Honestly, this is a change that should have come up a few months ago! The rise of spun and copied content has given rise to millions of new websites, which have one simple concept – of stealing away customers from sites that are serious about their business and put in genuine efforts. With this new algorithm, however, there is bound to be a positive difference in the marketplace, and all content-based websites will rejoice!

But there is a cloud to this silver lining! Article Directories, which were among the best ways to get noticed online – and probably the fastest way to get to the first page of Google – have also been affected negatively, and are no longer coming up on prime locations of SERPs. A key reason for that probably is the fact that people submit the same article to dozens of article submission sites, or even go one step further and just submit spun content on them all. Either way, the new algorithm is meant to sniff out the change and make sure that the sites featuring content of these types is given a push down the search rankings. How this will affect the long term campaign of SEO consultants is yet to be seen, but in general, that’s a good move also!

So we come back to what we have always been saying – Content is King! Without good content, there is absolutely no way by which a long term SEO campaign can be run, and if it costs more than a shabby spun campaign, it is because it is worth it! If you don’t yet have a content team in place, consider outsourcing your work to FountainHead SEO – the amount of experience the team has is absolutely stunning. Ask for a quote today!

Fountainhead SEO is a one-of-a-kind service, which exclusively focuses on building client blogs.

The importance of having a top of the line blog for your business is terribly underrated. If you look at all the different SEO techniques we use to promote our business, ongoing content is the most important one. Take our site – SEO Pencil as an example. For all the keywords we want to focus on – like SEO Backend Service Provider, Content Writing, and so on, there are several search results that come up favoring SEO Pencil, and except for one from the main site, the rest are all from the blog!

It is simple, really. The content on your website will not be changed around every day in order to accommodate the keywords you want to focus on, and building Web 2.0 properties away from your site – even from sites like WordPress, Blogger, and so on – are not equal to having your own content on your own blog. We all spend hundreds of dollars on creating linkwheels, web 2.0 properties, and the like for our website, but how much ever content we post on a third party site, it is not really equivalent to posting on our own blog – for our own visitors to see. It is a proven fact that having a fabulous blog is a sure-shot way to gain a strong audience. And with today’s embedding revolution, you can just put up your blog on your FaceBook page, Twitter page, or any other means you use to promote your business; and that becomes yet another tool for your business!

The best thing about FountainHead SEO is that it is immensely affordable. If you search Google for a similar kind of a service, you will see that these websites’ charges range from $ 499 to $ 3000!!! FountainHead SEO packages start at $ 73, and the most intense package available on the site (24 blog posts per month) is charged @ $ 169 No real competition there, right? It is really a no-brainer to choose a blog maintenance service now. Head over to the site and check out what we have to offer. We welcome any suggestions / comments you may have at sales@fountainheadseo.com

However, in the last year or so, this has changed in a radical way! Companies looking for freelance writers have suddenly become very particular in their choices and want only writers who are willing to work at 50 cents per 100 words or lesser! And they are even particular that they only want writers from India or from Philippines; primarily because they work for less.

But then not all people who put up $ 3 per hour are good with their language skills! While it is unfair to say that everyone working at that price is bad with language, it is a risk the buyer should be willing to take –as these websites are pretty strict about writers (and other freelance professionals) getting paid for the work they have been engaged to do.

Thinking into the reason why this is so, there is a nice finding we had. When we started with writing online, it was a part-time opportunity which would make us a little money on the side. With time that opportunity grew to become bigger, but still was part time. With a lot of freelancers looking for jobs that was the case. There were those who spent their entire working day working online, but they were a minority. That is why it was common to see good writers having only about 20 hours per week or so. But the economy crashed during that time, and many more people opted to turn full time freelance professionals in writing, software programming etc. Even with the economy now on an upturn, these people decided to continue working from home full time, and that is why we see freelance sites full of people having 40 hours or more available per week.

