How to research SEO candidate
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From my reading most SEO "experts" are indeed con artists.
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@popester said in How to research SEO candidate:
Does a contractor ever need admin access to Word Press for editing?
Can a contractor do their job without having full access via FTP to the site?How would they be able to do any optimization if they don't have access to your website? You could setup a dev site for them to test changes in and then push the changes to prod but really if your company is hiring them there needs to be a bit of trust.
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@coliver This is where my ignorance shows. I really don't know what level access an SEO wizard "needs". I am trying to rectify that situation by researching and asking questions. In my 20 years at the same company and having been on both sides of the request standard user answer to the question " How much access do you need " is " All of it ". When I got to the IT side of the desk I saw the potential for disaster and decided as well as read in more than one "Best Practices" article that is NOT an option.
I think the dev site is a great idea; unfortunately that will have to be a future endeavor.
I absolutely trust that they will not do nefarious things, its the dumb things that keep me up a night.IT Generalist is so apropos.
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I just got word back from our hosting site. They are for more cautious than I am when it comes to security. They said, not much you can do but give them Deity level access and change the password when they are done. Oh well. At least I tried.
Thanks.
Am i supposed to mark solved if I found the answer?
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@coliver said in How to research SEO candidate:
From my reading most SEO "experts" are indeed con artists.
Yep. SEO really just means, make a proper web site. It's a lot simpler than most people think. A lot of the SEO "experts" actually hurt your ranking in Google searches.
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Yoast free is great and will do more than any of those "SEO experts". I've never paid for yoast, but I can imagine it's worth it. I'm able to get on the first page of Google with my blog for certain keywords without much hassle.
Yoast tells you exactly what to do to increase SEO. Dumb stuff like having an image named the same as your target keyword makes a big difference. Yoast grades each page and post and gives your site an overall grade. Red means bad SEO, yellow could use improvement, and green is excellent. Not all my pages or posts are green, but the ones that are rank very highly.
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@popester said in How to research SEO candidate:
This may be too nebulous a question, but i was wondering, where is a good place to start looking if you want to research a SEO person/company? Our company has a bad track record finding people that do this that are not con artists.
That's because it's a con artist service category. SEO isn't something you hire someone for, it's just something that your marketing and web people do as part of normal operations. Not something you do separately or hire someone for.
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@popester said in How to research SEO candidate:
@coliver This is where my ignorance shows. I really don't know what level access an SEO wizard "needs".
Total access.
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A contractor can't really do SEO, SEO is a continuous activity from your content people.
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@popester said in How to research SEO candidate:
- Can a contractor do their job without having full access via FTP to the site?
We don't even have FTP to any of our sites, so that's definitely not needed.
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That's the free version. I'd imagine the paid version must be better and can possibly do some of those tasks automatically.
I also have some yellow and red pages/posts. With any minimal effort, you can generally get yellow. I've gotten red in a few places because they are posts or pages that don't function like general pages/posts. I think in the paid version you can pick more templates for optimization. A good example would be a portfolio page. Yoast free tries to grade it like a regular post/page which makes it red.
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@scottalanmiller said in How to research SEO candidate:
@popester said in How to research SEO candidate:
- Can a contractor do their job without having full access via FTP to the site?
We don't even have FTP to any of our sites, so that's definitely not needed.
That's a red flag to me. They shouldn't need to download or upload anything other than images or small files which can be done directly through the website.
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I use Yoast as well for WP.
But there is a lot to SEO. I've been doing it for my sites and others over many years.
As Scott said, total access is needed, but should best be done internally.
You can pay someone to do it, but most likely they'll need to edit content depending on it's current condition.
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Yeah, FTP isn't needed, but in some cases may be the only way to edit web content. With WP, no. It jsut depends on how your setup is.
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I have been researching and working on the same thing for a long time.
I know in the past there were a lot of ways to "game" your results, like link networks, but these are now penalized by Google.
If you think about it, Google wants every result to be relevant. So if your content, services and geography is relevant you will appear in the results. You used to have to "build" SEO, but those things seem to have very little impact on SEO anymore. Things you can not control (like people searching for something and picking a particular link) have more impact that back links and other SEO strategies. Page content means a lot more than metadata.
There are good plugins out there as mentioned above that are the best place to start, plus setting up a Google Business Page has a huge impact on returned results in your area.
