This past week alone, I discussed SEO with two friends - one is a lawyer who lives in my neighborhood and the other is the promoter of a non-profit charitable organization.  Both could benefit from improved search engine positioning and both asked me early in the conversation "what is this going to cost me?"

Asking an SEO consultant how much his services cost is like asking a travel agent how much a business trip will cost.  The travel agent will respond "where do you want to go and what is the purpose and length of your trip?" which is exactly what I would ask.   Generally search engine optimization involves modifying or creating web site pages so that they will appear in the top five to ten search results for one or more desired search phrases.  Search engine optimization is not a "thing" - instead it is a process that includes among other things:

• site topic market evaluation
• search phrase (key word) research
• site structure outline creation
• content creation and planned release of new content
• existing content modification
• on-page optimization (adding title tags, header tags, page description tags, etc.)
• Yahoo search monkey codes (new technology)
• quality link building
• site conversion analysis
• adding analytic software and setting up conversion funnels and tracking reports
• sitemap creation and submission
• content rewriting services for article marketing and press release marketing
• blog development
• creation of audio and/or video segments for web site

A web site in a minimally competitive niche may only require a few of these techniques and a minimal investment of time.  A more competitive niche may require many months to fully implement the SEO strategy.

The cost will also be a function of who generates new content.  If you can provide the content and/or the underlying research material, your cost will be less than if I have to write or outsource the content creation.

Generally the optimization process will take a minimum of three to six months to produce noticeable effects, although this could be longer in more competitive niches or for more competitive search phrases.   Once the initial optimization is done, most clients will benefit from a maintenance program that keeps your web site in the top 10 or higher for specific search phrases, and that expands your exposure for additional search phrases.

Examples of SEO projects in which I have been involved:

• local law firm looking to increase search engine visibility in one small geographic market for less than 10 search phrases - I have worked with this lawyer for close to 18 months, added video to his site, created a blog and provided new content for the blog ongoing - the initial cost was $1,500, the video components were $750 and the blog maintenance works out to $50 per month
• local medical practice with three web sites looking to increase patient numbers - I have generated multiple pages of new content and worked to incorporate existing video into the various web sites.  This project started 6 months ago and the cost to this client so far has been $2,500.
• national home remodeling contractor looking to expand into a new (large) city.  I was retained to set up a pay per click campaign and to create topics for new content - my fee for this project totaled $750
• regional law firm with multiple offices retained me to create new web sites for their new markets and blogs for their new markets.  My job also involves writing the content, rewriting the content on existing sites, adding analytics, and many of the other elements identified above.  I personally visited this client's new office in another city and recorded multiple video clips.  This client now has #1 position on the major search engines in five large cities and we are generating dozens of potential clients weekly.  This client pays me a signficant monthly retainer for on-going services
• local jewelry store with two web sites looking to improve search engine positioning for less than 10 search phrases - I took over the SEO from another vendor who was using "black hat" techniques.  The annual cost to this client will be around $2,000.

The starting point for any SEO project is for you to take a few minutes and brainstorm about what you want your site to do for your business, and what you expect from your site as a marketing tool - in three months, in six months, in a year, in 2 years.

When I practiced law on a daily basis, I learned early on that you can't possibly convince a judge or jury about the merits of your case if you don't have a working theory of your case and a defined goal for that case.  You need similiar goals for your web site.  I can certainly help you firm up your vision of where you want to go, while my main task is to identify the techniques that will help you fulfil your strategy in the least amount of time with the lowest possible cost.

I work with lawyers and other professionals and very few of these service providers use audio or video.  Thus, for the time being at least, you can really stand out by adding video to your site.

My colleague Jay Douglas has been creating professional videos for clients for over ten years and he tells me that a web site video should not last more than 3 or 4 minutes.   Time Magazine columnist Bill Tancer notes that the average YouTube session lasts no more than 20 minutes.

When I videotape and produce videos for law firm clients, I generally limit the segments to one to three minutes.  If I have an hour's worth of information to convey, , I'll create 5 to 7 minute segments and stack them on the web page.  I have seen knowledgeable web developers post 90 minute videos - this makes no sense to me at all.

Columnist Tancer contends that web information consumers are not willing to spend a great deal of time viewing video on a computer or laptop screen.  This does make sense, given that most people consumer video on television, where content (the shows) are broken up by commercial breaks every 7 to 8 minutes and the quality of the video feed can be high definition beamed to a 55" monitor.

