A great quote from LED Digest this morning:

for some markets SEO is irrelevant because the website is at its achievable maximum, and (perhaps more commonly) using top-class SEO on many a website is putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, and pigs are famous for not flying.

I just did a search on Google for ’seo training certification’ and this is one of the top 10 results.

http://www.seotraining.org/

I’m wrapping up my first large SEO project this week. The client contacted me yesterday and wants me to present to them ways that I can continue improving visibility for their site…

I’m happy about that - the company I’m working with is small but growing and is in an interesting but competitive niche industry. We’ve had a number of good conversations about the work and the site and it was all quite productive - they are now much more knowledgeable about where they stand in relation to their competitors and tactics to improve that standing, and I have my SEO processes and reports debugged to the point where the next time I perform this service, my workload will be cut way down.

So… over the weekend I thought about how I could continue with them. They have a medium-sized small business site, and we worked on 8 landing pages for the first three months as a package deal, not monthly fees.

Now my suggestion to them will be to continue in that vein with the next set of 10 pages or so, and rather than moving to a monthly fee-based service I think I’m going to revise my packages and present one of them as the best option (the more cost-effective option since I’m really starting from scratch with the next batch of pages). If we get to the point where all landing pages are optimized, then it will switch into monthly fees.

I did some reading today online, visiting about 20 SEO firms and a few blogs and found a big range in pricing, for the few that even mentioned it. $2000-$6000 per month for some, $75 per hour for others…

I really undercharged when I started working with them (it was my first large SEO project) but I’ve revised my single package into three, based on the number of hours I spent the first time and the fact that this time will be a lot faster. I don’t really know how to price my services based on the value I provide for the client, but that’s something that I noted frequently when I was researching how to reset my prices.

I spent a lot of time in the beginning getting the processes, data gathering methods and reporting formats nailed down, and don’t have to do any of that again. It was tricky at first to create a cohesive set of documents but now I think it’s come together quite well, and the client’s been very pleased with the depth of reporting.

I think my pricing structure is fair, reflects my level of experience accurately and will cover most of my clients’ needs, except for the smallest sites. I’m really interested in targeting small to medium-sized sites with moderately competitive keywords because it’s a bit more challenging.

I just read this very long and very thoughtfully written post by Danny Sullivan regarding Jason Calcanis’ recent rant against the SEO industry (or rather 90% of it). This is a worthwhile read.

I spent a little time today researching how to optimize PDF’s for the search engines. I’ll summarize what I found - but note that this isn’t a complete list, there are a number of other techniques out there.

1) All three major search engines can crawl PDF text - just make sure the file is created in a text-based application like Acrobat or Word. PDF’s created from Photoshop files are not text-based.

2) Create links within the PDF’s content just as you would for a regular web page.

3) Most search engines (including Google) will pick up and use a title element as the title for their results pages, so this is important! To enter a title phrase, click File > Document Properties.

4) If you don’t include a title, Google will instead pull up the first chunk of text it finds in the document itself and use that as the title for the document it its results pages. This can have unwelcome consequences, as you might imagine, so take a moment and put in a real title phrase.

5) Some search engines will pick up the description element (Yahoo will, but Google won’t from what I read today) so it probably doesn’t hurt to enter something here.

6) When finished editing existing PDF’s, click Save As… to save over the existing file and clean up any unused objects.

A few articles about optimizing PDF’s for the web:

How to Optimize PDF Files for Web Sites by Andy King.

Make Your PDF’s Work Well with Google by Duff Johnson.

SEO Your PDF’s by Kevin Kantola.