But for buyers, it is a nightmare. Working with freelancers is fine if the assignment is short lived. But for a long term content requirement, trusting a batch of freelancers whose only connection with you is a username on an IM window could prove disastrous. There are a few real professionals who value their work from home and give it their 100%; but those are in the minority today. The majority of ‘writers’ are not serious about the profession – they just want to get things done with and get paid –and that is visible in the fact that they are reluctant to take qualifying tests available on the best freelancing websites.

The best bet would still be to work with a professional team of writers like at SEO Pencil. Not only is there better communication between the parties, but there is an assurance of quality and quantity in the form of a contract. And the good thing is that the pricing will just be as much as that from a group of freelancers – if not less! You can ask for a custom quote from info@seopencil.com for more info.

There is a lot of talk and answer going on about the future of SEO. As backend providers to SEO Consultants, that question is always on the top of our thoughts, and rarely does a week go by when we don’t think about it and plot out alternatives.

A few weeks ago, one of our clients sent us this video from Matt Cutts, who is a Google employee and regularly answers questions on video at Google Webmaster Central. This video pretty much sums up all our fears, and the good thing (suspense : broken) is that yes, SEO will be around – though it will change and we will need to adapt.

Click play and get your own gyaan!

Over 5 million unique searches have happened last month on Cheap SEO, and that is quite stunning! Top search keywords like ‘SEO Tips’ and ‘SEO Company’ came much later. This led us to look deeper into what led so many people to look for cheap SEO, and the results were really amazing. Messages on forums and questions on sites like Yahoo Answers bear testimony to the fact that most businesses are getting stripped off when they approach an SEO Consultant. Going by the questions posed by people on discussions forums, we headed over to a few sites that offered so called ‘path breaking SEO’ to their clients, and imagine the prices they are charging! One guy was charging $ 349 per month for an ordinary linkwheel with spun articles and submission to a few article directories and RSS sites (which are anyway free). Now, some of the best linkwheel packages from reputed sites retail at about $ 150, and that too with a higher quality of articles – written by people and not a spinner software!

Some other SEO guys charge $ 200 just for keyword research, and that too can easily be done for free by using free SEO tools from Google. There was a great article we saw on a top SEO guru’s blog a few weeks ago, where he mentioned that ever since the advent of SEO, a lot of people have made ‘phenomenal’ money. That is true! A small business owner wanting to get presence on a search engine will need to cough out up to $ 500 a month, which straight away puts his site budget in the red!

One SEO consultant who charged these prices specifically mentioned on his site that the reason his services ‘appear’ more expensive than those offered by other people is because he uses staff from within the USA, and that patriotic customers should not worry about paying that bloated tariff. Seriously Funny, this guy! In today’s flat world, these things are obsolete! Can a business refuse to sell to a customer from a different country and expect to survive in today’s competition? SEO is best done when outsourced. Not only does that reduce the costs involved, but it also frees up very valuable time at the consultant’s end, which can be used to devise newer strategies which will enhance the client’s position on SERPs. It’ll also free up time for sales and customer service, and that will result in more clients!

We’ll come up with a real case study in a few days time, and you should look at that for an illustration.

Customers who look for Cheap SEO more often than not are people who don’t value their business. Google is a genius, and it’s algorithm is more intelligent than we think. Thousands of businesses have suffered the repercussions of a shabby SEO job by means of a Google Slap, and they are still struggling to come up on the search rankings. Going in for a guy who puts up a board saying ‘SEO’ just on the basis of his prices is pure suicide! If the only agenda of a business is to reduce prices, it would do well to do SEO by itself, using some of the free tools available online, and live with whatever results come up; rather than risk whatever they have created till now.

SEO Pencil can significantly reduce your final cost, and some of that saving can be passed on to your clients. If costing is losing you customers, ask us for a quote. We might be able to help.

After we wrote that post, there have been a lot of comments that came our way, and one of them is the root for this article. There was an SEO Consultant who mentioned that as a consultant’s business grows, it probably makes sense to shift onto a model where he works with employees and not outsource his business. While there is merit in the thought, when it is converted into language we all understand – of economics – it really does not add up.