So, the bottom line for me: put video on your web site, but keep the segments as short as possible in easily digested chunks.

I responded by asking him if he had tested his web site for conversion.  It turns out that his web site is not yet live - it is in production and will be produced by a friend at no cost.   I just took a look and, yes, the domain is registered, and the "in production" version of the site is there.  The designer is using a template downloaded from Free Website Templates, and the site looks to be about 10% complete.

Now let me stop right here and say that I have nothing against a free website template.   In my view money spent on expensive design is often money wasted as one can have a very effective web site with a free template that displays good content.

My point here is simply that before my friend even thinks of signing on for $3,000 per month of pay per click traffic, he needs to have a live web site up and running and he needs to test that site to verify that live visitors are responding appropriately.  If live visitors don't like your site, and if they don't follow the path that you have set out for them, you are wasting your money with paid advertising.

I explained to my friend my concerns about marketing for personal injury online and that in my view his target ought to be the "researcher" type who will spend hours online looking for a vendor who will provide extensive information.

I also suggested to my friend that he should capture names and email and add a sequential autoresponder to his site to communicate with past, present and future clients.

Now, my friend is a very smart and successful lawyer.  But this episode shows that even smart, savvy, trained minds can fall prey to the hype of a good salesman and the excitement of wanting to tap into the Internet gold rush.  My friend needs to either educate himself about how the Internet might work for his practice or he needs to associate a consultant like me to advise him.  Otherwise the $9,000 he plans on spending will do him no good at all.

In my view, the Internet functions as a research tool.  This is especially true if you are offering professional services.  People go to Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. to learn about a particular topic, not necessarily to choose a vendor or to buy that service right now.

Contrast this to the visitor dynamic in the yellow pages.  Yellow page browsers are not researchers.  They know that they will not find extensive information about a topic.  Yellow page buyers tend to be visual people who will respond to large, dramatic ads.  This is why in the lawyer market, yellow page ads work well for practice areas like personal injury, DUI, uncontested divorce and bankruptcy.  A significant percentage of buyers for these services are looking for any reason to make a buying decision - price, location, immediacy, social proof.

Internet browsers generally look for more detail.  I have had a great deal of success with my bankruptcy sites because I offer extensive information.  The people that respond to my bankruptcy web sites tend to be better educated, have more complex situations, and are less price conscious.   I have had much less success with personal injury web sites because most people involved in soft tissue auto accidents are looking for quick settlements and they do not perceive that there is much difference between Lawyer A and Lawyer B.

Therefore, before I will agree to work with a lawyer, I have a long discussion with him/her about his market - are his clients people who are looking to research?  If so, I will give those clients more information than any other competitor in the market, and my client will dominate this "researcher" part of his market.  I use blogs, podcasts, web sites, wikis, forums - whatever makes sense for the particular market.

Fortunately, the search engines also like extensive, relevant content.  So, in the ideal scenario, I can map out a multi-site approach that will please both the search engines and the client/researcher and, as a result, keep my client extremely busy with new business.

If at all possible, you should download and install the Akismet plug-in for WordPress.  Akismet is free for personal use and carries a nominal charge for commercial use, and it can block most spam using a sophisticated spam detection algorithm.

What happens, however, if you just learned about Akismet and you have hundreds or thousands of spam comments, or you inadvertantly changed a WordPress setting that let all this spam in.  Is there any hope?

The short answer is "yes" - there is hope.  In this video, I show you how to use the search function in the mass edit mode to identify likely spam by keyword as well as by IP address.  Hope you find it helpful

At a minimum, every blogger should enable the moderation feature for all blog comments.  If your comments are unmoderated, you will soon see hundreds, if not thousands of irrelevant, spammy, link-filled comments on your blog posts.

Most blog platforms have spam filtering either built in or available as a plug-in.  Wordpress, which is my blogging platform, has a plug-in called Akismet, which is a very good spam filter.

Many of us learn about comment spam the hard way.  What happens if you did not previously enable spam blocking and now you have 10,000 spam comments in moderation, or worse, showing up as comments on your blog posts?   Fortunately there is an answer to this problem and the video demonstrates how to go about clearing spam posts in volume.  The blog I use for my example is the Bankruptcy Law Network blog.  This is a multi-contributor blog that accepts contributions from a select group of lawyers.  The blog has been very successful in educating consumers and those in the legal community about Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but, as a group, we did not plan very well to when it came to moderating and processing comments.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves with over 10,000 unmoderated comments, most of which were spam.  Worse, the size of the unmoderated comments table in the SEQL database that manages the Wordpress blog made the manual, one-by-one processing of comments very slow and cumbersome.

