Mediaboss Marketing

Talking to the Global SEO manager of a large organization with offices around the world, he was bemoaning the high turnover of staff and the difficulty of keeping people in SEO posts around the world with the right level of SEO knowledge and expertise to achieve their goals.

Its a challenge many organizations face. Thats not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.

Another issue is that SEO responsibilities around the world arent often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.

Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. Im also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry were all in.

In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I dont propose to labour this point I think were all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.

The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over Im sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but its still a cost and its value isnt always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)

We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Lets look at some strategies.

If you think Im about to say its a good idea to go to conferences, youd only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which Ive seen a few companies deploy.

A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know theres a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.

With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what theyve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the teams minds.

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5 Tips For Maintaining International SEO Knowledge With Training

The just-released first series is all about Rank Tracker. The four videos are to demonstrate how Rank Tracker's most powerful features should be used to their full potential for dominating search results.

Minsk, Belarus (PRWEB) March 14, 2012

The first training video series is devoted to the much-hyped Rank Tracker. The four Rank Tracker video tutorials released today are to take users by hand through:

"Rank Tracker by Link-Assistant.Com is the rank checking tool of choice for 380k professionals in the SEO industry worldwide," says Viktar Khamianok, CEO and Founder, Link-Assistant.Com. "Among other factors that helped us achieve this level of loyalty is enhancing our SEO software with new features several times a month to echo all the latest SEO trends."

"Though Rank Tracker is pretty easy to use, it has grown to become so feature-rich that we want to make sure our users dont miss out on every function available in the SEO tool."

Visit http://www.link-assistant.com/video.html to get Rank Tracker's training videos.

New video tutorials on the remaining SEO PowerSuite tools are to be released early in April.

Stay tuned for the company's updates, read Link-Assistant.Com's SEO blog and get social with us on Facebook fb.me/LinkAssistant, Twitter @LinkAssistant and Google Plus gplus.to/LinkAssistant.

Also check out Link-Assistant.Com's Youtube account to watch all videos released by the company and their customers. SEO PowerSuite users often have their own helpful tips and tricks on using the software that bring great value to the whole community. Thus, Link-Assistant.Com encourages their customers sending short help videos theyll be shared with other users though Youtube.

*Defining the world standard for SEO software About Link-Assistant.Com:*

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Link-Assistant.Com to Launch Its Training Video Series for SEO PowerSuite Software

**Full disclosure, this is meant to be a humorous type post and rant for fellow SEO professional, sorry if I have offended anyone! 🙂

After 13 years in this industry, I have had my share of absolutely horrible SEO leads. I know that dealing with bad leads comes with the territory of being a business owner, regardless of industry, but sometimes I feel like SEO has to deal with more (or much worse) bad leads than other industries. Here are four of my favorite worst SEO leads Ive come across over the years. How many of these have you had to deal with?

Whenever I talk with an SEO lead that refers to themselves as a serial entrepreneur, all I can usually think is hyper client. I know there are people out there that make a fantastic living building a business from the ground up and then selling it and moving onto the next project, but Ive found that the ones who are really successful at that arent trying to juggle 10 companies at once.

I was speaking with a lead a few months ago that had 90 websites he wanted SEO services for. Almost all of them were brand new (meaning zero search engine trust factor), poorly designed and had next to no content. I dont like taking on clients that I dont think I can actually help, and I knew that my company wasnt a good fit for this site owner. I recommended that he take a few SEO training courses and learn the basics of SEO for himself and really narrow his focus on which sites he thought had the most potential and then maybe a few months down the road we could revisit an SEO partnership. His response? He didnt have the money to take any SEO classes. Then how are you going to pay for full-service SEO on 90 websites?!

In my experience, serial entrepreneurs usually turn into hyper clients. They have a hard time focusing on what needs to be done (and getting in down in a set time frame) and arent ready to settle in for the long haul. SEO requires a lot of patience and a lot of trust in your provider, and leads like this usually have neither.