Consider this – even if you are in a low-wage country like India or China, starting an office will cost you money – buying computers, getting the infrastructure ready, training your staff, working out the overheads, and so on. Even if you consider that as a one-time investment, till you have a lot of business flowing through the team you have put in place, the costs will remain high. It is all a volume game as you know. If you have a capacity of 100 articles per day and if you only have 50 article orders coming in each day, your cost is double – really basic common sense, right?

While most people only look at the convenience of outsourcing an entire business process to a company like SEO Pencil, what they usually overlook is the intangible benefit of saving huge $$$ on costs, as irrespective of volume, you pay the company a flat fee. A classic example here would be that of a hotel ordering food raw materials and semi-processed stuff from a vendor on a rate contract. While it would seem a better idea to have their own farms and processing units, hardly any hotel does that! They are not farmers or processing professionals – they are hoteliers and that is what they should focus on. Similarly, you are good at sales, and starting a team to handle your SEO work will only take time away from what you do best – sales! A hotel gets into a rate contract precisely because they make more money when the volumes are high.

When you contract with a company like SEO Pencil, you know what you will be paying us at the end of each assignment. So your costs are entirely fixed! Add to that a marketing cost of say 20%, and the rest of the invoice price is your profit. Makes life really simple!

So what is the answer to the perennial question of whether you should build and train your own team or outsource it all and reap the benefits? Actually, we won’t know what works for you, but one nice case study would be a consultant we work with, who has a small team of people working to support the work we do for him. Since a lot of customers prefer to speak to a live person before ordering, and since that cannot be outsourced to us too, he has a team in place who handle client orders, support requests, and act as a liaison with our project manager here. If there is an urgent request a client makes, his team can finish making the changes right away without waiting for us to wake up the next morning and deliver!

That seems like the best of both worlds, right? You can ask us for a quote to see how much you can reduce on your monthly operations billing, and then decide whether the change is a positive move.

Actually, we should probably say LinkWheel 3.0 or 4.0! There have been so many changes in the way linkwheels have been built over the years, and no two SEO consultants are in agreement about the perfect linkwheel even today!

But the general consensus is that creating blogs on web 2.0 properties having a high pagerank is generally beneficial to the client money site, and linking them in a particular order will enhance the authority stemming from these links.

We have several large consultants that we create linkwheels for, and while some of them ask us to close the wheel – 1-2-3-4-5-1, some others specifically ask us not to close them. Some others send instructions asking us just to create the properties and not bother about linking at all, but link to a third party authority site.

But over the last few months, there has been a change in the kind of orders coming in, and that is what we mean by LinkWheels 2.0. Clients are wizening up to the idea of using web 2.0 properties in various ways, and as an SEO consultant, you should be a few steps ahead of your customers! One of the most common requests we’ve been receiving is of not linking the properties at all. Instead, there are links being sent out to authority sites like www.wikipedia.org and www.about.com, or some discussions page like www.answers.yahoo.com. This gets the page to be indexed real fast, and in turn, allows the links going out to the money site also to be added as backlinks on Google.

Then there are clients who ask us to use high-performance web 2.0 properties like Squidoo and Hub pages as a key node on their linkwheels. We’ll talk more about Squidoos in the next post, but for now, using these unique lenses as a part of the linkwheel instantly takes the product to the next level. Though it takes a certain level of knowledge to create a Squidoo Lens unlike with ordinary web 2.0 properties, the effort is certainly worth it. Similarly with Hub Pages, Yola, and other such sites that offer us various kinds of customizations on the properties.

Some other clients just want us to use certain properties which they can make use of in the future. Probably a WordPress blog that can be maintained for the long term. A few clients also want us to make their social pages like FaceBook as a part of their linkwheel, and that makes sense too. In one shot, there is juice generated for the money site as well as for the social page, which in turn again generates links for the main site. This form of links is gaining huge popularity, and we’ll come to that in one of the next posts on this blog.

