Boiled down to one sentence: your web site should not be a massive image served from a URL with fifteen thousand query parameters.
The best SEO tip is to have a site that is useful for the keywords you're targetting. My website is a boring (design-wise) collection of text, but when people are searching for something on there, it usually comes up pretty high in the results. That's because I'm not trying to make my site "relevant" to people that aren't interested in it.
That's actually fairly useful: it distills everything down into a few basic rules, which is basically about how things should be with this stuff. It's not exactly nuclear physics.
The comments on his site are funny. "Put me out of business". If all it takes is a two page PDF to "give away all the secrets", then you were inflating the value of what you sold in the first place.
I went to a SEO conference a few years back when I was working for the man.
It cost a few thousand dollars for me to attend the morning session, where they told us basically those points on the sheet. Then they answered 1000 questions about people such as 'I heard hyphens are better than underscores in URLs'.
Clearly SEO folks are good at inflating the value they provide.
most people can grasp the general seo concepts fairly quickly, a quick guide like this and an afternoon of work could yield some strong long term results for your site.
After reading some of the responses its funny, I hear "seo's inflating their vaule" and "Whats canonical issues" ...
1. Some SEO's do inflate their value, honestly most hackers here don't need one; our best clients (mutually beneficial) are the ones who have a site, but its old, out dated and not producing like it should. A lot of people don't have the time to monitor their back links, check their title and alt tags and hunt for more links... If you asked anyone I've ever worked SEO for; they would say I've gave them a great ROI
2. Canonical Issues: AKA Keyword Cannibalization, when you have more than one page focused on one keyword. They compete against each other in google, mostly used in reference to the title tag as most CMS's really mess those up.
I don't doubt that there is value in some of this stuff, but a problem that seems to be quite frequent is this: the more honest people out there can easily teach most of their clients most of what they need to know in a day or two, so unless you can land clients who really just don't want to get their hands dirty, it's tough to get a recurring revenue stream going.
Anecdote: at the last place I worked, we had a guy come in for an interview. Bright guy, and came across as being straightforward, but he was really insistent about having an 'ongoing' type of deal, whereas the boss already had read a lot of what the guy knew, and so decided against it. I think the boss might have sprung for a day or two of consulting, but certainly wasn't going to go for anything more than a one-off.
tell me your keywords,
I give price for top 5, bottom 5 in G,Y,MSN
add all the top 5, bottom 5, together (thats total amount)
half down, then half when rankings are achieved for 3 weeks
deliverables
monthly report, (links, on site optimization, off site optimization)
after getting positon the amount due would be the second half of total price, then if you wanted there would be a maintenance package of $x or $X /mo to keep gaining links and thus stay on top.
*if your rankings can't be achieved you get your 1/2 down back.
- in this model also includes transparency of links and methods also education of client, no hold barred Q&A anytime phone call etc...
Sounds like you are one of the 'SEO' folks that most people frown upon.
a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit.
b) not providing a service that is going to work in the long term - doing black hattery to bomb them into the top 5 for a few weeks is going to get them dropped in rankings in the long term.
c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam.
"a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit."
What's wrong with that? Ranking for a very generic keyword such as "widget" would definitely require much more time, effort, and money than ranking for "easy blue widget".
"c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam."
Where did you come to the conclusion that off-site optimization is spam? Link exchanges, directory submissions, etc, are not "spam".
It is called variable pricing - and the service you provide shouldn't change based on what keywords are relevant. It is not like BMW vs Kia whatsoever.
I don't claim to know all about SEO, but the basics are incredibly simple. I do know there is an abundance of people offering services like this, and they like to spread a lot of FUDD.
That said, I'd have a rough time understanding why anyone would do SEO consulting full-time. Is there that much money in it? It seems like it would be a good side-project but if you were really good at it, it seems to me that your time would be better served running e-commerce sites, blogs, whatever, driving traffic to it, and generating more slightly more passive income.
I would assume that most people who do SEO also do all the other aspects related to site design and optimization. SEO would just be one aspect of one's time. Just guessing though.
The best SEO tip is to have a site that is useful for the keywords you're targetting. My website is a boring (design-wise) collection of text, but when people are searching for something on there, it usually comes up pretty high in the results. That's because I'm not trying to make my site "relevant" to people that aren't interested in it.