Don’t pay people to optimize your site. These days, SEO projects should focus more on link building. Building incoming links to your site takes time and connections. Optimizing a site is so fast and easy that the SEO firm should throw it in for free. Don’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for a 30-minute project. Also, don’t pay for “search engine submission.” This is another scam that people pay for that can be done with one simple click. It takes mere seconds and people pay hundreds of dollars for it.

The SEO scams are so prevalent that it makes it tough for an honest SEO guy to convince anyone who has been burned to try again.  In fact, some who have been taken no longer believe SEO can be effective to improve rankings. It certainly can. Their SEO guy was either incompetent or dishonest. The problem had nothing to do with search engine optimization.

Fair enough. I would feel the same way if I lost my hard earned money to a virtual crook. So, I’ve turned the tables on the SEO industry and decided to run my SEO business more like a restaurant. I cook up the results. You consume the improved rankings, then pay for the service. If I deliver an undercooked steak, you get to send it back, or walk out before you have even shown a credit card. This turning of the tables is appropriate given the status of the industry. It is full of crooks and the honest SEO firms need to face the facts and be accommodating.

Will your SEO firm accept payment only after you get to page one for your keyword? The next time a slick SEO firm approaches you with big promises, turn the tables and offer to pay their fee only after they produce all those big results.

If you don’t speak the same language, communication is tough.

You speak English and you have a huge opportunity to consult with a company in Tokyo. The big shot CEO only speaks Japanese. If you’re going to work with him, you have two choices. Learn Japanese (not likely) or hire a professional interpreter. Either way, you’ve got it handled once the communication barrier is resolved.Likewise, if you want to publish a website that has potential to rank well in the search engine results pages, you have to learn to speak Google. Google has it’s own way of interpreting a site, and it is not about the language in which the content is written. It is related to SEO factors: titles, descriptions, header tags, keywords and other aspects of SEO. If you don’t speak Google, optimizing these critical aspects of your site is impossible.

Google has a code – a way of assessing your site’s place in the search engine results and if you don’t know how to communicate your relevance with precision, the search engine will wildly misinterpret your site and you simply won’t rank well in relevant searches.So, if you don’t speak Google, you have two options: Learn to speak Google (not likely, but possible if you find the right resources and realize it will take nearly the same amount of effort as learning Japanese) or hire an interpreter. Again, this is not about the language and grammar in which your site content is written. It has to do with SEO factors.

Connections: it is all about knowing the right people.

The next Google mirror of human life has to do with the level of authority Google gives your site for ranking purposes. Google ranks every site it can read on a scale of 0-10. The Google home page is a 10. Most sites published are zeroes. Sites that rank for popular key words, locally or internationally, often rank 0-6. Sites ranking 7, 8, 9, and 10 are extraordinarily rare. To learn you site’s page rank, you can get a plug in to your Firefox browser. Just Google it and download. Soon you’ll know every sites rank upon visiting.Page rank is Google’s opinion of how important your site is. The higher the rank, the more important you are. So, if someone searches for a term that is relevant to your site and a competing site as well, Google will rank your site first if you have a higher page rank, all else being equal.

How does Google determine page rank? The same way people determine social rank. The more people you know – the more connections you have – and the more influential those people are, the greater social importance you achieve. In Googlespeak, connections are often called backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links to your site. Google determines that your site is important if other sites on the Internet think your site is important and link to it.To use an analogy of how this works, let’s say you’re viewing the resumes of several computer consultants to hire. You don’t know any of them personally, so you definitely want to check their references.

Here is the breakdown. Assume all resumes are of qualified applicants:

• Three resumes have no references available and no suggestion of how to get them.
• Two resumes ask you to contact the applicant for references, which you do, but don’t hear back.
• Two resumes have references listed, but require no contact with the references.
• One resume lists one reference only and invites you to contact him with information provided.
• One resume lists three references and invites you to contact them.
• One resume lists three references with contact information and you notice one of the references is a very successful, honest and well-known local businessman.
• One resume lists references and contact information and you notice the same local businessman is there, too, right next to the names of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, with their personal cell phone numbers provided.

So, who wins the ranking contest? It isn’t hard to determine. Now, you may not hire ANY of the applicants when all is said and done. But this isn’t about the hiring decision. It’s about the ranking process. The resume scenarios above are excellent analogies of backlink scenarios for websites. Some have no backlinks whatsoever. Some have backlinks for which Google gives no credit (nofollow links). Others have backlinks that are of low authority (from PR zero sites). Still others have high quality, high authority backlinks. Some sites even have links from prestigious colleges, universities and government organizations. And Google loves these most of all.Want to come up higher in the searches? You’d better convince Google to think your site is more important than you competitors’ sites. How to do this? Acquire quality, high PR backlinks. When you have thousands of these, or at least more than your competitors in the combination of quantity and quality, you will rank! It’s in the algorithm.

