Pandia Post Newsletter No. 12 2002 Part 6

BOOKS & TOOLS

Planet Ocean's Search Engine News Newsletter

By reading a newsletter like the Pandia Post you will get the big picture as regards search engine development and search engine optimization. If you optimize your own site, or would like to stay up to date on the intricacies of ranking and marketing, you need more. We recommend a subscription to Planet Ocean's Search Engine News monthly newsletter.

The newsletter includes search engine updates for Yahoo!, Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, Lycos, ODP, LookSmart and Overture. Each issue has articles on topics like spam, Web technologies, keyword selection, paid inclusion services, linking strategies and more.

There is also a Quick Submit Reference Chart, a Global Search Engine and Directory List and an Inktomi Powered Search Engines Comparison Chart. Moreover, you get Planet Ocean's excellent introduction to search engine optimization, The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engines Wars, as a very useful bonus. This book is updated every month.

For US$97 you get the ebook, six months of Search Engine News, and access to six years of archives and resources, and you'll get a refund if you don't like it.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear. Pandia will get a percentage if you accept this offer after having clicked on the link below. We would, however, never recommend a product like this one if we didn't believe it to be one of the best -- yes, probably the best -- available. We read the newsletter regularly and do pay for our own subscription!

Click here to subscribe to Planet Ocean's Search Engine News: http://www.searchenginehelp.com/pandia/senewspeek/

Buyer’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization & Positioning Services

Online ebook by MarketingSherpa.com. 140 pp. USD199,-

This is a study of SEOP (search engine optimization and positioning services). Why should you hire and how much should you pay? These are the questions behind this study, which was done from July to December 2001. Research was done in the States and in Great Britain, by Anthony Muller and Tom Gibbon respectively. Anne Holland edited the study.

If no one is doing SEOP for your site or if the work that is being done does not seem to be worth the money, this is definitively the book for you. If you or your firm do SEOP work this study could also prove valuable. It will help you anticipate the questions and demands of your customers and this could give you the edge in this very competitive market.

An update to the Buyer’s Guide is already available. It features 25 more profiles of SEOP firms, most of them in the USA but also some in Canada and Australia.This month there will be an all new second edition. It will include profiles of more than 75 SEOP firms in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Europe.

Every SEOP firm that applies for inclusion and meets the requirements can get themselves into this guide. What a golden opportunity to be visible to SEOP buyers! And inclusion is free. The requirements are that the firm must derive a significant portion of its revenues from SEOP consulting. It must have at least one person on staff who spends 100% of her or his time doing SEOP and that person must have at least three years of fulltime SEOP experience. Also, they must answer the questions of marketingSherpa.com’s researcher thoroughly.

So what do you get if you decide to buy this study? It starts with telling you in lay man’s terms why you should hire an SEOP firm. In fact all of the study is written in a way that makes it intelligible to a broad audience, not just geeks and techies.

The Buyer’s Guide then goes on to tell you what you should expect from an SEOP firm. What kind of services should they offer and what effects are you entitled to be looking for? There is even a list of seven guidelines that you should have in mind when evaluating potential candidates. Very useful.

Our favourite is the 14-point Best Practices Questionnaire. It offers fourteen questions that you are recommended to ask before you start working with an SEOP firm. To each questions you get to know what a really good SEOP consultant is likely to answer and which answers that should make a mental warning sign pop up. This section is quite thorough but still very to the point.

The main part of the book contains an evaluation of a list of US and UK SEOP firms. You get easy-scan charts of pricing and best practices. Put together these charts will tell you if the firm charging the really big bucks is really as good as they claim of if the inconspicuous little firm you might easily have overlooked might do just as well.

The section called “43 SEOP Firms Evaluated in Detail” makes up most of the study. Even so, you get no more than two pages of short summaries for each firm. To us this does not feel so detailed at all. We also miss a couple of lines at the end of each evaluation, highlighting the highs and lows. Still this section might be useful as a sort of in-depth yellow pages on SEO.

Each evaluation tells you about set-up fees, maintenance fees, contrasts, consulting & results, services & techniques used and best result to date. The evaluations are easy to compare and with the extended list of SEOP forms in the second edition this section could be very useful.

Yes, the Buyer’s Guide is a handy tool. Still, USD119 is a lot of money when you don’t even get a book, just a pdf file. The study is thorough and professional. The report, however, seems to have been published in a hurry. We found the misspellings to prove it. This kind of blemish should be avoided, especially when you charge such a high price. Hopefully this will be corrected in the new edition.

MarketingSherpa presentation of the newly updated Buyers' Guide to Search Engine Optimization & Positioning Firms

More books on search engines and Internet searching