SEO is one of many markets where getting some straight answers on how much a particular service is worth is hard to find. What is a reasonable fee SEOs should charge for getting your site to the top 10 results on Google for example? While most SEO companies prefer to charge monthly maintenance contract fees or large setup fees initially and a small monthly fee, in our opinion measurable results speak louder than well polished monthly status reports. Once you talk to a few reputable SEO companies and request a quote, you will see wildly different search engine optimization pricing and contract terms. Sometimes the total costs can vary by as much 50%-10,000%. How is an average website owner supposed to make sense of all the pricing options and SEO guarantees?

Well, let’s start with some fundamentals about how SEO company’s determine pricing for their SEO services

1. Most SEOs will spend some time analyzing your site and come with a keyword list of about 5 to 10 target phrases unless you already have a specific keyword list.
2. They will check your site’s age, ranking, Google PageRank and current link popularity.
3. They will take a look the competition and the search engine results landscape for the chosen keywords. They will get answers to things like how old the sites are in the top 10 results, how many back links they have, what’s the average Google PageRank of the top 10-20 sites and many other important metrics.
4. Next they will determine if the target keywords has low competition, moderate competition, or very high competition. They will use the keywords in quotes, enter the Google search commands for checking anchor text competition (allinanchor) and title tag competition (allintitle).

Based on where your site currently ranks in the search results can have a very important affect on the SEO pricing. Lifting a website to the first page results of Google from say number 500 is a lot tougher than moving it from the 50th position to the top 10.

As a webmaster paying for SEO services you only care about seeing your site in the top 10 and not so much about how your site gets there, but from a search engine optimization company’s perspective it’s very important to take into consideration all the above variables.

Still, there are some guidelines you should use in gauging whether or not your are over paying for SEO services. One very telling research method is running the Google Traffic Estimator Tool using your target keywords. We believe in letting the pay-per-click market determine how much you should pay for SEO services. Here is a quick example. Using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool take a look at the results for the keyword “golf shoes”. What you will notice is that this keyword can cost Google Adwords advertisers between $720 - $1,200 a day to be in the number 1 to 2 in the sponsored results. Let’s take the low end of the spectrum and multiply 30 days X $720 = $21,600 a month in advertising costs just for this one keyword. So how much a SEO should charge for getting a natural top 10 ranking on Google for this keyword? How about $259,200?

By doing some home work with the Google Traffic Estimator Tool and taking a look at the exact phrase competition for “golf shoes” on Google you would be a lot better equipped to sort out who can offer you the best SEO services and pricing.

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Yahoo will be phasing out the Overture keyword tool and perhaps making room for a new keyword search tool based on their new Panama advertising platform in the near future. The Overture keyword tool has been up and down for a few days now, but as of this morning it seems all regional versions of the Overture keyword inventory tool are also dead.

In a thread over at Webmasterworld someone claims to have talked with Yahoo representatives and they have given assurances they will fix the problem as early as today. If you rely heavily on the Overture keyword inventory data you have a few options although most of these options have some type of costs associated with them. Some of the best keyword research tools include Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer and Wordze.

The only free keyword tool available without creating an account is the Google external keyword tool. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search volume in numbers.

Update Feb, 02, 2007

The overture keyword invertory tool is still alive at this address http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/, although it shows the previous month's results from December 2006. This may mean December 2006 was the last update for this popular keyword tool.

Also, a new Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and KeywordDiscovery research tool has been released to the Overture keyword tool decommissioning.

Keyword focus is everything
Web page optimization at a basic level is the distribution of keyword phrases in the HTML page content. The most important web page elements to optimize are the body text, internal links, decorative tags such as bold and italic, headings and image alt tags. Incorporating your keywords in these key page elements is the foundation for well optimized web pages. So far so good, but what about the fact that your keyword research may have turned up over 40-50 target keyword phrases.

Can you optimize your web pages using dozens of keywords on a single web page? You could, but it wouldn’t be very effective in getting top ranking even for one of those keywords. The reason is simple. Having too many keywords targeted on a single web page dilutes the focus of the web page.

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Searching just got easier thanks to Quintura’s new free search tool. This downloadable windows based program helps searchers create better search queries by finding through word association semantically related words. With a clever visual interface the word connections can be seen as a map and added or removed from your search query.

In some ways this tool is similar to Wordtracker or the Google Adword keyword suggestion tools without the visual mapping. After taking the tool for a test around the block I was pleasantly surprised to find out how simple and easy it is to build search queries. The Quintura search tool finds relevant keyword terms and maps them on your screen, which allows for easy search query building.
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We have developed a Free Microsoft Excel based keywords list generator that can create a list of ready to use search phrases in Google Adwords, META keywords or other applications.
This spreadsheet based tool can create thousands of possible combinations of keywords in seconds. Optionally you can specify quotes or other characters to surround your generated keyword phrases with. Now you can quickly and efficiently create Google Adwords phrases with bid amounts and URLs.

The best part is, it’s absolutely FREE, so please download your free copy today.
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