Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A really good seo gets more referals than they can handle!  So sick of low quality, unethical, high volume crappy seo scammers out there....AAARRRGGHHHHHH!!!!!

Ok, I feel much better now....

This is just my opinion, but the fact that someone would have to cold call to find SEO clients throws up all kinds of red flags.  A talented SEO NEVER needs to cold call. In fact the problem is not finding new clients, the problem is having to pick and choose who you take on. Isnt the point of seo to bring in leads and clients? If your own seo skills are so poor that you have to cold call, then...well I am go out on a limb here, but get the he k out of our industry and giving real seo's a bad reputation.

Keyword usage is highly important, how as the prior poster said keep it natural. I mean think about it, if your website is about Hotdog Manufacturing it would only make sense to have that phrase used frequently. The actual ratio of keyword vs total words does not have an exact formula, however if you just keep in mind natural You should be fine. If the phrase is scattered to heavily (keyword stuffing) then you could get penalized. Good luck!

When I ask this, I am not under the illusion that links do nothing.  I am more curious if from an SEO strategy perspective is executing a link building campaign a really unwise use of time and resources?  Currently my company literally has every single one of our SEO clients ranked on page 1 rank 1 for their most high value keyword and in the top 5 results for another 5 to 10 high value keywords.  we have almost done no link building for these clients. I mean we have established a handful of really good links, but thats it. I look at some competitors link profiles and they have hundreds yet our clients sites are outranking them.

I am almost at the point of not implementing link building initiatives. I mean we will still establish high quality links as they naturally present themselves, but as far as investing time and resources building links i am leaning towards not even doing that anymore or atleast for a while to see what the effect will be.

We seem to find better results when we spend our time building great additional pages and following all web best practices.

Just curious as to what other think?

Thanks SEOmoz Community!

I agree with alot of what has been said, but the two comments really ring true for are,

#1 All these low quality SEO's are creating a huge opportunity for high qualified SEO's

#2 Word of mouth. Word of mouth. Word of mouth.

Thanks for the posting. I do similar blog posts somewhat frequently myself..

Thank you!

Thanks!!

I recommend looking at www.servint.net I am customer of theirs and they are awesome. The support is the best i have ever dealt with and they have been around since the 90's.

Good morning SEOmoz community. I have a question which I am pretty sure I already know the answer to, however i thought I would reach out to my fellow experts to see if anyone had some great advice.

I would really like to give my website a makeover.  i have two thoughts on this, one is to scrap the site completely and start fresh, the other would be to only change it visually, but keep all the content and on-page optimization. I am terrified of losing my rankings. I am ranked position 1 and 2 for highly competitive terms and have another 15 - 20 keywords on page 1. Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!!!

I am looking to expand my hosting and i wanted to know who some of you my fellow Mozzers would suggest? I need it on the westcoast...i could do something in Mountain Standard Time zone too, but PST preferable...

Many, many thanks!!

Keyword usage is highly important, how as the prior poster said keep it natural. I mean think about it, if your website is about Hotdog Manufacturing it would only make sense to have that phrase used frequently. The actual ratio of keyword vs total words does not have an exact formula, however if you just keep in mind natural You should be fine. If the phrase is scattered to heavily (keyword stuffing) then you could get penalized. Good luck!

Thank you Cyrus!  To answer the question of why I changed their domain name in the first place,

1. Original domain name had no relevance to the services they provide
2. The domain name was 23 characters long, which I feel is way too long and allows for 23 opportunities for a client to misspell the name when writing emails, accessing the website, ect....
3. The domain name was 7 syllables....by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused
4. They had virtually no web presence, so the switch was simple enough.  They had literally one link.  The site was under 10 pages, so again, not a huge undertaking.

Again, thank you so much for the feedback.  SEOmoz really has a great community!

This is just my opinion, but the fact that someone would have to cold call to find SEO clients throws up all kinds of red flags.  A talented SEO NEVER needs to cold call. In fact the problem is not finding new clients, the problem is having to pick and choose who you take on. Isnt the point of seo to bring in leads and clients? If your own seo skills are so poor that you have to cold call, then...well I am go out on a limb here, but get the he k out of our industry and giving real seo's a bad reputation.

In my experience keywords in the front are more powerful. Google algorytm takes into account the minute variances in a title. So for example if you sold cars in new york the titles "buy cars new york" "new york buy cars" "cars new york buy" would all have a different effect on rankings "typically"  . I know that was a severly rough example, but hopefully the general concept made sense...

I agree with alot of what has been said, but the two comments really ring true for are,

#1 All these low quality SEO's are creating a huge opportunity for high qualified SEO's

#2 Word of mouth. Word of mouth. Word of mouth.

Thanks for the posting. I do similar blog posts somewhat frequently myself..

I just tried Liquid Web...I was going to go with them, but twice I called and the voice connection was horrible and when I asked the sales rep to explain the benefits of going with liquid web as opposed to other providers, she almost acted annoyed...it was very uncomfortable...not a great way to enter into a business relationship....unfortunately they are scratched off the list of possibilities as a place to bring our rapidly growing web agencies client websites....

Trying Media Temple and your suggested Pair...thanks!

A really good seo gets more referals than they can handle!  So sick of low quality, unethical, high volume crappy seo scammers out there....AAARRRGGHHHHHH!!!!!

Ok, I feel much better now....

They are updating the Rankings tool so I believe we will not get reports until thw update is done. Its actually driving me nuts!  Its one of the main features I use....its been down for a while now...

Well I am going to also go with your suggestion, I am going to pick up some hosti g from Pair next. Thanks for all your input!

I think the best strategy would to achieve visibility in both Places listing and traditional organic. One without the other would simply be 50% less effective, atleast based on how Google is currently dispalying search results. Perhaps in the future there will be significantly more weight given to traditional organic results, or maybe places aill dominate...or some other form of search result placements will emerge. I think to have an all inclusive approach at this point would be a safe approach. Good luck with everything!