Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Matt,

I had not seen this before and it is really a nice tool It should be easy for Brett to fix the issue with it. Good job.

EGOL,

I typically am anti adsense, your idea is the first to make me think, hmmmm?

Thanks,

Brett,

Your question is "How do they affect SEO?" Simply put, they can sometimes increase the speed with which a site loads, but there are caveats. Seeing all your questions around site speed, I would suggest trying this link to Yahoo (comes from YSlow)

So, if the site is too slow, beyond user experience issues (which to me are the bigger issues usually around a slow site) you can cost yourself in PPC and, IMO if UX issues are significant, SEO ranking.

Hope this helps,

An interesting question arises out of a conversation with one of my team. We were talking about FB pages in particular regarding a client and I am for icons that allow for trust without leaving the client's site page (I am from a direct marketing background originally and am against sending them somewhere else). She was pointing out that we had a client who has a FB page and we were not sending them to that page.

I explained how I do not like to gain a bit of trust by sending them off site because it is the opportunity to lose a conversion by them becoming distracted. I also thought of a client who has over 100,000 likes, shares, etc. and who still is in the direct sales business at the end of the day; were they better off with a prospective client/customer to send them to their FB page/Twitter page, etc. or should they stay on the commercial site?

I still believe that in the bricks and mortar world, I would not have a customer who came in to buy/look at a TV first go down the street to a social club for people who liked my company and then hope they come back and buy. Also, is there an opportunity to close a sale that would not have been closed by virtue of sending them away or to increase the size of the sale (remember, this must be such a sale increase or probability of sale increase as to outweigh the risk of loss of a client who would have bought)?

I look forward to your assistance.

Amit,

I came to post a Question this morning and your query was first and I read it. Please understand first that I offer this in the hopes that it will assist you in your endeavor.

First and foremost, you mention that you have been doing on page and off page SEO ...but not getting proper responses. So i am only going to speak to the first part of this as I did not do an exhaustive review of the site.

Typically, in our company the first thing I check when we are having trouble with a client page/site is have we in some way been remiss in our on page SEO. And, if I am honest with you, there are definitely times when I say, "How did we miss this?"

Your on page is basically in need of overhaul on a lot of levels. Poor title tags, meta description over long and therefore wasted, missing H1/H2 almost everywhere, duplicate content with other online European pharmacies, meta keywords showing is not a best practice, etc.

This particular vertical is beyond highly competitive; it is one in which you must be ever vigilant and ever careful. (duplicate content, poor linking plans, etc. can cause algorithm problems if not penalties).

I think your best option is to back up and assess the site, then develop a plan, check the plan, and finally then implement changes. One area I would focus on noting your interest in KW analysis is this: Are you better served in a highly competitive niche using broad keywords or should you do some research around secondary keywords, long-tail keywords, etc.?

I hope this helps,

Robert

Searches that show in kw tool are for the Google search network and include images. What is reported using exact match is the search volume for the keyword. 
A search is neither organic or paid, it is a search. So, any traffic for that kw is just that traffic - they choose what they click on in terms of organic or paid.

Best

Glad to help

OK, so, with what you gave me there, I would suggest simply adding a couple of sentences as to why or if your purpose is different, what they should do about it, etc.

Yes, you can say Stock X went up to $Y today and there is nothing wrong with that content. You can repeat it every day and there is nothing wrong with that. It won't serve you IMO beyond just being there, but with a date, a stock price, etc. there is nothing to "penalize."

SaraSEO

I do not believe there is a minimum in terms of any type of penalty. My opinion is that any content should have a reason for being there and what you write should be what your customers are looking for in the way of information from an industry leader. 
So long as they are not just the same article rewritten over and over or articles that say nothing in relation to what your company does/is, etc. you will be fine. Follow the rules of making the content interesting by creating good titles that will appeal to your customer: If you just improved customer service on a problem area for example: Why Does Everyone Keep Complaining About _____: The Answer Here! Things that make people want to go see what is there, etc.
Hope it helps.

Best

This would more likely be due to Penguin from a linking point of view. If the drop is due to Panda timing it will likely be a content issue. 
IF you know you have links that are bad, use the disavow for the links and take them off. If you check your content and you have duped content or poor or thin content, it will need to be improved in order to gain ranking.

