Some questions you might ask are:

1. Can I talk with the person who will be doing my optimization and marketing work? (you don’t really want to talk to a sales rep or even the manager as much as seeing if you can communicate well with the person executing your work and do they themselves have a deep understanding of SEO or are they just an employee who has their fingers crossed on the other side of the phone. Don’t be sold by a hotshot and then delivered to some newbie account manager. You don’t want to be part of a learning curve)

2. How many years have you been providing SEO? (Remember, it takes ten years at anything to truly gain a degree of mastery)

3. What is the process utilized that will help me realize my goals with SEO marketing? (An expert can answer this question without hesitation in a clear and informative manner)

4. Do you guarantee top positions in Google? (This is a trick question. Google has published: “No person can guarantee positions in Google.” The only true guarantee for positions is by using pay per click to get listed in the “sponsored” section of the results pages. “No” is the better answer to this question. definitely beware of any “SEO expert” who offers a “money back guarantee” as they know their own abilities as well as their limitations and will tend to word the contract with loopholes that allow them to keep your investment if they can not get you top positions as promised. True Search Optimization is an art form and some science, coupled with some very cool software applications, a lot of passion and some downright gritty experience. If the “SEO expert” says “yes” to this question, keep shopping)

5. Can you show me that you have a track record of being able to get your clients to the top of the organic search positions? (this is the natural question to follow a “no” answer to the previous question)

6. Can you provide references? (Check more than three)

7. Can you show me how your own site performs for your industry keywords? (If they are an Expert at SEO, claiming to be able to help you to rank and position and convert better, wouldn’t you agree that they should also be able to do well for their own business?)

7. What is the first step to helping me? (Pro answers will be “rehabilitative analysis” or “keyword research” or something along those lines).

There is more. Maybe I’ll comment them in later. or you can comment on this. If you would like more information and tips about hiring an SEO Expert you can also contact me, maybe hire me or hire me to help you hire an appropriate SEO. Search optimization professional.

I guess the moral of the post is: A lot of money is wasted investing in “SEO experts” who just simply are not able to deliver what is possible. Be aware and keep vigilant.

Cheers!

Robert

I had thought that it looked impressive to be on the top of search for the phrase “search engine expert.” But when I Googled the phrase, I was somewhat surprised. I found my business on page one of the results at #7.

At number 1 is Scott Hendison in Oregon. I know Scott from workshops back in 2003. I think to my self… That is great! he has cleaned up his past darker-hatted ways and now he’s at the top for a good phrase. Congrats on Numero Uno Scott!

SEOlogic has #2 and thier SEO quiz is #3, Kule!

Then I find #4, Brad Fallon, listed, which brings up some emotion in me, maybe fear, as I held #1 for the phrase “SEO Expert” unchallenged for just over three years, and yes, kudos to Brad, he was one who stepped up, with his Blog of all things, to dethrone me. And he has kept it from me for two years also, so I gotta tip my hat to Brad. BTW, Brad has a couple of my old buddies held hostage over in his stomper camp.

At #5 Webreference has an interview with Danny Sullivan and at #6 is Search Engine Watch, which I think is latently semantically related to Danny, so I give the #5 & #6 spots to Danny Sullivan who is now with Third Door Media Sphinning out SMX events. Now If I were Google, and granted I am not, lol, but if I were, I would just whitelist Danny in as #1 for “Search Engine Expert” and leave it be.

Then there is my little listing there at #7 (I have never specifically targeted that phrase either as it was not part of my findings).

At #8 is Jill Whalen from High Rankings. Jill is going tit for tat with me on a couple of top positions for some of my personal favorite phrases, but I think I am winning where concerned, and I agree that Jill should be on this list. YOU GO GIRL!

And at #9 is Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com Dude, when I saw that domain launch, I knew a storm was coming! Of what I know about Aaron which isn’t a lot, he seems very sensible and very logical, two qualities that can get you to this page. I should read your blog more, I know.

And #10 would have got an honorable mention except their link server 404′d and left me hangin’ with the backie.

So, this may have even been important. So, being me, I whip out the lappie and I pulled up the Keyword Discovery, to see if I can’t do a little discovery. And what I found was that out of 60 Bugillion+ queries last year, only 1 search was for the phrase “search engine expert”. And, well, hmmm…

This is a great ego result, meaning that it feels good to ones ego to find themselves listed as a top 10 search engine expert. Hey, I even built a searchie but she broke from malnutrition, or maybe it was manipulation. Anyways, “ego” results don’t bring home the bacon.

I did find it interesting though, that KD says there are three decent phrases stemming from the phrase “search engine expert” and I went and looked and I am #1 for all three of those phrases, and these phrases bring me business and they all three have a higher count than does “SEO Expert”.

So I guess the reason I thought this might make a good blog post is because the target phrase only had a count of 1. Maybe I was wrong and that is completely uninteresting.

