We received a posting from a newcomer who writes “I got a proposal in an email that said an SEO company can guarantee me top placement for $149 per month. Is this a scam?”

Normally one of us would just reply to the thread but it’s such a good topic, I thought it should have a top spot.

In short – I am not able to say whether or not it’s a scam. I will say however that you really need to be careful with proposals like this. First of all, I don’t know how anyone can guarantee top placement on any search engine – unless they own it. And I don’t think the people offering this service own any big search engines. Which brings up a good point… What search engines can they guarantee placement on and for what keywords?

I suggest, that when dealing with any SEO professional – or wannbe – offering such a guarantee, you ask the following questions:

• What search engines will I attain top 10 listings in?
• What keywords will I get top listing for?
• Can I see your references?

If they don’t have good answers - forget it. And if they do have good answers, get it in writing.

I just got an email from a visitor who has a Web site and is new to the area of SEO. He says, “How much should I pay for search engine optimization services?”

Here’s my thought… I would only pay what it’s worth to you. In other words calculate what you stand to gain and compare that to what the investment in SEO. Then decide if it’s worth it.

Here’s one way to do it. If you feel confident that an SEO professional can get you in the top rankings of Google, MSN or Yahoo, for your main keyword, at a reasonable cost – it is likely worth it. Just do a little math.

You can reasonably figure that if a keyword is searched on Google 5,000 times per month and you get a #3 placement, you will likely get about 2,000 visits per month. This is, of course assuming that 40% of the people that are searching decide to check out your site, which is about the low end for a #3 ranking (40% to 55% seems about right depending on the topic and target market).

Let’s say you get 2,000 visits for one month, from an optimization that cost you $1,000. That would work out to 50 cents per visitor. That might be expensive or it could be a bargain – depending on your profit margin and conversion rate.

In other words, calculate your potential return on investment and go from there.

There are many cloaking techniques, including IP based, User Agent based, and doorway pages. IP based cloaking detects the IP of a visitor, and if it’s a search engine spider, redirects it to an optimized, but not user-friendly page. User Agent based cloaking accomplishes the same thing, except that it differentiates between visitors according to the software they use to reach the site, since robots use their specific settings. Doorway pages are somewhat different. They are basically keyword-stuffed for search engines, but when a visitor reaches the page, it either redirects them immediately to another page, or requires them to click a link to “enter the site.” Keep away from cloaking, unless you want to be banned after a week of getting to the top.

Declare the character encoding you use in the META "Content-Type" tag of every page. However, from then on you’ll have to follow the character set you’ve chosen. Failing to do so may damage your ranking since the page will be considered technically flawed.

If you’re using cascading style sheets (CSS) or JavaScript, move them from your actual page to an external file, and embed them through a SRC link. Search engine spiders are rumored to place a slight penalty when the textual amount of scripts is bigger than the amount of actual “crawlable” content.

Don’t use the META Refresh tag to redirect visitors. Most search engines will consider it spam, especially if it redirects right away. You could use ASP, PHP, or another such technology for this purpose, or change the ".htaccess" file to use the “301” redirect, meaning that the site moved permanently. An example of this would be: Redirect 301 /old-page.htm http://www.somesite.com/new-page.htm

So, do the seo tips on this site really work? Google must think so. After only 7 days of being online, seopartner.com is ranked #2 on Google! That’s #2 out of 2,930,000 competing web pages for the search term seo partner. And with an average of 2,000 people per week searching for an seo partner - on Google alone - you will find yourself corresponding with some of the greatest minds in search engine optimization every day here.

But of course, Google is just one major search engine in a world of many. Let’s see how seopartner.com does on some of the other top search
engines.

As you can see, the tips that we offer - we use. And those tips work! Please feel free to start benefiting from them today. They are free to use and enjoy.

Please Note: seopartner.com was launched on Saturday October 1, 2005 @ 11:25 PM EST. The results posted above were taken on Saturday October 8, 2005 @ 12:24 PM. That’s 6 days and 11 hours from brand new to #1 on MSN, #2 on Google and more - for our number one keyword!

We have just added 5 more great resources for you to enjoy!

One of our very successful SEO friends asked me to share this…

Where a keyword appears in the text can be as important as how often you use it.

Try to place over 50% of your keyword usage in the first couple paragraphs of the body text without stuffing (55% to 75% is typically ideal). This can be tricky, but well worth the effort.

If, for example, you used "New Hampshire real estate" as a keyword phrase seven times throughout the page, try to break it down like this:

4 mentions in the first two paragraphs

2 mentions in the next paragraph or two

1 mention in a paragraph toward the bottom of the page

Natural Text Flow

Please keep in mind that it’s becoming more and more important to try to keep your text in a natural language sort of flow.

Many search engines are on the look out for blocky sentences and phrases that are not combined in a natural order.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know which keywords are the most popular before you choose them? You can. This is a really cool tool. Read the instructions below andclick on the link provided.

Overture’s keyword selection tool is the ultimate spy tool. Just enter any term that you wish to research. You will be shown how many searches were done for that and similar terms for the last month. Similar terms are typically those that include your actual search term as a portion.

Overture’s tool was created for people trying to determine the popularity of a keyword for the purpose of bidding on that word.

Another Fantastic Keyword Research Option

For a reasonable fee, you can use a fantastic keyword-tracking tool called Word Tracker.

Word Tracker will not only tell you how popular your chosen keyword is, but it reveals your competition to you as well.

They offer a free trial, which I recommend trying if you are interested in saving a lot of time and research effort.