems really interested in all your pages, and is giving you high rankings. You can´t get enough, you think this is it.

Blissfully happy, you frolick around with her, basking in her beauty. You would do anything for her.

After a while, she seems a little distant. Not so interested in what you have to say anymore. The time between visits gets a little bit longer. She stops sending so much traffic. Then, it stops altogether.

You hang your head in bitter frustration. You thought you had it all, but it seems she is more interested in somebody else. She has gone behind your back, and is giving her traffic to your rivals.

Why? You think to yourself. You struggle to understand, she is a mystery to you. I thought you loved me? Where did I go wrong? Was it my links? Is is that my domain authority is not strong enough? You try find out why, try to get close to her.

You are blocked by her Gay Friend, Matt Cutts.

“She thinks you are a spammer, she doesn´t trust you. She says you are not as interesting as other sites. Now get lost!”

But still you try. “Just let me talk to her!” you say, “just give me one more chance!”.

“Look, ducky, the best I can do is pass a message on to her. Submit a reinclusion request, and go and sort yourself out. In your current state, she will never be interested in you. You really need to pull yourself together, sweetheart!”

So off you go and wallow in self pity. How could you have been so naïve? She said she loved you!

Oh google, thou art a cruel mistress!

The SEO playboy

You look back at your first time. Pah! How young and stupid you were! Just look at you now!

You know all the right words to say, you hang out in seedy places, spreading your dodgy links everywhere. You know exactly where to go to pick her up, and you can do it easy.

A different site every night. Two or three a day, F*** ‘em and chuck ‘em. You know how to present yourself to get her gagging for more. Bish bosh bash, loads of traffic, then on to the next one. Its all automatic, you don´t even have to try any more. She never knows what’s hit her, she falls for your shallow tricks every time. Your rivals look on in disdain, you laugh. They are just jealous. Day in, day out, the same techniques.

You never hang around for long. You get her hooked on your scraped content, she snorts up big lines of it, and likes it. She wants more, so you give it to her. More and more. When she realizes you have tricked her, you are long gone. On to the next one. Plenty more where that came from.

Then one day, you wake up, lonely. You realize you are all style and no substance. You have no depth, your tricks no longer work. You are fed up with a different site every night. You long for something more stable. You look in the mirror and realize what you have become. You must change.

Oh google, what have I done, I have corrupted you, I have polluted you!

The long term relationship SEO.

You feel older, wiser in your ways. You are happy. You are stable. You still have all the flair from your playboy days, but now you back it up with substance. You have a comfortable familiarity with her, but she still keeps you on your toes, to stop you getting complacent. You know how to communicate with her on a deeper level. She trusts you.

You have stopped hating her Gay Friend Matt Cutts, and realize he is just looking out for her. You know what you need to do to make this work, and she rewards you with some really hot, sizzling traffic.

You know she will carry on changing as you both get older, but you will adapt. You will have your ups and downs, but you will work through them, together. Finally, you have found the right balance.

Oh google, how could I live without you?

I am going to share with you how I get dozens of great articles a month for 2-4$ each, written by native English writers.

Since the google Panda update, where google de-valued low quality filler content sites, a lot of people are wondering how to get decent quality articles for their website or for posting on web 2.0 sites/article directories. I have seen many people swear by outsourcing article writing on freelancer.com and so on, paying 1-6 dollars per 3-500 word article, but in my experience all these articles are terribly written by non-native speakers and riddled with errors, something nobody would want to read.

Another popular method in recent years has been article spinning, where you prepare an article, then use software to “spin” hundreds of “unique” versions of the articles. Again, trash results. I know some people have taken article spinning to the level of art form, and do produce quite reasonable articles from doing this, but this is beyond the reach of most of us and the results still make you go “meh..” , certainly they are not articles I would read.

So, that leaves us with paying a real person, who is a native English speaker… which means expensive, right? All the services I have seen offering these sorts of services charge upwards of 10-15$ for a 600 word article.

Well, here is my method:

Recruit a legion of students to write articles.

Contrary to popular belief, students do not spend all their time studying, instead choosing to loaf about. Put them to work!

I remember being a student, I was perpetually skint, spending all my cash on going out, and did all sorts of crappy jobs to earn a bit of money, so I thought there was an opportunity here.

I put an advert on a local classified ads site asking for students to write articles for 2€ (about 3$). I asked them to contact me explaining why they would be good for the job, how many articles they thought they could write in a week, and to include their phone number so I could call them. I also said I would pay weekly, in cash.

I was overwhelmed with responses, so I called a few up and had a chat with them, and with in a week, they were sending in dozens of articles. There were English majors, business students, marketing students, the works. The articles were great as they had a fresh outlook on the topic, were written from different angles and viewpoints, and some of them were quite passionate.

I had them write on all sorts of topics, from travel to jobhunting, money saving tips and so on. I used the content to both populate my own network of sites, and to use as guestposts on other blogs for linkbuilding. A success!