There is news that search engines are not counting linkwheels as well as they used to in the past, and there is a semblance of truth in that. Google and other search engines have altered their algorithm slightly, and just building a traditional closed linkwheel is not going to generate the amount of authority it used to in the past. But then there are various other ways in which we can use the internet of today to generate leads and sales for our customers. SEO marketing is moving towards integrating articles, press releases, and video sharing sites also into a linkwheel. Are you there yet?

To find out more about different styles of linkwheels and other web 2.0 properties you can offer to your customers, send in a mail at info@seopencil.com. We’ll be more than happy to help.

As one of the internet’s largest backend content writing teams, we firmly believe that it is the responsibility of the SEO Consultant to educate the client on choosing the right keywords and in selecting from various kinds of content. For instance

- SEO Articles

- Product Reviews

- Product Descriptions

- Article Submissions

- Press Releases

- Website Content, and

- High end submissions for Knol, Wikipedia, and other authority sites

We receive several orders where even SEO Consultants are not clear about the parameters recommended for each of these types of content, and that is real sad! Each day Google is becoming more and more intelligent, and it can sniff out whether a particular set of content is suited for where the post is being done or not. For instance, articles on a linkwheel are solely SEO articles and just need to target search engines. It is indeed rare that a visitor stumbles across the properties of a linkwheel and buys because of the links given there. While that may happen once in a while, it is an absolute rarity. However, an article submitted to directories like Ezine Articles is meant to lend authority to the money site, and it is quite often that people click on a link at the end of the page and go on to buy. So the purposes of each of these articles are entirely different.

A good SEO Consultant would not be working uni-dimensionally with a client. He will work on a whole range of tasks – including building Web 2.0 Properties, building linkwheels, maintaining client blogs, submitting press releases, writing articles for directories, maintaining high-end properties like Squidoo and Hub, and much more. The parameters for each of these articles are different. Make sure your team understands them! A simple difference would be that a normal linkwheel article can be of less than 300 words, and it’ll do fine. For a Squidoo, however, just posting one article would be wasting the potential that property can offer to your clients. What would make sense is a large article broken up into 3 or 4 parts. That’ll give a client more flexibility and allow him to use that one property as a node for multiple promotional activities. Article submissions are of 400-500 words as are PRs. For an authority page like Knol, the article should go on to beyond 1000 words, and all of it well written.

Not only will you helping a client get more webspace, but you will also be maximizing your invoice value as each of the tasks is billable. Does your current content team have the capability to work on these complex client orders? Else, choose a team which you can just plug into – like at SEO Pencil. Dedicated project managers at our end mean you can just focus on sales and trust us to deliver the right kind of content for each assignment.

Search Engine Optimization is an innovation which happened out of necessity. Once search engines started sending in traffic which was much more profitable for customers, it was necessary that the websites being created got ranked according to the services they offered, and people who had a fair idea about the workings of the internet stepped up to the plate and said ‘Let me at it’! Those were the first SEO Consultants, and some of them are still around – and they are really really very big!

Each time there was a change in the internet – like the advent of Web 2.0 Properties, Viral Advertising, Wiki Sites, Sponsored Posts and so on, there was a change in the way SEO was done, and some people got around to naming them as White Hat and Black Hat. If you are an SEO Consultant, you would also know that there is no hard and fast defining line between the two. Rather, most of the SEO activity we do today falls into the grey area between the two, and that area keeps shifting each time Google and the other search engines change their algorithm – which is quite often!

But generally speaking, activities which are one time – like the building of linkwheels with the sole purpose of getting the money site indexed and ranked quickly, sending in comments on automated mode without bothering whether the blogs fall into the same category or not, using spun content, and other such tasks fall under the classification of Black Hat techniques. However, when the same Web 2.0 properties are built with an intention of being maintained on a regular basis – like say a post each week or each month, with topics changing according to the changes on the client website, the SEO process could become White Hat. There are several SEO guys who say that spun content could be equally effective in getting indexed, but the truth is that clients who want spun content are not serious about their business. They are ready to piggyback on content which someone else’s business has created, and that is really unethical.