Remember these are algorithm changes/improvements and not penalties. It becomes more difficult with them and you must research to ascertain most likely cause.

Best

RBenedict,

What you are describing is not reciprocal linking. You are a holding company with a legitimate purpose in your linking as well. Here is the GWMT page on Linking Schemes. The language is quite clear on what a "scheme" is:

Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site, or outgoing links from your site. Manipulating these links may affect the quality of our search results, and as such is a violation of Google’sWebmaster Guidelines.

I would not nofollow and they are not harmful.

Best

searchpl

It does pass juice to the linked sites. Here is a good post by Cyrus Shepard around maximizing G+.

See #2.

Best

JPretz,

I'm just unsure if using the same content will really hurt us

I would say, "Define hurt." If the competitors are each selling ten items a day each on a given product and you are selling one, are you going to be hurt?

Then, if you are, make a change.

We know that duplicated content is a negative algorithmically, we know that the higher we rank the higher activity we have.

Hope that helps,

best

JPretz,

IMO this is one of those cost benefit analysis questions: Is rewriting the product descriptions worth the result change? Well, you could test it on some percentage of products to see if it changes outcomes. Then decide. 
If the site is massive and the task daunting, testing will at least give you direction. But, at the end of the day, the more you differentiate your site and those duplicate products the better off you are. Think about every competitor selling a Blue Oyster Sweater. If they all use the manufacturer's description, there is no differentiation. If you differentiate and do so with images, text, etc. who will they see. What if you are using markup and they are not, etc.?

I like being differentiated.

Best,

Zakaria

The 'mugshot' to this point is attributable to the author. So, if you are an author who is a contributor to a given G+, and there is a post/page, etc. that comes up in SERPs, your pic as the author will be shown and not the company. If you have an image that is not a photo of you (or a stunt double!) other images like avatars or art will not come up.

Think of it this way: just as PR is a measure of page validity to query, authorship is a measure of author validity to subject. (I am not saying either is or is not correct at times).  So, a company cannot be an author (it can be a publisher, but have not seen logo show yet).

As to what is the best way to make that work for you, I would think it would depend on the situation, the strategy, and the company. We publish a lot for various properties we own and for properties of clients. With clients, we sometimes allow authorship to the copywriter if it in no way effects the client. With our properties (an example is we have a site on local merchants) we allow authorship and encourage it for our copywriters. If you have a good team member who is writing and becoming known on a topic, there is no reason they cannot be granted acknowledgement in the marketplace as knowing the topic. The only argument against it is that they may leave and compete against you and since we employ hidden ninja assassins we do not ever have that problem reoccur with the same employee... Just kidding.

So, over time, your increase in author credit around a given subject should be the benefit you derive.

I hope this helps a bit.

Does the apache have the mod rewrite installed?

Well put Bryan,

Certainly doesn't offend me either, but not much does... Just easier to live that way.....

It is funny given that the algo is serving it up you have to wonder, are folks really needing to work on conserving their stash? What about hydroponics? Etc. Heck, maybe I just came up with a new site for affiliates of hydroponics!!!!

Thanks

I sincerely apologize for having offended, I will speak with Sergey as I think its his fault...

Larry.

Oh great, you gave it away! Funny as hell. I am guessing with the recession, wars, elections and baby boomers that pot is needing to be conserved more and more every day!

This cracked me up. I knew everyone was going to say, what have you been searching on?!?

So, how are you conserving...?

First, this is one I thought I would never ask, but: Could this be true?

I had noticed my MacBook Pro was eating some power and wanted to see if I could optimize my settings so to take advantage what battery life was available. (I swear that is the truth). So, I am at a Starbucks on someone and typed into Google search bar the following query -

Best way to conserve - and, received the following instant search results before I could type - power on a macbook pro

I am not putting it here as I want you to ask yourself what came up. I have attached a screenshot.

My colleague arrived and without prompting she retried and got the same. So I am curious:

Do you get the same result and why do you think that result is so predominant?