Some pointers I learned from this excersise:

• It is best to recruit a few people, so you have a steady stream of content, but not too many or it becomes complicated to manage • Make it clear you have software that checks for copied content
• It is best to speak on the phone and meet up in person, as some are suspicious of “work from home” scams.
• Paying weekly in cash is a GREAT incentive for impoverished students
• Expect to see a drop-off in productivity around exam time
• Make sure you do a proper interview so they take it seriously, some students flake after a while
• Keep on top of who submitted what, and who has been paid. It is very important to be organized, you do want to keep your students sweet, and pay them on time.
• The students will often refer some of their friends who also want to write articles.
• Some students will be faster and output more than the others, take into account that these are people, not machines, and all are different.

A small, unexpected bonus here and there when they have done a good job is a great motivator Of course, I also got some applications from “divas” who think their writing is worth much more than 2€, I had one that thought it was a typo and wanted 200 per article. One must be firm, if they don´t want the job, they don´t have to take it.

So there you go, try it yourself. If you are a blogger and the main draw of the blog is YOUR writing, this is probably not for you, but if you are looking to create content for off-site uses, for SEO purposes, affiliate marketing and so on, it can be a godsend.

Have you used this sort of method? What about some of the other items discussed, like outsourcing to India or article spinning?

As from today, 30th March 2011, it is expressly forbidden to link to this site, either the homepage or any inner page, without the written permission of the webmaster.  We have taken this decision because of the excess of people linking to our website could cause us harm, and creating such a link is against the spirit of the internet.  Any unauthorized attempts to link to this site will result in legal action from our very expensive lawyer.

We have decided to implement this condition after many other large websites have also taken the (in our opinion, quite correct) decision to prevent linking to their sites, including:

Shell

Barclays Capital

BBC Magazines

Eurostar

Lloyds TSB

Amongst others. We are at this time waiting for written permission from said institutions to link to their websites from this page. Until we receive such permission, you will have to visit the webpages directly as any hyperlinking from this page would result in a breach of the terms and conditions of the institutions. We will however, link to this page, which does link to these institutions. Follow the links at your own risk, as they are unauthorized.

We believe this measure is important to keep the internet working correctly and how it was originally intended, as too many people take liberties and link to sites without authorization and this is completely unacceptable.

We would encourage all readers of this blog who wish to be visible and easily findable by people on the internet to immediately enforce similar tactics, and to start contacting all pages who have created links to their own sites and ask them to take the links down.

Guest posting is one of the soundest link building strategies at the moment. For those that don´t know what it is, you write an article for another blog, in exchange for a link back to your site.  The benefits are:

• Links in the body of the content, which google loves these days (much better than footer links, sidebar links or worse, links from a dreaded "resources" page.
• You have control of the anchor text, and the text surrounding the link.
• You have control over the title of the article
• You get relevant links from a diverse range of ips (hand up those that spend all there time getting links from squiddoo and ezine articles. You are limiting the range of ips your links are coming from) Link diversity is more important these days
• You get additional exposure to your site from actual real human readers.

However, many people who go into guest posting seem to have the biggest egos in the world, and will not submit posts to sites unless they are pr 4 or whatever and will send them an instant boost in traffic. They are too precious over their writing.  In the end, these people are being incredibly short sighted, but we shall leave them to it as it leaves the path open to the rest of us mere mortals who have links to build and sites to rank.

I personally prefer to guest post on newish blogs.  I do not give a flying monkey´s left toe if the site has pagerand or not. I couldn´t care less if the site has hardly any comments on its posts. Why?  Because:

It is easier to get guest posts on new blogs, and your links value will increase over time!

My point is illustrated fantastically in my super scientific graph below.  The newer the site, the easier it is to guest post on the site. Your article doesn´t have to be the best piece of literature since shakespeare to be accepted and your post will be published quicker.

It is often as simple as dropping the blog owner an email saying "Hey, I have been checking out your blog, it looks promising. I was hoping you might accept a guest post from me about such and such, what do you think?"  The owner will firstly be flattered someone is reading his or her blog, they will get a warm tingly feeling and say yes.

And, don´t forget, the blog will increase in value over time which means your link will increase in value over time. The blog will attract links to it, will have more content put on it, and it will gain authority. As it does so, your link will pass more value. It will age and mature like a fine wine

You will gain a great contact

Lets face it, by guest posting on a new blog, you are doing them a favour. You can tweet the guest post to your followers, give them a bit of traffic, plus you will give them the encouragement that their blog is worth something.  Help them out like this, and you can call on them again in the future when you have another site to promote, or an article you want tweeting or whatever. Give and ye shall receive.

The owner of a new blog may have other blogs and know other bloggers

A lot of people who run blogs have their own mini network of sites, all other guest posting opportunities. Plus, they probably know some other bloggers, and can introduce you leading to yet more posting opportunities.

So there you go, solid pseudo scientific evidence as to why you should guest post on new blogs, so if you are a guest posting snob, buck up your attitude, sonny jim!  If you are looking for places to connect with guest bloggers, take a look at guestpostexchange.com and myblogguest.com, you should find enough opportunities to get started there.