I do my best to get back to every lead that comes into my company, whether it is by phone or our online lead form. I am more than happy to spend a few hours going back and forth with a potential SEO client and walking them through my companys SEO process. I do my best to address any concerns and questions, especially if they have been burned by a black hat SEO company in the past. Ill draw up a proposal, and even meet them in person if I think its a potentially great client. But then what happens sometimes? They vanish off the face of the earth. Suddenly emails stopped getting answered, phone calls dont get returned and that proposal is probably sitting in someones trash folder.

If you decide your site isnt ready for outsourcing SEO, or you found another SEO provider to work with thats fine, just let me know! Ive put a lot of my time and effort into guiding you through the process, please dont just disappear on me.

How many phone calls, proposals, face-to-face meetings and back-and-forth emails does one lead really need? I understand that choosing an SEO provider isnt like deciding where you want to go for lunch, but there comes a point where you have all the information I can give you without you becoming an actual client. I want to make the process as transparent as possible and make you feel confident about choosing my SEO company as your SEO provider but there is only so much I can do!

Also, dont expect me to outline an entire onsite and link building campaign for your website during the sales process. Im not holding out on you, but I truly cant make educated recommendations without having access to your sites analytics, an insiders look at your business and much more. Unless you are prepared to let me dig through your site dont expect a custom SEO plan upfront.

I really hate it when leads try to play me against other SEO firms. If you liked what you heard from another SEO company so much that you feel the need to bring it up in our conversation why havent you hired them already? Trust your gut and go with it! I especially feel like it comes up a lot when leads start asking about pricing and they are trying to get me to lower the cost of my monthly SEO services by saying that company X was only going to charge them so much. I understand that some leads are just trying to get a feel for the types of SEO providers out there and figure out which one is the best fit for them, but it feels like others are trying to pit us against each other just so they can get a better deal. There is no secret to SEO success, and trying to convince me that another SEO company knows one and I better divulge it if I want you as a client isnt going to work.

Originally posted here:
My Favorite Worst SEO Leads

SMX West is approaching fast, and one of the sessions that caught my eye was the Enterprise SEO Challenges & Solutions. The panel is loaded with speakers with deep experience in enterprise SEO. I decided to reach out to the panelists and get a preview of their presentations, so I asked each of them some questions in advance of the show.

Eric Enge:Can you tells us how Ebay deals with the challenges of producing content on a large scale?

Jordan Koene: The cool thing about eBay is that we have millions of pages making the management of these pages complex.

However, many of the pages on eBay are not directly controlled by the company, rather they are controlled by our community of sellers. This is often a challenge and requires education and support from eBay to our community of sellers.

One of the solutions we created are pages which aggregate our sellers items into what we call a product page, such as this one for the Nikon D90 123 MP Digital SLR Camera (Black Body Only).

If you scroll down the page a bit, you will see lots of great content such as this product description (only a portion is shown):

Or, these user reviews (only a subset are shown):

These types of pages benefit the sellers by creating a larger marketplace that can compete more effectively for keywords that can bring them potential buyers.

Read more:
Enterprise SEO Panel Preview For SMX West 2012

Markham, Ontario (PRWEB) February 27, 2012

Search Engine Workshops Director of Training John Alexander is to bring a live, hands-on SEO workshop on April 18-20, in Markham, Ontario.

The 3 Day SEO Training Workshop includes personalized instruction to each attendee along with a free 6 month mentoring program all for one tuition fee. Students completing the search engine workshop program are very successful, gaining top visibility in the organic search engine rankings.

John Alexander continued to say that "the reason the hands-on SEO Workshop is popular is because we limit enrollment to only just 18 students maximum, so each participant gets personal one-on-one interaction with me and we look at each students training on a one-to one basis." This SEO seminar is, in fact, a workshop where students are encouraged to bring along their laptops so they get instruction as well as hands on exercises with the trainer right there to answer all of their questions as they work on learning advanced search engine optimization skills over 3 days.

Then after the workshop, they are given a free 6 month SEO mentoring program for ongoing support at no extra cost. Alexander closed by saying that "this makes 10 years that I have been teaching hands on SEO Workshops, since I began back in January 2002 with the first SEO Workshop."

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Search Engine Workshops to Bring a 3-Day Advanced Hands-on SEO Training Workshop to Markham April 18-20