This is funny.

efuts.png

Hey Cole,

Just a clarification: I am not saying the client should be on dedicated. We purchase from our provider fully dedicated servers that only our clients or our properties are on. So, if we have server A, it may have just one ecommerce client ,etc. Server B could be our site and 10 client sites. Each of these has no other company on it. So, either us or our clients nothing outside of that. 
With many companies, they are buying monthly hosting from someone like GoDaddy and then simply marking it up. So they have 50 clients hosted all over GoDaddy, but not on a single or two servers.

By keeping all "in the house" we know that there is nothing inappropriate going on.

All the best,

Good question BTW

knockmyheart,

You are using Yoast so this is likely a setting you have wrong in xml sitemaps portion under SEO on Dashboard. Don't add anything as the plug in will handle if you just set it correctly. I have attached a scrn sht of one I have open and want to know if yours looks like this?

You have 5 urls of which the above 3 return 404 response codes. the other two resolve to the url. So, we just need to know what you have done that is blocking these. This is likely a setting you have made in error.

Shoot me a screen shot of what you are showing in robots.txt and .htaccess from Yoast and any other changes you made.

I will try to assist.

Ig70v.png

Sorry Ocelot, was tied up.

Here is a link to a moz resource from WebConfs.com

On moz here is another good resource page re redirects (where I pulled that link above from).

On WebConfs.com in the left sidebar is a redirect checker, once done put in your url and see how you did.

LMK if you get stuck.

Cole,

I think if there were a little more detail it would help, but I do understand the hosts point of view given the gradient of the increase. But, if you can avoid it, do not let a host (that is not your dev company, sem/seo company, etc. into your .htaccess file unless you are highly trusting of them). I have security issues.

If the hosting company is using non dedicated servers for you and their other clients (highly likely) then what they are doing is simply reselling the hosting and they are under fire from GoDaddy, BlueHost, NS, etc. for the spike. But, I would really want to see the agreement you have with them as well as, taking your site down for a traffic spike is a big deal unless they know you are doing something nefarious. As to a WP site "handling" 17K visits a day, it will. The issue is a bandwidth on the other end issue.

So, why is Pinterest a problem is a real curiosity. I could see something like an infographic that is more general could get a lot of traffic to you, but not be your customer. And, while I think John is not unreasonable about Adsense, etc., it is not something I would do as an agency or for any of our properties. (again just a philosophy). But, is there anything you can do with the traffic? Can you get them to like or share something, tweet, G+ with you, etc.? I understand that the traffic is not actually valueless, but not your customer and, possibly, a distraction.

I do like that piece of Pinterest and have seen Pinterest be a really nice social tool.

Hope this was at least helpful in some small way,

Robert

RedFishKing

It really is a matter of what you want to accomplish as to whether you need a subdomain blog. or a sub directory .com/blog. For the purpose of your "main" site, typically you want to use directories as sub domains are treated as their own domain. So, links to them will only be to them and those to a sub directory will pass juice on.

There are reasons to want to have a sub domain (sometimes with geo location, etc), but if you don't really need a sub domain its better IMO to use directory.

Hope this clarifies.

For yours, when you know the bad url is www.example.com/how-happened/dont-know

And you have a how-happened page on current site. In the .htaccess file put your 301 from bad link to current url  and you will move any links as well.

Here's a question I often ask of our team: What are we spending our time on in terms of time cost vs. benefit? So, if putting in the 30K product pages is taking x amount of time, have you asked yourself - Why? Just to get clicks on some you don't have? Etc. So, if you were to take say the best 3000 and put the reviews, other content, etc. and when that was done then start on the next 3000 in the same way, would your result be improved? Would gaining PA on the ones you had truly optimized get you high enough that you can get more traffic to the site? Do you then keep improving at a rate that is augmenting where you are going?

So, instead of asking is this a good idea (and on the face it is), ask is this the best idea?

Hope it helps

OK Joseph, I think I need to break it down a bit from a point of view.

First, I am not sure what you mean by SEOMOZ says that seo signals are roughly 8% of SERPS and growing. If you are speaking of on page social signals, that is an opinion of a reasonable group of SEO pros.

