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yep... Adwords discussions generally center around keywords and budgets... if the bidder is not diligently tracking margins, costs, conversions and bidding my bet is that he is losing his shirt and doesn't know it. Lots of people who are doing that math quit doing Adwords because they discover that the competition is insane.

Here are a couple of YouMoz posts that discuss things that are good to show in reports from an agency that should give you a couple of ideas. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/agent-seo-reporting-maam http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/what-to-include-in-your-seo-reports

I would agree with mctip_it.  The description is a little long.  The keywords tag is not helping you at all (other than telling your competitors what keywords you are targeting.)  Bing recently caused a stir when they announced that YES, they do use the keywords tag in regards to SEO.  Then, they came out and clarified that actually it was a negative ranking factor.  Sites that stuffed their meta keywords tag were more likely to be engaging in spammy SEO.

No followed links are links that don't carry any 'link juice'. A lot of websites like twitter and facebook as well as comments on websites have no follow links because they don't want people spamming them to get easy links. Root domains are like www.seomoz.org or www.cnn.com. So if you have 300 links and 30 linking root domains that means that 30 different sites are linking to you. This is From The SEO Moz SEO Guide. (It's under chapter 4) " Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax: Lousy Punks! Links can have lots of attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag. In the example above, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, we've told the search engines that we, the site owners, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow, taken literally, instructs search engines to not follow a link (although some do.) The nofollow tag came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guest book, and link injection spam (read more about the launch here), but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines, but it is clear they do not passas much weight as normal "followed" links Are nofollow Links Bad? Although they don't pass as much value as their followed cousins, nofollowed links are a natural part of a diverse link profile. A website with lots of inbound links will accumulate many nofollowed links, and this isn't a bad thing. In fact, SEOmoz's Ranking Factors showed that high ranking sites tended to have a higher percentage of inbound nofollowed links than lower ranking sites." As far as how to fix it, when you have no followed links that generally because that is the way the website has the structure setup and there isn't anything that you can do about it. If you have a lot of links and not many linking root domains, you just have to try to diversify your links through link building.

Being a web designer I think that a lot of designers really don't know a lot about SEO. Keeping up in one incredibly fast moving industry is hard enough none the less keeping up with both SEO and Design. That being said, it isn't impossible. If you say Panda or Penguin and they have no idea what you're talking about, they don't keep up with the SEO industry. On page SEO disregarding content (think of it as your sites skeleton)is important but from a strict design & development perspective there isn't _that_ much you can do. Of course the code should be clean, semantic, and make sense without overuse javascript or any of flash, but what really matters is how they'll structure the site and place content. It also can't hurt to ask what they'll do about mobile. I recommend responsive design but that does tend to get pricey because of the excess work involved. (Semantic code would be proper use of heading tags (h1-h6), use of alt on images, proper meta descriptions and titles. Flash is bad, stay away. ) For example the basics I would ask are what content management system they recommend using and how will they structure the links along with what will they do about your current links.  You want them to make the link structure so that it makes sense (/contact-us) vs (page?2329422.html) and that if they are changing your current link structure they'll 301 them. You'll also probably want them to say they'll use caches and a CDN along with limiting images and the size of images to keep page load speed time down. If a designer is component and uses a CMS such as Wordpress, and aslong as they have clean code, it isn't that hard to make the site really SEO friendly by installing a few plugins.  I have seen some badly coded sites that have weird redirection issues and are just plain badly coded so you still have to be careful. It really depends on what you're expecting out of the designer. If you want them to just build you the site and you'll take care of the rest such as off page SEO, content, etc, most reputable designers/agencies will do. However if you want them to link build and write content for you that is totally different and they would require much more knowledge and skills and a ton of other questions I would ask. If I design and build a site for a client it is SEO friendly. My code is clean and semantic and I use best practices. However that is only part of SEO and it's up to them to do everything else required such as link building, testing, content, etc. So you can't go strictly on what rankings they have achieved in the past unless you are paying them to do all the other aspects of SEO as well. I would look at their portfolio and see if you like the work they do. If you're going to do all the other aspects of SEO by yourself that is really all that matters because you will be responsible for link building, content, etc.  Still question them about the basics I mentioned above and see what they say but most good designers should know those basics. But most importantly, educate yourself. If you look at SEOMoz's beginner SEO book, you'll be in a better spot to ask the designer questions and save yourself from being upset with your choice in the long run. There are so many variables that come into play that being educated and perhaps even getting an SEO audit or consultation beforehand would be very beneficial especially if you have good rankings and/or an established site. Good luck.

I think it’s a great question that most people don’t ask. SEO while development: This can also further divided in two different parts depending on your budget and goals. Like if you are a simple local business then one way to go with SEO while development is to make sure that website is building currently from Navigation, Content, links, hosting and domain point of view. Other way to go is to have pre promotional plan to engage the target audience even before the website go live and at the same time making sure that website is fit from all development and on-page areas. Continuous SEO In this SEO service you expect results, you expect to get yourself on top of search engine from the desired key phrases and get leads and sales for the business out of it. There is no time limit to it but usually one can expect to start seeing results within 4 to 6 month of time (depending on niche and industry) I believe you should go for One time SEO, with or without the promotion plan is up to your business strategy and budget for SEO.

Looking at 6 to 8 pages, you providing the content (images, video, text) somewhere between $1,500 to $3,000. The reasons for the range are myriad, but typically if you have content, a site like that should run toward the $1,500 more than the $3K.

Hi Capitol, This isn't a fair question. HTML is a browser language. Wordpress is a CMS (Content Management System). Wordpress uses HTML, html doesn't use Wordpress. The purpose of Wordpress is to make web pages easier to generate, manage and archive. A website built outside of a CMS system can work great but can require more time to create. My company's website is done in straight development (HTML/PHP/JAVASCRIPT/JQUERY), but we also run a site that uses a CMS (Oscommerce). Each one requires specific requirements. The main site requires more of my time, but the CMS requires knowledge of specific Oscommerce requirements, Wordpress would be the same.

Choosing a host would entirely depend on on your requirement. I seriously doubt having your site hosted with them would cause it not to be  crawled. ( unless of course the server you have with them have explicitly prevented bots crawling the pages in there , which would make no sense for them to do )

Yes irrelevant sites are where you don't want them. Reciprocal links are now not that great of an idea. Google forbids buying links and reciprocal are almost the same thing. However, if they are generally helpful to the consumer/user then it is alright but don't make it a far stretch.

I would spend it on anything that will produce more profits.  I know is a silly response but the truth is that a lot of people do not do that. I would recommend to invest time and not money in learning SEO.  Whether you can do in house SEO for you site in the interim or have good fundamentals to monitor what you are paying for, it will help you in the long run. You can also use a mix of adwords to help you get sales now while your SEO site matures.  Also follow what Brent said.

Great words of wisdom from Martin! There are one hell of a lot of designers and programmers/ developers out there that are great at what they do but have no idea about other aspects such as SEO (infact especially SEO). If your on a budget then there will be a lot of work that you can do yourself to fix the issues, it will just take time and effort on your behalf to find them and learn how to fix the issues.  There is one hell of a lot of information and know how out there on the web .. use SEOmoz reports to identify the problems and then do the research on how to fix the issue. I started my web business up in exactly the same way as you, and now I too am having to do the same work.. so far all done in house but soon i will have to outsource for the real fine detail.

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