In this post I shall share with you a technique I have been using successfully to get free, very high quality content from authority niche authors, free links, and make everyone involved feel like they have gained something. I bet you thought you could only get cheap content through article spinning software or outsourcing to indians, with illegible results, right?  Wrong! Here is how to do it:

What we will do:

1. Find really great writers on your subject, and get them to write for you, for free.
2. Get these people to attract links for you.

How we will do this:

First of all, your site needs to look decent. That is, not like a splog, a MFA site or like it was cobbled together by your cousin who "knows html". If you have a cms such as Joomla or wordpress, you can easily make it look great and professional using a professional but cheap, clean, template. Next, you need to put some content on, that is good, high quality. This is so under a quick, cursory examination, your site looks professional and legitimate.

Next, we need to find some people to write for us, for free.  How do we do this? We search for authorities, big names, and quality writers for our industry, then we invite them to write for us. Not ask, not beg, but invite. It would be our honour if these people would write for our blog.

So off we go into google, looking for people who are writing or blogging in our industry, and obviously like writing, have extremely good, solid posts, and preferably have a lot of followers on twitter, or people that leave a lot of comments. We compile our list of people, and then we need to do a bit of stalking to find out about them. Email, telephone, real name, twitter handle, that sort of thing.  Then we send them an email saying:

Hello (insert their name in their),

I have been reading your blog and really love your articles, especially the one about (insert what it was about in here). I was wondering if you would be interested in doing a guest post for my site about something similar? I think our readers would find it really useful, and I would be happy to links back to your blog from your work.

Please let me know if you would be interested in doing this.

Thanks,

your name and number and website

Very often, they will write back to you all flattered and happy, because you have given them a great feeling in their belly and someone actually reads their stuff, and they will want to know more details.

Now, you must be very polite and patient at this point, as they will want to do the best work they possibly can - imagine someone has just announced you will be published in a prestigious magazine, this is how they are feeling, so do not break the illusion. They will probably take a week or so to get it just right.

Then you whack it on your blog, giving them a bio back to their blog, and announce a date for publication.  This is important, as it will make them feel like it is more of an event, and will start telling everybody about having their work published somewhere. Then, when it is published, let them know, and gently suggest she post the link on twitter, or even on her own blog. As this person is a good writer, they will probably have quite an audience already, so this will attract some links from twitter and maybe some other blogs, and probably some comments.

After the first post is published, go to a bit of effort and social bookmark it and the like, and get a bit of traffic clicking on the link back to their site.  Then you tell them it has been a great success, and would they be interested in publishing on a regular basis, such as once a week/fortnight/month.  Usually, they are delighted to do so, and you have regular, free, high quality posts on your blog.

Repeat the process with 7/14/20 people, and you have a constant stream of free content, each with its ready made audience and attracting its own links, from authorities in your niche.  The more people you have doing this, the more authoritative it will appear to your readers AND your guest posters, and the easier it will be to get more guest posters.

What you are essentially doing is being the middleman in a network of authoritative professionals in your industry. BAM! authoritative, high quality blog that is perpetually generating free content and building free, quality links. This site will last the test of time, is squeaky clean white hat and pretty much automatic. Bye bye scrapers, spinners and automatic forum spamming tools, hello money.

And the best part is, everybody wins.  You get your site, which you can monetize, or point links to your money site, they get added exposure, authority and access to a wider network and the readers get really good content.

So after 9 months of nothing, google has decided to update its toolbar pagerank. Allthough this is an outdated metric, and one should not take too much notice of it, it is a good overall rough indicator of the authority of a site, and it is always nice to see that little green bar creep up.  Many people were beginning to suspect that google had killed toolbar pagerank because it is a primary metric used to determine the value of anchor text link sales, a practice Google is keen to stamp out. The theory was that if google stopped updating its pagerank, people would stop selling links.

Well, whatever the reasons, we now have a page rank update effective of today, 20th january 2011. People should see their pagerank change as the datacentres across the world update.

So how did I do in this game?

Well, I had no sites drop in pagerank, which is of course very good.

With new sites that did not exist this time last year, I had one site jump from unranked to pagerank 3, another from unranked to pagerank 2, half a dozen from unranked to pagerank 1. On some higher PR sites that have been around for a number of years, I saw many internal pages go from pr 1 and 2 to pr 3&4, some main sections up from pr1 to pr 3.

A few other sites went from pr1 to pr3, and I had a swath of very new sites being set at pr0, where previously they were greyed out in the toolbar.

So, all in all very pleased, especially the ones that went from unranked to pr3. What joy!  I also notices with these particular sites that I have adsense, my earnings jumped by about 200% over normal days today, straight after the update. Coincidence, or is PR back, stronger than ever?

Exact match domains are domain names that contain the exact keywords you want to rank for. For example, if you want to rank highly for "great big hotdogs" you would buy greatbighotdogs.com or .org or .net.  Google gives these domains a big lift in the search engines for their terms, so with relatively few incoming links, you can rank highly for some keywords with stiff competition.