But, you have to define that and you have to understand there is more than I got 100 likes. If you read a really good post IMO on moz by Philip Petrescu - The Impact of Authoritative Links, Mentions, and Shares on Rankings you will see that there is a lot more than it being a share from thirty FB pages. I think, that you have to read what he says first is the importance of fresh content. (We have 8 copywriters who are good on staff and produce some serious content so I know he is correct). Then, while social media mentions are important, the next piece is WHO is mentioning it? If you get a share from Guy Kawasaki or someone of similar ilk, you will likely get a lot more 'weight' from that than from your sites.

But, even that is not the issue. The issue is: What is your strategy? What amount of your time is spent manipulating a bunch of FB, Twitter, G+ sites? 8%, is IMO a massive waste of time. I would get further with content creation and that content would get legit shares, tweets, etc.

In building a site or improving it, I suggest that you decide how you are going to improve it ahead of time. What time will be devoted to what? When we take on a client or create a company owned property, we do not start until we know where we want to go and how we want to get there. In doing that we are forced to look at cost benefit within various parts of SEO, etc.

So, yes, you can put up a ton and IMO I do not think that Google per se is tracking Cblocks, servers, etc. right this second in terms of social ranking manipulation. (The reason I think this is that in order to grow that social account, there is work involved and to build 30 and handle them is not good time use.).

I think you would be better served creating high quality content for the vertical that begs people to use it/like it/share it.

But, again, its just an opinion.

Best,

Robert

Kris,

Most excellent, thought out response. Wow. 
Thanks,

Robert

Darcy,

I think Dana makes the best point possible and that is...is the content GOOD? Is it something people are looking for? etc. 
To just add content is not helpful in my opinion. But, we have sites that we add 100's of pages a month to and it is all unique content around specific verticals. It is amazing to watch what happens as you add better and better content and more of it to a site.

Hope this helps. A question would be: Over what period and is the content already created?

Ocelot,

I would use Screaming Frog to spider the site. If you don't have, you should be able to download a free version from the web to whatever browser, etc. you use. When you open it, you will see where to put the domain and below that a row of buttons - use response codes to find what 404's you have. then click on them and use the links button at the bottom to see the links to those pages.

There is no blanket way to redirect the bad links if that is what you are asking. You can look at them in WMT and for the ones that have authority/get traffic, etc. you can redirect those to relevant pages and the others you need to have a good 404 page up that keeps them on the site.

Hope that helps,

Joseph,

I think that its a reasonable question and will give my opinion(s):

First, I don't see the need to have multiple FB/G+ accounts for us or for our clients. I think then you are back to what is the value of it, isn't it just gaming the system, etc. I think if you have great content and do not over commercialize you will get a good result.

Then, as to the masked IP address, etc. I just don't see that as necessary even if you are doing the other. At some point, I think we end up trying to fix really low % issues and that it takes us away from endeavors that would better improve our rankings.

IMO

Thanks

Nathan

I am not seeing any problems in mine, but did find a known issue they are working on:   https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/22253397-some-campaigns-not-getting-rankings-updates

It states a few may have fallen through and lets you know how to handle.

Hope that helps you out.

Robert

Mandi,

I think you are meaning redirected as opposed to proxied. (Canonical in this case - from GWMT)

Two ways:

• Add a rel="canonical" link to the  section of the non-canonical version of each HTML page.

  To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, create a element as follows:

  Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price.

  If you publish content on both http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish and https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the  element:

  Add this link to the  section of https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish.

• **Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header.**Adding rel="canonical" to the head section of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server):

Hope this helps,

Robert

OK, you are making a common mistake and that appears to be causing you a problem. When you look at your website, you have a different address than either +/places listing. This is critical if you are to get it right. Note: You are pulling in a google map with it and using the address on the site. So, you have 3 addresses minimum in the eyes of the Google. If you have differing addresses on any citation sites (and in your business there are too many!!!) or in Bing, Yahoo, etc. then it is confusion to the 10th degree.

You have to clean that piece up. I am assuming the one with a review by Nigel is the one that is NOT good?? The one with the review by Joe J is the correct one and that is absolutely the mailing address of the establishment? If so, I will go into mapmaker and make an edit. (we do a few of these so it may help). I do not want to change the wrong thing so LMK.

