Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello,

I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.

I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?

Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.

But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.

Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.

Would love to hear your experiences either way.

Thanks.

Hello,

I'm starting a web design company doing standard web design, E-commerce web design, and E-commerce SEO. I've been doing the nuts and bolts of an E-commerce business with four online stores, one very successful, for nine years. Since that's my main experience, I'm sticking with helping others with the nuts and bolts of their E-commmerce SEO. I also do the web design, which I've been doing since 2001.

What should I charge per hour for my web design and E-commerce SEO services? I live in Boise, Idaho. I'm thinking $100 an hour for everything, is that too much for web design or too little for SEO? The SEO would be billed exact but my web design estimates are more generous.

Looking for honest opinions. I don't want to over or under charge.

Thanks

Bob

Julie and EGOL,

Some excellent information, and useful for protecting my own stuff as I grow! My client's wife happens to be an attorney and she said exactly what both of you said.

Thanks.

I spoke to the owner. There's only 4 in question and one nofollow now

On the 4, I looked and they're not generating traffic. I'm unclear what you mean by relevant in this case. They are generally related to our niche as, for example, an informational clothing site (backlink provider) is related to a store that sells socks (our site)

We have 81 linking root domains and one nice piece of content if that helps.

What do you recommend for these 4? I'm guessing swapping for an editorial link is your recommendation, but due to not exact niche relevancy, I'm wondering if you'll suggest removal.

Thanks for the awesome advice, btw

Hello,

We have an Ecommerce store and we need our category buttons to be redone and to shine. Unfortunately, I've tried all my places and none are 10X, though none of them cost very much (like Fiverr, Freelancer)

What I would like is some advice on where to go for inexpensive but still very good quality graphics. I'm a good designer, and so far, I can do better graphics than the designers I've found, I just don't have the time as a busy SEO.

Please let me know If you have any gems you are willing to share. I'm searching the community colleges as we speak.

Thanks.

Hello,

We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console.

Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup?

We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago.

Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone?

Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin.

Thanks.

Hello,

I think there is a lot of room for improvement to my SEO packages (analysis) page on my website. Visit it by clicking here.

I've always done SEO for our own business, so I'm new to this. Any help is appreciated.

btw: I'm going to redo the chart on the page. I don't think profit and sales would ever compare like that. Thanks.

Hello,

For both ecommerce and sites that sell services, I've seen a lot of people recommending a blog for SEO.

Should this blog be inside or separate from the main website for the most results?

I can see how adding one to a site would create more unique content and an opportunity for link bait, but perhaps there is a reason to have a blog separate from the main site

Thank you.

Hello,

Where do you guys go to get inspiring new ideas for web design layouts.

I'm making a portfolio and need one more design.

I'm thinking 4 is enough sample sites. So far I have 3.

Thanks!

Hello,

I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice.

DMOZ and Best of the Web fall into that category.

And so do some niche directories.

How do you determine whether to go with a niche directory or not?

Also, what's the ratio of how many niche directory links you'd want compared to other types of links (being very safe) 3:1? 4:1? 5:1? Does it matter what your other links are?

Thanks.

Hello,

Please critique the SEO resume found here.

I'm looking for a job working 30 hours a week making $30/hour in Idaho.

Looking for advice on creating the best resume possible. It's all honest.

Thanks.

I'm going to repost this question searching for companies in the USA or Canada

Yes I've watched that great mozinar many times.

Hello,

I notice that it is common practice to put the page's keywords directly into an alt tag.

I don't see how this helps the user and how it helps the user using screen readers and such.

Do you think future G updates will slightly penalize pages with alt tags that are just the page's keywords and not a helpful phrase? What do you recommend to put in alt tags in light of future G updates?

Hi,

I'm targeting Boise, Idaho and building an SEO consulting website.

Right now I only offer 3 things because that's what I have experience in:

1. On-site SEO

2. Content Audit

3. Start a company from scratch.

Ecommerce, Service, or Informational

I know #3 involves all SEO, so it will be challenging, but 1-3 is what I've been doing for 10 years.

What feedback do you have as far as 1-3 being my 3 offers, and is $200/hour fair? I work off quotes by estimating my time at $200/hour.

Thanks.

Thanks EGOL, that now makes sense.

So all the customer service phone calls and what the client always has to explain to the customer

Closing this question soon.

Hello,

I'm helping my client write a long, comprehensive, best-of-the-web piece of content.

It's a boring ecommerce niche, but on the informational side the top 10 competitors for the most linked to topic are all big players with huge domain authority.

There's not a lot of links in the industry, should I try to top all the big industries through better content (somehow), pictures, illustrations, slideshows with audio, and by being more thorough than these very good competitors?

Or should I go for something that's less linked to (maybe 1/5 as much people linking to it) but easier?

or both?

We're on a short timeline of 3 and 1/2 months until we need traffic and our budget is not huge

Hello,

In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche.

The product descriptions are different with different product names.

Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site.

Let me know if Google is OK with this.

We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog.

Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK?

Thank you.

Interested in hearing what others have to say,

but very grateful for your response Miriam. When I say start a company, I find myself sitting down with people who want a more passionate job and doing their keyword research and helping them start their (usually store and content both) and tell them what content to write and how to expand.

I'm done doing it for free unless it's close friend or family member. It's a lot of work. Thus the package. Just for the Boise area.

My experience is taking businesses from zero to $5000/month or zero to $30,000/month in sales so you can see that's small business. I've worked under a 7m/year company, but they kept a lot from me. Consider that I have 10 years of experience but I only specialize in a few things really because they are strong enough for a good ROI for my customer.

Anyways, what is a better rate in your opinion (or anyone else reading this)?

Hello,

We have found traffic to increase upon adding content to category descriptions. Our category pages are stronger than our product pages.

Our main categories (the fourty that are in the navigation) have 500 words on them, carefully written helpful content.

We are trying to decide whether to increase (for these 40 categories) to 1000 words per category. Do you think this would increase traffic ? Is it a good idea?

Thanks!