However, this seems beyond the reach of many people, old and young, so a whole industry has built up to help people control their weight. Special food, special treatments, detox this, crash diet that. It’s mostly a load of bullshit and my less cakes plus moderate exercise formula is all you really need.

So what of SEO? Well in much the same way as fatties all over the world are being ripped off so companies are similarly being relieved of cash under false pretences. There are a dazzling array of get ranked quick schemes being offered by a dazzling array of snake oil salesmen but if you fall for one you only have your self to blame, just like people who eat too many pies paying for magic fat shedding remedies.

Wise up, stop looking for short cuts and get your metaphorical trainers on.

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Large companies with an extensive web presence, newspaper companies for example, have realised the value not of adverts, banners etc, but of links. The latest offering was for 40 links added to articles in their news pages over a 12 month period for £3000.

Apart from being unethical, what these companies are doing is ensuring only companies with deep pockets can buy the links and benefit from them, assuming they work.

I mentioned in a previous post that we’d nearly succumbed to the charms of a corporate link pimp but thankfully we saw the light before it was too late. Mind you, this ethical stance is expensive, there’s good profit to make re-selling this stuff and we’re missing out! So Matt Cutts, come on fella, nail these bloody people!

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On the face of it you might think, fair enough, people need a fixed price. Well, you’d be wrong and here’s why.

To give a fixed price you need, and I mean NEED, a fixed scope of work. If you don’t get a fixed scope but give a fixed price you are on a road to nowhere. Businesses giving fixed prices against variable scopes go bust very quickly. You need to know exactly what’s needed and exactly what you are going to deliver. Where websites are concerned this is often just not possible as clients rarely know exactly what they want, things change as the project progresses and people start to ‘get it’.

Fixed prices on variable scope projects result in the agency rates being degraded to the point where they are no longer making a profit. You start out at £50 an hour, for example, for 10 hours = £500. The scope creeps, the fee doesn’t and suddenly you’ve done 20 hours of work for £500 = £25/hr. With a break even to run your business profitably of £40/hr you are now losing money and tensions start to run high, both you an the client start to get tetchy and things spiral out of control.

That’s not to say some parts of a project can’t be fixed price whilst other parts are left variable. For example, if a client doesn’t know exactly how many pages a website is going to have it’s impossible to give a fixed scope of work. In this case the design and build would be fixed but the content work would be variable. It’s just common sense.

The only way to give a fixed price against a variable scope is to price the project way over the top to cover the worst case scenario, this doesn’t give clients good value for money in my opinion.

This problem gets even more acute where SEO is concerned. Here’s another quote from a client, a different client. “How much to get our site onto page 1?”. Well, how do you answer that. You start by saying you can’t guarantee to get a site onto page 1, then continue with an outline of the work required to make a site the best it can be. SEO never stops because making a site the best it can be and better than its competitors is a never ending task. The best approach is to adopt the tack taken by PR companies and charge a set monthly rate in return for time spent improving the site.

The alternative is to do the work yourself, it’s that simple. The work needs doing and someone is going to have to do it.

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There are also a shed load of people who have created crap websites in the hope of generating an income from Google Adsense or from affiliate marketing. It’s all about creating crap nobody needs to generate income by doing nothing.

Google have started banning affiliate marketers from their AdWords programs and I wonder if this is the beginning of Google realising their index is in danger of disappearing up its own arse in a puff of blue smoke. Just in case Google needs a hand with this here’s my list of things Google can do right now to clean up their index….

1. Discount all links from forums
   They are 99% self promotion and spam. Sure you will kill some links that merit being counted but for the most part you won’t. Bin ‘em.
2. Discount all links from blogs comments
   Again, 99% of blog comment links are self promotion. Most people comment in blogs to generate links. There are some great blog comments out there but it’s for the greater good to simply bin them all.
3. Discount links from Article Sites
   I’ve used article marketing to good effect but the links are not based on merit so although it will hurt me I’m happy to do what’s right for the greater good. In the bin with them.
4. Discount social book marking
   This is a classic example of yet another great idea being abused out of all usefulness. Sorry but in the bin they must go.
5. Discount link farms
   If we, the great unwashed, can find these sites surely you can, so do so and bin them.

So what does that leave? Well heaven forfend we’ll have to revert back to creating something that’s so useful other site owners will want to link to it!

But seriously……. none of the above will happen even though it’s so out of hand that Google’s index is becoming increasingly irrelevant. People are going to become more reliant on old fashioned networking and referrals when looking for products and services, albeit facilitated by 21st century tools (Twitter, Facebook etc). Who knows, maybe Google with it’s new smart phone will move more and more into other areas too as it’s flagship product becomes mired in spam.

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Is this a blast of Caffiene?

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This wasn’t written in 1973, it was written this year, this month!

This is precisely the sort of crap the SEO industry doesn’t need, perpetuating the myth that SEO is a black art and its practitioners are modern day alchemists.

SEO isn’t a black art and just as alchemists couldn’t make gold from mixing other ingredients so an SEO consultant can’t make a rubbish website storm into the Google top ten.

There’s no black art to SEO, just hard work, and to demonstrate this we are offering FREE SEO Advice via a one to one session to anyone who wants it. No hard sell, just a plain English 30 minute evaluation of where you are and where you need to get to.

We’re on a mission to help business owners understand SEO!

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So far as SEO is concerned I see 2009 as a year for consolidation. As a response to the SEO information overload of 2008 I think 2009 will see website owners get back to the basics of creating great content and securing real links based on merit.

Of course social media will be even bigger this year and my feeling is people will recognise that social media is about more than just creating thousands of links to pointless web pages. 2009 will be the year of conversations and adding value.

At Red Evo we are investing some brain time on some of the big issues such as how to engage with cash strapped consumers and cost conscious clients. To us the challenge is relished not feared and on balance I am personally excited about what’s going to be a very challenging year for most businesses.

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This is an interesting proposition and I think there are plenty of people who would love some of the results in the serps to be justified by the boffins at the plex…

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If the company offering this service is a real company they will have overheads. Even with low overheads their day rate will be in the hundreds, assuming they understand day rates. Even being generous their overheads must be around £25 per hour, adding 20% profit brings this to £30/hour. So for £199 you would get just over six and a half hours.

This is fine, if all you want is some keyword research, or some general tidying up then six or seven hours is fine. If however you need strategic advice, competitor analysis, keyword research, link building, social media marketing, in short a professional SEO approach, it’s not going to cut it.

I’ve looked long and hard at making our SEO services as affordable as possible, falling short of outsourcing it to the Indian sub continent, and I can’t see how these guys can add any real value based on these budgets.

I look forward to being proved wrong

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One thing that’s always existed is the cheap website. Built by people who don’t know what they are doing, for people who don’t know what they need. Billions must have been wasted on ill conceived sites, doomed to failure before their first title element had been written, or not as is often the case.

There seems to be an endless stream of people with big ideas for websites that are going to make them a million. The common denominator is they only want to spend a few hundred pounds building it. Equally, there is an endless stream of trick developers who are only too happy to take their money, no doubt with a promise of online success.

As the online world becomes ever more noisy the need to spend money to succeed online will increase. Have a go heroes will increasingly fail, fake developers will fall by the wayside and the snake oil salesmen will pack their bags and look for easy money elsewhere.

How do I know this? I don’t, it’s just a feeling

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