Now, you also want to go to your citation sites (especially the ones using Google to get to you) and make sure they all have exact address as what you will have on your one G+/places page. If the map you are pulling in is not addressed correctly and you don't know how to fix, LMK and we will show you.

WIth change in MapMaker we may be able to get something reasonably quickly. If you will get all over the citation sites, website, map, it will help. From now on there can be only ONE...address. (OK that highlander thing was clever!)

Best

First, good move by client to not use translation plug in IMO.

So, you have a Chinese site in Chinese and you are adding English and Korean or, it is a new venture? (server question made me think this). Good question on server hosting.

The answer is based on what all you want to accomplish: Is the site to be a multi lingual site, multi regional sit, or both?

If you are wanting to be multi regional then your client is  wanting to rank in Baidu for China, Naver - Korea, and Google US/UK/AU, etc. Or, for multi lingual, you could be just looking to sell to disparate people living in China. For both, you get the pic. 
HERE Is a great GWT link for setup of domains/sub domains/directories, etc  Note this has an excellent table further down.

Avoiding duplicate content can be accomplished multiple ways and Google has made some real strides with the use of rel-alternate-hreflang link elements

So, you have a bit of reading, but if you can supply a few answers, we can help you out.

All the best,

Ocelot,

Others have had similar issues, and if you are able to give a name/domain that would be a big help. If you need confidential you can always PM (many will suggest this to assist you).

There are several times this can happen with an address or even a business name, etc.

First, is the phone number you are using consistent across time?

When did you complete to 100%?

When did you first notice change? Any movement or is it gradually down? Have you looked at the business in Map maker?

LMK and I will follow with you,

Robert

I have been giving shouts out to the mozzers I speak with re the survey. Some will be taking. I will tweet, etc. to my huge following (my son I think)... etc.

Best

Great idea Sha, took the survey, waiting on results.

Best

Bryan,

With archives, I would suggest you noindex them. I think you may have misread this a bit and I know that all the initial terminology in WP can get confusing. With categories, you do index them typically. With archived posts, they are more likely to show duplicate content (And Dan points it out in his post).

Hope it helps,

This is always the issue with "We need you to prepay because... blah blah blah." The real reason is, if we did it month to month, it would kill the model.

I think the problem will be that slowly it has no real value. How slowly,who knows, I have never been able to justify the cost for the PR services. I have gotten a lot of emails from them telling me they disagree with me though.

Best

Nick,

Wow, by paying extra you get to use anchor text! OK, sorry, had to do that...

To say I have an opinion on these is an understatement. First, it sounds as if you are using them as more of an actual release which is good. Most companies use them as web trash and news rehash with a company or firm name repeated: XYZ announces inside toilets used more often than outhouses in US!!

My question would be, how is it working for you? Are you getting links back and are they of value? If so, where do you need/want them and make sure you are watching for questionable ones, keeping anchor text varied, etc.

Rand did a nice piece on Link earning versus link building that I went back and reread that speaks to more "meritorious" (for lack of a better term) link gathering. I think over time we will see this type of link building diminish. As someone who understands PR, I can tell you that the "press" does not see this type of thing due to there being so much of it. So, to call it a press release is overstating it at best. These are link building tools for the web.

I think with Penguin and all the other animals, slowly these will lose value.

Good to see someone at least using it like a real press release about their company,

Best

Just amazing how people must be in the industry in some way or they are just lambs for these guys. I can understand how someone who is not used to what all we deal with would just go, oh yeah, gotta renew.....

When I am uber rich I am going to hire a bunch of the best devs in the world so that we can develop mind numbing bot worms that seek out and pee on these guys while they sleep...

I liked that EGOL, I did not catch it at all.

Got an email this morning on a domain that is not privacy protected. (One of mine that I own significant extensions for).

I am attaching the email and the link. The thing did not throw me off because I know where all is and it had nothing identifiable, but to those with a domain and they want to keep it, this has to have some real chance of taking some peoples money.

The domain you land on is SecureTrans32456.com/order/.........

Just keeping the world alert...

best

eXorT.png?1 eXorT.png?1 mZvcK.png?1

I am going to keep it brief and say this: Google is using an algorithm that mathematically combines 200+ factors. Within that there are many ways to have an odd result here or there.