• Is your San Diego SEO firm legitimate?
Do they practice “white hat” SEO within Google’s terms of service? If not, your site could get “sandboxed” by Google – banned – and without any warning to you. Can you imagine a rogue SEO firm (or merely an inexperienced one) damaging your relationship with Google for you without you understanding how it happened?

• Is a real person working for you?
Many SEO firms use “bots” or “black hat” software to do their work for them. Your site gets put into a cookie cutter system that runs on auto-pilot and that is it! Status reports, updates and consulting on an effective individual SEO strategy is beyond their capability, not to mention their intention.

• Is your SEO expert available?
Many SEO companies take on too many clients for the staff they employ. You can assume this is the case with yours if you end up waiting days for a return phone call, then don’t get detailed answers to your questions when you do finally speak to them.

• Does your SEO expert understand business and marketing?
Most “techies” who do SEO actually do not understand fundamental business concepts, especially marketing. SEO that is not guided by experienced marketing knowledge, when successful, often brings irrelevant traffic to your site – not potential customers or clients for your business.

• Is your SEO expert really just a web designer?
Many web designers claim to understand SEO and it makes sense to they lay person that they might. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. It is actually rare to find a web designer who doubles as an expert in both on-site and off-site search engine optimization. Design and SEO are two different specialty fields that don’t typically attract people of similar skill sets.Rigorous keyword research, backlink building, page rank building, high PR links, blog commenting, search engine pinging, dofollow/nofollow links, linkwheels, etc. Does your web designer understand these essential SEO functions? And this is only the beginning of the list! Did your designer insist on a competitive analysis of relevant keywords before building your site? If not, he doesn’t understand SEO.

• Finally, does your SEO firm put concepts in terms that you understand?
Do they provide evidence of work completed and an explanation of how the work serves the long term needs of your site?  If not, just remember the last time you dropped your car off to a roadside auto shop and said, “Do whatever it needs.”

Now, you carefully roll up the scroll, slip it into the bottle, replace the cork and toss it overboard into the rolling sea. There!

Surely the world will be a different place! Such is the plight of those who intend to be seen online, but don’t understand the critical nature of keyword research. You have no prayer of being seen without it. Of course, you could get lucky. We’ve all heard the legends of those who’ve had luck with messages in bottles. The Police even got millions of messages in return, as the song testifies.

Still, I think I’ll throw my hat in with those who favor diligent keyword research. Here are some guidelines that will put your site in front of relevant readers who are searching for information that you provide.

1. Identify medium traffic, low competition keywords. They get traffic AND you have a chance to rank for them.

2. Make sure to include your keyword in the title, body, description and header tags. Don’t spam your page with too many keyword mentions. Besides being silly, it doesn’t help in the search engines results anyway.

3. Test your keywords for commerciality if you want to make money online. There are keywords that don’t make money. “Jokes” for example, doesn’t produce income for anyone in spite of achieving millions of searches every month. People are looking for something free when they search for jokes, quotes, history, etc…

What results should you expect when publishing a website with no keyword research?

Toss a blank envelope into the daily stream of postal mail and what will happen to it? Drop a message in a bottle in the middle of the Pacific and wait for a response. Get an unlisted phone number and sit there waiting for calls.  Place a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert and tell someone to go find it. OK, I am running out of metaphors, but I hope you understand how absolutely crucial keyword research is if you want visitors to your site. There is simply no substitute unless you believe in blind luck, which can work in your favor on occasion, but is no strategy on which to build a business! Identifying relevant and low competition keywords before you write your article and plugging them into the appropriate places in your webpage is like placing yourself in the middle of a shopping mall with a great product at a wonderful price. People will see you, buy your product and thank you for being there.Going for keywords with too high competition is like going up against WalMart with  common household items. Seriously, you don’t have a prayer to rank against the web behemoths for the most popular keywords. You need to find a way in through the back door.The moral of the story: DO YOUR KEYWORD RESEARCH! Identify relevant, medium-traffic and low competition keywords and phrases to tackle. If you have a low ranking site (PR 0-2) don’t choose keywords with sites on the first page of Google that rank higher than PR3. Be reasonable. As you build your sites authority with the search engines, you will rank higher and higher and more competitive keywords will be available to you.