I get about 2 calls a week from people who have used cheap SEO companies or some other company who has not performed to the levels they had expected, and I feel bad, I have always hated seeing people get absolutely ripped off, which is why I have a standing offer to review any SEO proposal in my free time.

What I am hearing more and more of is that many people who purchase SEO services are now turning to lists and ratings of SEO companies with websites like TopSEO’s to help them sort through the garbage SEO companies. “On their homepage the big slogan is 2000 companies evaluated, only 80 chosen.” The question is, what is the criteria used to filter out the 1920 companies who weren’t chosen?

But just when you think you’ve got something you can use…buyer beware…I have found that a very recent winner listed by TopSEOs.com in 2008 as a TOP SEO company that doesn’t currently rank well for their own brand name – this reeks of problems. Major problems.

When I find a company that is not ranking well for its own brand name it spells problems, problems that usually come from overly aggressive tactics. If an SEO company doesn’t rank well for its own brand name that especially raises issues as they (the SEO companies) are the trusted advisors for their clients. Their clients come to them saying, “hey can you help us navigate this confusing SEO space and to get results”? They expect us to use tactics that won’t get them in trouble.

I was told about this company by one of their ex-clients (they will remain unnamed), they are in SEMPO, sponsor major events, and the like, they seem credible right?

We learned about this company because one of their clients called us to explain the situation of how he used the SEO company listings at TopSEO’s to help find a good TOP SEO company, this company was highly rated which made him feel more at ease as he left his old offshore SEO firm who didn’t perform well either.

Note: when I type in this company’s name, I see a few old blog posts that are on important sites which heavy anchor text links within the blog posts. Maybe they used pay per post or some similar service to get links? Who knows.

For those of you using SEO rating services, it really is buyer beware!!

The only list I would trust is this one
Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz crew doesn’t make a dime off of this list, I think they developed it out of a love for the industry and hoping to connect people who need good SEO services to those whom they feel are reputable.

Lee Odden of TopRank has a nice list of ways to select a company, not sure if he’d still include topseo’s.

Ideally marketingsherpa would bring back their SEO guide

I don’t know the due diligence process that TopSEO’s does for listed “top SEO companies”, but to truly make that list valuable and honest I would recommend that they do some of the following:

I really would love to see TOPSEOs let us know the due diligence process on companies and seek out suggestions to improve the current setup, I’ve done my part in the 8 bullets above, what other suggestions would you have to build a better SEO company mousetrap?

Hey Folks - At the last Affiliate Summit I had the pleasure of having a web business heavyweight in on my session. For those of you that know Jason Calacanis, he is a baller in the web business space and is famous for the SEO is BS comment that set the SEO Industry ablaze. If you are interested in finding out more, here’s a link (to google results).

As you all know SEO is something I just love being a part of and in this presentation, I gave my honest gut feedback on how to do linking the right way, and how to prime the pump if you have to with paid links…lets be honest a submission to Yahoo Directory or Best of the web is a paid listing too. I don’t mean blatant spam sites, I mean just paying for links in general. Jason took it as an opportunity to ask some questions, I wish they were more substantive cause the audience would have gotten more value out some more substantive questions, but here’s the video on my thoughts about how to manage paid links, evaluate your competitors use of them, and see if you even need to. To watch the video with my annotations in it go here instead of watching it below, when you embed it does not include annotations.

I also need your feedback, I spent some time annotating these videos because I talk fast and through out a lot of URLs, if you’d like me to go back and annotate more videos, please comment on our youtube channel or here on our blog - and I’ll start adding annotation of URLs and free SEO tools in the ones that get the most requests.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Jason for at least sitting down and asking some questions - it helped me actually be better prepared for future shows. Jason and I spoke after the show and assuming he was genuine about it - he was a totally cool dude who I think is sick of spammers, but then again aren’t we all!

At a recent Affiliate SummitI was asked if a 20,000 keywords meta tag was a good idea. Don’t believe me here’s the video:

So next time you think SEO has no future, remember that what we think of as common place simple SEO is still foreign to so many people as greywolf outlines so well.

While I was a bit short in this video, I really wanted to stress the point that this person was wasting their time, so while yes many of us should be reading these 10 books to save our SEO jobs so many of us need to still read up on the basics, so here are a few favorites, sorry if it is an SEOmoz love fest, but its good stuff:

SEOMOZ Ranking Factors

SEO for Beginners

Oldie but goodie

Not too long ago the SEO community was set ablaze when shoemoney said SEO has no future, and I agree to some extent - Graywolf already covered that people still don’t follow the basics, and a few other major reasons why SEO DOES HAVE A FUTURE which I agree with 100%, but won’t re-hash he covered that well. The argument that is still NOT being talked about is the fact that shoemoney was somewhat right, that led me too this post!

Hey I LOVE SEO, I think you all know that. Fortunately I also LOVE marketing. As a result I read a LOT of marketing books. I recently got thinking…that SEO today really requires a lot of MARKETING savvy, not as much TECH savvy. I spoke about this in a recent presentation at the Affiliate Summit (yes I’ll be speaking in Boston!) where I walked the audience through the progression of SEO from needing tech savvy (1998) to marketing savvy (2003) - You can see the slides here:



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What I was trying to illustrate back 4 months ago was that yes, SEO, as we know it is dying for some types of SEOs. For most of those SEO’s who have relied on TECH instead of MARKETING are going to really feel the pain when they can’t understand how to create things of value, that people want, fill a need, have a chance to go viral, CONVERT, is trackable, is easy to use, and respects people’s privacy.

Here are the 10 books I think you should be reading to be a good SEO:

• Meatball Sundae
• Selling the Invisible
• Don’t make me think
• Wikinomics
• The Tipping point
• Microtrends
• Call to action
• Web analytics an hour per day
• SuperCrunchers
• Groundswell

Please let me know of others!