“PYO strawberries” are words usually found on a hand painted wooden sign at the side of the road in the British countryside during the summer months. It means “Pick your own strawberries” for the non-countryside types! This can be adapted to the SEO world too. This post is aimed at business owners who want to hire SEO’s but aren’t experts themselves or who plain know nothing about SEO.
I am often asked who I recommend to do an SEO job or whether a particular SEO is a good choice. I can recommend some very good experts, but it’s far more useful to be able to pick your own. You will know exactly the kind of person who will fit well within your team, and the sort of background you’d like them to have. It’s not easy however to know for sure that this expert is indeed an expert or a charlatan.
I have no idea about car engines or even how cars work so it’s not going to be easy for me to know if a particular mechanic is going to rip me off or whether s/he is going to do a good honest job. Word of mouth (WOM) is a common way of picking a good one, but a double check never hurts. I would ask a knowledgeable friend of mine what are good questions to ask and what the responses should be. If my tires don’t need changing (because my friend told me so), and the mechanic says I need to change them, then alarm bells go off. The same sort of technique can be applied to choosing an SEO.
Here are 5 useful filter questions to ask:
- Why is PageRank important?
The PageRank scores which we have access to via Google give an idea of how important Google thinks the site is. It is an abstraction and not an exact measure, so success will not be solely based on this score. PageRank uses the links between sites to establish which ones are more important. The more quality links in, the better. PageRank is not something that your SEO should be focusing on to be honest. They be telling you about how measuring conversions is far more important to you.
- Will you optimise my content for LSI?
It isn’t necessary to optimise for LSI (Latent semantic indexing). The the content will be optimised based on relevant keywords for the business and written for the user. LSI is a very old technique which has more than changed since it was first introduced. Only Google knows which techniques they use to analyse text. Paying attention to semantic fields is of course very useful though. Don’t trust an SEO who says that they will optimise you site for LSI. They can’t. And it’s pointless.
- How much time will it take you to get my site to #1 for my target keywords?
There can be no real time frame as it depends on such a large number of factors. Conversions are far more important than how high you are in the rankings. Being at #1 for a term which brings you no revenue is useless. While rankings will be monitored regularly, this information will feed in to the rest of the data gathered about the site to determine how well it is performing.
- How will you increase my inbound links?
The discussion should be about finding sites that are in your niche and which will draw in your target audience as well. Using social media methods to build quality link volume is a good strategy too, and would indicate that this expert maybe has experience in social media marketing as well. You can ask about this also. If they start telling you that they will get reciprocal links, buy links, and submit to lots of directories, the alarm bells should be ringing.
- Will you submit my site to the search engines?
You do not need to submit your site to the search engines. If they start telling you about how they’re go through this process for you and say yes, then back away immediately.
So…
This technique should weed out the bad ones from the others. I do believe that SEO and social media marketing (SMM) compliment each other very well, so if an SEO is proposing using that in conjunction with the SEO efforts, by all means consider going ahead with this. When it is well managed and transparent, it can work wonders for you.
The big name SEO’s out there are an easy pick but there are also a lot of very very good little guys out there who will do an excellent job for you. Picking someone local has its advantages because you can meet up face-to-face as often as you need to, but having someone in a different country is easily managed through skype, email and collaboration environments like Basecamp.
Now you’re satisfied the SEO is an expert:
Once you have picked your expert and you are happy with them, you must also be prepared to trust them. They will ask for certain things to included on the site like additional text for example of even for a site redesign in an extreme case. Ask as many questions as you need to but now that you have hired them, let them do their job. There is a temptation to take the clear and accessible explanations to mean that it’s easy. It’s not, and the expert has experience and specialist knowledge that you don’t necessarily have. Trust them 
So to sum it all up:
If the seo says “I will focus on pagerank, optimise your site for LSI, get you to #1 in a week, and submit your site to a load of directories” – run for the hills screaming.
Happy picking!
Nice article, I’d never heard of LSI before but I’m glad to hear that it’s something that isn’t the next big thing in SEO and I’ve missed out!