Anyway, the general shift – even among customers – is that so-called White Hat SEO Techniques yield better results in the long term. An SEO Consultant we work for has two distinct websites – one for all the bulk work of Black Hat, and one exclusively for White Hat SEO work, such as

- Client Blog Maintenance

- Social Media Profile Creation and Updation

- Social Bookmarking in related niches

- Local Directory Submissions

- Article Submissions

- Press Releases, and other such techniques.

These could take more time, and when counted per item, could even work out to be more expensive than the common automated commenting work and building a few haphazard web 2.0 properties. However, when clients are willing to pay that extra bit in order to get ranked for the long term, why not offer it?

Make a value proposition to your clients – tell them that instead of common linkwheels, you will make them a deal in which these blogs are updated a fixed number of times each month. Not only will that result in a higher authority per link from each of these websites, but you will also have better business on your books – as you can forecast in advance as to how much work you have for the coming weeks. Tell your customers that you can manage their brand across the internet – on all web 2.0 properties, social media websites, and social bookmarking sites. If you’d like, you can even manage client profiles on Social Networking sites!

Start making the transition towards services which yield results for a longer period of time. Your clients will be with you for all that while, and it is a win-win situation for both parties! To know about how SEO Pencil can help you make this transition, add us on Skype as ‘seopencil’ or send us a mail at info@seopencil.com.

Everything related to computers has one common keyword – Scalability. When a solution is implemented for a company, the first question asked is about how scalable that particular solution is, and that is a valid question too. Else, as a company grows, they will constantly need to buy new solutions, and that won’t make sense!

The same is true for any kind of a profession related to the internet. The internet itself is a completely scalable entity. Else, we would not have got where we are today! Each day there is an addition of capacity somewhere in the world – in the form of servers, disk space, bandwidth, speed, users, websites, services, and many more! All of this capacity has one goal – to enhance the experience a user goes through while using the internet.

As SEO Consultants, you are in a high chair to look over this capacity expansion. As each new website goes online, you know exactly where it will feature on the search engines, and you will know whether it will survive or go bust in a few months. Also, if you’ve been making a living online for a few years, you will know what trends of today will continue to exist a few years down the line and what trends will get obsolete.

Similarly, client expectations also continue to change. As a client grows, he will suddenly need you to don new hats and offer new services, failing which he will have to look for some other provider; and that provider will also take away your basic set of services! Think about it – as a customer, you will naturally want to work with one SEO team handling the entire gamut of services you want for your sites. That is much more convenient and time saving than working with a dozen different people. But since you already have a relationship with your client, he will give you a chance to deliver the new services he wants you to. Only when you cannot will he look for an alternate. If you have been in SEO for a period of time, you would have faced this situation several times already.

The question that comes up in a situation like that is about the scalability of your team. Do you have the capability to increase your team size and the range of your offerings within a very short period of time? If you feel the answer is yes, ask yourself these questions –

- Do you have the resources to recruit and train new people in your technologies?

- Do you have the necessary infrastructure to support the new people you will be bringing on board?

- Do you have dedicated project managers who can handle the different services you offer a client without mixing it all up?

- Do you have the necessary capital to infuse into this expansion? Even if you do, is that capital well spent in expanding the team than marketing your services?

- Even if you expand today, will you able to do that once more when a new client comes on board?

If the answer to even one of these questions is ‘No’, it is time for you to look beyond your boundaries.

Outsourcing is the perfect answer to scalability. Whether it is an IT project or building a highway, the primary reason people like to outsource is because they don’t need to worry about increasing and reducing the size of the team. A dedicated team somewhere in India will cost you a third (or a fourth) of what you would spend on a team in your country, and it is a fact that the service standards are quite excellent.

A team like at SEO Pencil will not only save you costs, but will also make sure that your time is suddenly freed up – no more people management for you! Just handle clients and make money! Sensible, right?