Ok, so that bozo at #10 who didn’t get mentioned today, well he kinda needs a replacement, so I am just gonna through in a wild card. If I were Google, I’d put John Alexander from Search Engine Workshops on page one, because for starters, as I am tiring from typing this long-assed post, I reflect on his wisdom, when he warned us three years ago about the eventual commodification of SEO as a service.

I’m dun!

What is the best way to see who’s linking to you (or your competitors)? It seems like ages ago now, but you used to be able to check your popularity by using the command line search in Google, link:www.domain.com and see who was linking to you, but in a link-driven Web, on a link-driven search engine, Google decided this info was to valuable to search marketers and they disabled the ability to get acurate data with this method.

Googlebot (Google’s crawler) and Slurp (Yahoo’s crawler) are very similar. They are just simple crawlers, each follows links and gathers information to bring home for analysis. These two engines algorithms are very different but their bots are alike. So we can deduce that whatever links Slurp crawls, Googlebot can see and also crawl.

So, let’s use Yahoo to check our link popularity and we can fairly confidently assume that Google would have similar results.

The way I use Yahoo for this task is to do the command line search, linkdomain:mydomain.com. This query will take you into Yahoo Site Explorer, where, BLAMO! it shows that there are about 1600 plus pages with links to my domain.

There are several ways to refine the query once you are at the Site Explorer. Some are built in fields at the top left of the page while other “modifiers” to the command line can show interesting results too.

If you don’t know what to do with this data then I will be happy to teach you in an SEO consultation, where I can teach you also about cutting edge applications you can get and use to REALLY dig out this info, with link reputation data also.

By the way, if you like this post, would you link to it, or me?

Ah, it’s good to be back.

Both Yahoo and Google have introduced good Webmastering tools to help measure important data like page saturation. But if you want to see real quick where you stand at any given time, I do it like this:

Go to google.com. > Search for: site:www.yourdomain.com

On the results page, there is a blue bar at the top that tells you how many pages you have indexed in Google. Be sure to scroll down and go to the end by clicking on the last number, say page “10″ for example. If you see a link at the bottom of the page that says “see ommitted results” click on it and drill to the end again. While you are here you should see if any and how many of your pages are moving to the supplemental index, which is usually not good.

You want to see your page saturation grow, it is healthy for your business online. This is an easy and effective way to quickly check your progress. This “command line” search also works in Yahoo and in MSN.

There are some searches you can do on the Web which will help you indicate the health of your search marketing efforts.

Usually, from the get go, when someone contacts me to help them, there are some things I want to know about the domain as soon as is possible. Historical data is most helpful, how old is the domain, how old is the current Web site, are there recently lost positions, and any details about previous search marketing efforts are always helpful, but the two indicator searches I like to perform tell me very important information,

1. Saturation: how many pages of your site are crawlable and indexed, and in Google are all the pages in the main index or have a percentage of the domains pages moved to the supplemental index? and

2. Popularity: how many other Web pages are linking to you, who are they and what are they saying about you. In my next two posts I’ll show you how to get this information using “operator” or “command Line” searches.

The way to find out if any of your pages are in the Google supplemental (low value) index is like this:

Go to Google.com

Search Google for site:www.yourdomain.com

Start looking to see where they begin. You will know because the bottom row of data also says: “supplemental.” If you have more than 20% of your pages listed in the supplemental index then you should take action. These pages are usually stale and often share or duplicate content. If you do not know what action to take you can call me, or find an SEO expert near you to consult with.

But you should certainly at least see if you have a problem yet.

You just load the domain that you want to work on into Firefox, turn on the tool bar and wallah! goodies at my finger tips! Theres a code to content ratio, an html validator, code cleanup suggestions, link checker, lynx viewer, a sweet little KDA (Keyword Density Analyzer), a load time gauge, and a meta tag viewer and generator. There is also a site map generator. And there is more, Search tools and even quick WhoIs data. The Link Popularity checker only works if you have a Google API, which I don’t because I’m not a developer, and since Google deliberately skews all back link data, this is the one weakness of the tool bar, to claim it reveals link pop info. They should have pointed this part of the tool to Yahoo and it would be even greater. Hey now theres an idea…
Just yesterday I found a serious problem I had been overlooking on a clients site (ooops, but I didn’t make it, I am just fixing it). It was some erroneous code that was being calculated as text and was skewing all of our densities.

I’ve been using this tool since August of 2006 but I’ll probably use it even more often now. This tool is so helpful that They’ve earned a link from me. You can download the toolbar here. This app does not do your work for you but it is nifty in helping you find work that should be done. Great job RQ.

Free tools linke the Overture keyword selection tool do not work and often lead you to target far inferior phrases than what is available and from what phrases have a know searched for audience. For that reason it is of the utmost importance to use professional tools like Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Analog X.

Look for more posts about each of these keyword selection tools in the near future. And of course, the goods are available by subscription.