You do realise, you’ve just written an article telling crappy SEO guys how to blag themselves more work?
)
Thanks for the wonderful post. I’ve been looking around the web for this type of information and finally found it.
LOL – good point Andy! I guess that they can’t use those things on the client though! Thank you for the kind words.
Never heard of this before, so it’s very interesting. Cheers for a fantastic article.
You are welcome.
Hi CJ,
Good article. I agree with it all… except the point about optimising for LSI.
Technically you’re right – it’s impossible to optimise for LSI on a keyword level. You need to take the entire structure of the site’s language into context, and take that context against all the different content linking in as well.
So it’s by no means a simple undertaking and probably 6 months ago would have been all but impossible. There are now however several top line SEO agencies who are optimising websites based on their semantic profile (as well as other factors of course).
I can’t tell you the exact ins and outs I’m afraid but I’m sure many others are going to be finding similar processes in the near future at which point this kind of information won’t be client privileged only.
- If an agency refuses to reveal data or processes to a client – then you know they’re mucking you around and shouldn’t work with them – even if they’re happy to go performance only (you could always lose sales!).
Cheers
Phill
I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section. I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again. Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed. Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
Optimising for semantics is not optimising for LSI at all. LSI isn’t really isn’t about semantic per se, not in the sense that you think of it in relation to linguistics, which is what you optimise with regarding semantic profiling. Using LSI scores is not useful. I’ve said before that one more recent method is in fact Plsi, so how can you optimise for a method that is already not really in use as it’s form as described by SEO’s. Bob Carpenter will tell you more about this, and yes, he is right in saying that it is not scalable anyway. So really optimising for SEO is like optimising for genetic algorithms that have been mostly swapped for SVM’s now. It’s like optimising like it was done back in the 1990′s. I think “Phill” with 2 L’s is much cooler than with one!
Hi Check Pagerank – thanks for noticing, that was meant to be done already. Also may I add that if you don’t return to blogs because you can’t get a link, you are not really going to the blog because you’re interested in it in the first place. My sidebar is pretty busy so I don’t have all of the widgets other blogs have. Also this blog is open to those interested and not at all focused on traffic or rankings. You will notice that there is very little attention to SEO on SFS. Thank you for the recommendations but the blog does pretty well all on its own with me providing good content alone. That’s the point of a blog right?
Actually I checked and they are dofollow
Phill with two ls is way cooler.
PLSI (probabilistic right?) and other variations on LSI are great, but I agree from an SEO point of view one is no better than the next. The crazy thing is, I don’t know 100% how Google, for example, actually implement their system. I believe that there’s essentially a mashup occuring between lexical and semantic analysis (efficiency vs. accuracy) but the actual key details behind its implementation I dont know.
I suppose optimising for semantics is optimising for the result… All I know is that right now it works, and it takes into account factors off and on page, it seems that Google pays a lot more attention than SEOs give credit for to not just the anchor text of a site linking in, but the content of that whole site.
I did a lot of work on LDA some time ago and discovered I couldn’t come up with a way to use it in SEO. Perhaps I’m just not bright enough but that’s how I came around to a more direct study of the result (a semantic profile) importantly from Google’s point of view and not from an analysis of the website itself.
Off topic, you mention somewhere about Neural Networks and people not having to understand how they work, only what they are. I’d counter that by saying that in order to understand what they are, you need to know how they work.
Hi there I like your post
Hello, I found your blog in a new directory of blogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, Your blog looks good. Have a nice day.
You are a very smart person!
Oh Hi Phil, sorry for the belated reply to your comment. For me “How something works” means knowing absolutely everything about how something works. I have some idea of how a car engine works but I can’t say I know how it works because I don’t know what each part of the engine does and where each bolt should be and what size it is a why for example. As a non-mechanic, I don’t need to know that, but I need to know that the engine needs oil and water and sort of why. See what I mean?
“Phill” with 2 L’s (sorry)