After some looking around, I figured out how to deal with the spam comments in bulk and I show what I did in this screen capture video.

Some of the BLN bloggers are experienced and comfortable with the "technical" side of blogging, while others have no technical experience at all.  In reviewing some of the BLN posts, I noted that some of the attorney authors were not maximizing the value of the network.  This video demonstrates how I approach linking and trackbacks.

Over the years, I have signed up for multiple GMail accounts for different purposes.  I always set up a GMail account for my consulting clients, and I use the account to add Google Analytics to my clients' sites.   Until now, it was somewhat cumbersome to check all of those GMail accounts - you had to sign out of one and sign into another.

GMail Assistant solves this problem.  GMail Assistant is a Firefox plug in that allows you to add the login information for all your GMail accounts into one tab.  If you want to switch from one account to another, you go to the dropdown and select the desired account and within seconds you are looking at a different inbox.

You can run Gmail Assistant as a stand alone application or try a Firefox plug-in version that is slightly less robust.

I was particularly interested in the section where Lorelle wrote about how to deal with the problem of content theft.   Content theft happens when an unscrupulous blog owner "scapes" your content and puts it on his own (Google Adwords stuffed) blog.  Often the scraped blog (called a "splog" within the blogging community) will contain scraped content from several legitimate blogs on a particular topic.  The splogger then includes a trackback hoping to pick up page rank from the legitimate blog.

As Lorelle points out, these sploggers are content thieves.  In the "How to Stop Content Theft" section of her post, she identifies several specific tactics to deal with these content thieves.   There is a splogger who scrapes every post from my Atlanta bankruptcy blog and I am going to try some of these suggestions.  I'll report back to see how they work.

About 85% of the digital photos were backed up - I burn my digital photos to DVD's every year, but not much of the rest had been backed up.  Fortunately, my IT consultant was able to salvage the hard drive - he put it into an external enclosure so all of my data is still there.  Nevertheless, this experience served as a wakeup call to me.  You cannot assume that your digital information will always be there.

In the old days, there were backup programs that compressed data for storage on floppy disks.   Now, with hard drives holding 200 to 500 gigabytes of data, backup options are less obvious.

There are some software options but I have not found one that I like or completely trust.  At this point, I am going to use the external hard drive route - I will have to remember to back up but I will have a complete copy of all of my data.

My friend, Atlanta mortgage broker Steve Epstein included the following suggestions in his weekly newsletter.  You may have seen these tips before, but they bear repeating:

• Hold On to Those Disks. You know those disks that come with your computer…the ones with all the software on them…the ones you throw in a drawer and forget about? Well - don't. Even though software often comes preloaded and ready to use, those disks and serial numbers are priceless. Keep them in a safe, memorable place and you'll be able to easily reload your software after a crash.
• Rule of Thumb. Those little USB flash drives or "thumb drives" that you see everyone carrying around now are an ideal, inexpensive way to backup small files for short periods of time. Whether you're moving information from one computer to another or you want to make sure a critical company report doesn't get lost before the client presentation, these handy devices are well worth the small amount of money you'll spend for 4 GB of peace of mind.
• Don't Get Burned…Do the Burning Instead. Most computers come standard with CD/DVD burners. Contrary to television commercials, you can burn more than just song compilations. Make the most of this device by backing up your important data regularly. Most DVDs can hold 4.7 GB, or you can double the data with double layer DVDs (known as DVD DL) that can hold up to 8.5 GB!
• Take it Outside. To backup every last byte of data, add an external hard drive that operates independently of your computer. Products like Seagate's FreeAgent storage devices offer you a variety of options…as well as the ability to access your information even when you're not at home, so you can open a document or even view your family photos from out of town.
• Leave Home Without It. For the best level of protection, move data out of the house altogether. Storing your IT off-site protects it from fire, theft, and flooding. And it's not as expensive as you might think. In fact, you can get a ton of space free from services like Yahoo! and AOL. At that price, the only thing you have to lose is your data if you don't back it up!
• Once the Damage is Done. If you've already lost your data, you may actually be able to recover it…the cost, however, runs anywhere from the hundreds to the thousands.
• Don't wait until the worst-case scenario happens–act now to protect your important data files.