So, what I suggest is to look at a couple of things and determine your answer:

Search engine ranking factors on moz. (These are opinions)

Search engine periodic table from SearchEngineLand

From these, you can see what matters to move something up. As to your search and where you land there are even additional factors like are you using non personalized search or are your results impacted by previous searches?

So, a bit to learn,

Good luck,

My question would be this, you are saying it is new, but that you have DA/PA of 20/25? This is not new to me. A "new" domain starts out at 1 and goes up. If you are getting them to 20 in a week, please tell me how.

I think you may have meant you made changes, but am quite unclear.

activitysuper

Anecdotally, I would have to say that Google does not hold them back. First, even you say,"I have noticed with a few..." which would mean not with all or most. We put up a few sites each month and we see some that are new domains that are rocketed fairly quickly, some fall back, some stay. We see others that are the slog through to ranking, etc. I think it depends on many factors:
Linking day one, site map submissions, indexing on all engines asap, in GWMT or not, site architecture, vertical competitiveness, on page, on site, etc.

I do believe, again anecdotally, that there are times when a site seems to be pushed to the top by Google and "tested" for lack of a better word. Where in a tough vertical all of a sudden there is a new page showing with no authority/PR and then a few days later it is not. I keep waiting for Larry or Sergey to call and explain it to me...

Best,

Rob

You say: "All authority from these links have been removed by Google during the latest updates and ..."

How did you determine this? And, this is one of those questions where it depends on the site, what it does, criticality of PR for given pages, etc. So, with a client site wherein business results are at stake, I would not make a change without first notifying the client and achieving agreement on course.

That said, I do not see how a bunch of footer links are going to have that big of an impact on a site due to the minimal effect of where they are coming from. You could use the disavow tool from Google and use it judiciously to see what the effect is. Assuming you had 100 of these type links coming in, break it down into the worst 20, next, next, next and then disavow the lowest 20 and wait for effect, etc.

There are all types of ways you can manipulate a plan like that. To me, improving the profile is wise no matter what else you do.

Hope this helps,

ETSgroup

I would answer you first with this from GWMT regarding providers of SEO:

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What's your experience in my industry?
• What's your experience in my country/city?
• What's your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Today, everyone does SEO and unfortunately most who say they do cannot spell it. I see new prospective clients regularly who just had their entire site optimized and all someone did was put 30 keywords (and not even the best ones) on the page or wrote a paragraph for a title tag or meta description. So, yes, I have an opinion.

If your site is fairly new and was originally set up with keyword analysis done first, good on page/ on site SEO, etc. there is less for someone to do in that vein. If they are doing an SEO audit, with no guarantee of ongoing work and are a reputable firm/pro, the cost will likely range from $500 to $2,500 or higher depending on the type, size, etc. of the site. 
Once that is done, it is on to what Andy writes about and content is first. Authorship, Rich Snippets and structured data like Schema, Links that are quality and are earned (recent WBF by Rand) are best.

An ongoing SEO program of building links, etc. is difficult and expensive in time and people. For us with a site that is trying to get a lot of good links, we can charge up to $5K per month, but this is really having someone on it about 20 hours a week doing nothing but link building, etc.

If you are blogging it will depend on whether you are doing it or having copywriters do it. A decent page can run $50 to $250. (Length and Technical level, etc.).

I would look for someone who understands that SEO is not about ranking in Google, et al. It is about getting the business clients/customers/revenue, etc. What you have to weigh is what result you want for a given spend. If the site is bringing in customers, how many more do you need to spend say $500 to $1,000 a month? If you spend that you want to cover more than just the SEO piece, you want it to give you additional funds as well. My rule would depend on margins in your vertical, but probably minimum of 2:1 and more like 3:1 in most.

I hope this helps as I understand it is a difficult line to walk. Please check out those who say they do SEO. Make sure they have happy clients that will talk with you. Not that they never made a mistake; but if they did they owned it and improved.

Lastly, what Andy says about who to steer clear of is very important. Anyone who has some "special" way of doing it with magic windows, sites they own that link to one another, etc. cannot spell SEO.

All the best,

Robert