I noticed via my tracking this week that 15 people have found the SEOmoz blog by typing in $19 SEO at Google. I have to assume it's folks who've heard the pun and are curious about how this long running joke began, so I figured I'd provide an explanation (I've got another, cooler reason for bringing it up, but we'll save that for later on).
The $19 joke began in this old thread at SEOChat. Here's the gist of it:
New User:
Hi I'm new! I am wondering what I should charge for SEO??? Can anyone tell me??Randfish:
$19. That is the best possible amount to charge for SEO.Lots of Other Members:
What?? Why $19??Randfish:
Sorry for that, I couldn't resist. Your pricing should be based on 3 things - your cost (which is to say how much you could be earning with your time if it were put towards another endeavor), your specialization (in this case, SEO, which is a relatively focused field, but not one in which it is exceptionally difficult to find willing help), and the demand for your services (if you are new to the field, you must neccessarily charge less than those who have a reputation and can therefore charge more).
Best of luck!Cygnus:
No one understands jokes anymore.
Well, this little running tidbit made its way around the web. Note the 400+ references at forums and blogs across the SEO industry. In fact, we joked about it so much, it keeps coming up in comments, posts, threads and general industry banter. Well, Matt and I were trying to come up with something to pour our hearts and minds into for 3 months (in our 20% time) and decided that providing SEO service for $19 really was a noble goal.
Thus, in just a few short weeks, we'll be introducing the SEOmoz TRA Tool (a cheesy acronym for Total Rankings Analysis). I can't reveal everything about it yet, but needless to say, you're going to get a lot of very cool data about your rankings, your competitors, your links and some onsite details (canonicalization issues, keyword usage, targeting, etc).
We're pretty excited to be rolling out this system, and before we start charging $19, we'll be sending out some free trial codes to run it to SEOmoz blog readers. If you want to give it a test run when we put it in "beta", we'll be running a blog post in a few weeks and let folks leave comments if they want to receieve it. For now, if you've got any fantastic ideas for things you'd like TRA to analyze, drop them below. We're making some final adjustments and would love a few novel ideas to add value.
Matt's gonna kill me, but here's a sneak peek, anyway:
Kat all you think about is TnA
Yep, you're probably right about knowing your own linkbait Rand but there's certainly value in seeing what is attracting links in your niche.
Matt - honestly, that's the scariest avatar I've ever seen. Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, get something else.
hahaha, oh come on
Turkish: You take sugar? Brick Top: No thank you, Turkish; I'm sweet enough.
merchant - we have our ways... ;)
How will it analyze the links? The problem with link analysis is finding them. The link:site feature has been effectively disabled in all the search engines. MSN returns a half-accurate number, but won't show you more than about 250 of the links. Even if you did it day in day out for a month you still wouldn't get all the links to a site.
Most tools I've seen that claim to analyze links are just using the link:site tool in the SEs--but that's only a little better than pointless.
And links are everything in ranking for competitive keywords, which is sadly what people tend to think of when they think of SEO. So I don't understand all these SEO programs that don't or can't do links.
Speaking of linkbait, I still think we should call it the "TnA Tool."
Teehee.
I want a tool that watches my Yahoo backlinks and each week tells me about the new ones. I'd like to know when I get new links so I can send those folks a nice bottle of wine, a case of beer or a few pouches of Red Man.
Something like that. Indicative data hence the 'maybe considered linkbait'
I think looking at that within various verticals would be interesting and potentially useful.
Of course I wouldn't determine it, that would be Rand's job ;)
How would you determine link bait? Pages that currently hold an high amount of links compared to the average links on your other pages?
I'd think that if a site has a high number of links going to one subpage and a large percentage of those links are from a social bookmarking site like /. or digg you may consider that page "linkbaited".
I haven't tested this, but it makes sense in my head...
Hmmm... I can't see any possible value in measuring linkbait. If you've got some on your site, you know about it, so a tool telling you it's there would be a big waste, IMO.
Rand,
It wouldn't be valueable for your site but it would be great when researching competition. Especially if their link bait is only partially effective. You could investigate what they attempted, perfect it and release it yourself - new and improved!
But really it would be valueable to just find out if any of your competition is attempting it or had any success. If your industry has that going on you will definately need to step up your tactics to compete effectively. This could make a huge difference when estimating projects.
Could we focus on linkbait? Analyzing a site to indicate what might be considered existing linkbait, helping site owners to identify what is working for them already and perhaps cross referencing contextually related data against popular urls to identify what is working 'niche'-wide?
In other words a section headlined: The following URLS may be considered linkbait within your niche:
I'm happy to expand if that sounds like gibberish...