I’m wondering how many of you out there pay for SEO services versus just doing it yourself? I’ve never paid for any SEO services, but have been tossing around the idea of it for some time now. I feel like I’ve done the best I can for a couple of sites I own. If I’ve done everything I know how to do, and still can’t get a top ranking in Google or Yahoo, then maybe it’s time to hire SEO experts to finish the job.

At what price though? Would $100 a month be reasonable? How about $500 a month? I guess it depends on how popular the keywords are and how much profit you expect from the increase in traffic.

Paying for SEO might be hard to do, because it’s not something you see results for right away. It would take months to move up in the rankings. You can drive traffic to your website in other ways, such as PPC or advertising, but they don’t provide the long term benefits of strong SERP rankings. On the other hand, nothing is guaranteed in search engines. You could spend $1000 to get to page 1, and then 2 months later get bumped down or banned and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s a tough debate. I’ve always been a believer of ‘it takes money to make money.’ I have to imagine a lot of the ‘big players’ spend money on SEO, or are experts themselves. I am not an expert. My knowledge on the subject is limited.

So would you pay money for SEO services? How much would you pay to get page 1 rankings for all your big keywords?

I am having some trouble with the Adsense Deluxe wordpress plugin. I wanted to make a quick post here in case someone out there knows the fix.

I’ve notice on two of my blogs, Forum Business Blog and Mugdish Sports, that an error will occur on the index page if you are running Adsense Deluxe in more then 3 posts. Adsense has a rule that you can only display 3 ad units on a page, so if your page code has 10 ad unit codes in it, Adsense will only be displayed in the first 3 units from the top of the page. At least that’s how I understood it.

So take a look at Forum Business Blog. I have Adsense Deluxe placed in every single post. If you look at a single post like Page Titles Are Important to Forums, Adsense is displayed properly using the Adsense Deluxe plugin. However, if you go back to the Forum Business Blog home page, and scroll down to the Page Titles Are Important to Forums post on October 11, you will see a white box (if using FireFox) where the 200×200 ad unit was, or you will see a ‘This Page Cannot Be Displayed’ error if using Internet Explorer.

Of course an ad unit won’t be displayed in that post, because Adsense is already displayed in the first 3 posts, and you can only have 3 ad units per page. I, however, thought that if all the adsense units were taken, then the post would be displayed normal, not havnig a white box where the ad should be. Do you see what I’m saying?

What’s weird is that if you scroll down on Forum Business Blog to the post from October 10th, that post looks normal…and it has Adsense Deluxe in it. So why would the post from the 11th look jacked up, and the post frmo the 10th look OK? I don’t ever remember this happening.

If anyone knows what’s going on, please let me know. This is happening on a couple blogs I own. I’m using Wordpress version 2.3 and Adsense Deluxe version .8.

I’ve been tracking DerekBeau’s progress in the development of a Free PPC Campaign Builder Tool for a week or two now. The tool lets you build targeted, long-tail AdWords campaigns in record time. All you need to do is provide a keyword list, set some options, write some text ads, and this tool will do everything else for you. It is basically a free version of SpeedPPC.

Derek got the idea to create a free tool for everyone to use because he didn’t want other people to spend nearly $500 for a tool that should be free in the first place. I’ve already downloaded the tool, but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I’m posting this from Katie’s computer, so I likely won’t get to mess with it until tonight when I get home from work. However, if you can test the tool on Derek’s server here.

I think it’s pretty cool that Derek took almost 15 hours of his time to create a free tool for everyone to use. Be sure to head over to his blog and check it out.

The last two weeks I’ve been working on a new project. Today I’m officially ‘launching’ the site.

I’d like to introduce you to Forum Business Blog.

Forum Business Blog (FBB) is a new resource for current and prospective forum owners and administrators. I will cover everything from forum software, modifications and products, monetization, traffic building tips, member conversion tips, promotion ideas and more. Readers will learn everything they need to develop and maintain a successful forum.

My goal is to grow FBB into a successful blog with a purpose and targeted readership. This isn’t another ‘make money online’ blog that seem to be popping up everywhere. This blog is targeted to forums only. It’s not there to teach newbs how to make $1,000,000 overnight with no work whatsoever. Forums are HARD, and I aim to facilitate the development process.
I have a lot of experience with owning forums. I’ve started plenty of forums from scratch and even bought and sold forums for thousands of dollars. I’ve had a forum nominated for Board of the Month on Vbulletin as well. I’m not the end all be all when it comes to forums, but it is one of my better areas when it comes to running websites and making money online.

So if you own a forum, check out Forum Business Blog. If you want to own a forum, maybe FBB can persuade you you start one. Be sure to signup for the RSS too!
Let me know what you think. I’ve put a lot of time into this site and really want it to work. I can handle criticism, so lay it on me. Anything I can do to improve it, I will.

This post was written by Anja Glauch.

As competitive as the online world becomes, it also is crucial that a website is noticed online.

As repetitive as this might be, Search Engine Optimization ensures that your web content appears when a user is searching for it. It is essential that search engines can read the content from a website therefore optimizing PDF files as well as normal HTML/ XHTML web content would be an excellent step to take.

Search Engines rate websites based on their relevancy to content and keywords, but also on many quality links the sites has - outgoing and incoming. The same way Search Engine Optimization specialists can optimize websites, PDF documents can be optimized too.

How to optimize a PDF file:

• Make all PDF’s in text format, so that the search engine can read it;
• Complete the document’s properties, (especially the title) - what usually happens is that people forget to set a title, that way the search engine will pick content from the PDF file and it might not be exactly what you would want.
• Optimize text, by making sure that selected keywords are there and can easily be identified;
• Add links to PDF files, so that readers can always be redirected to your website;
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open it, and search engines can find it;
• Sizes should be kept as small as possible, if files take too long to download users will abandon the site;
• Place links to your files on your web page where it can easily be found, i.e. closer to the root level of the site’s file structure.
• Specify reading order, in terms of text and headlines;
• Publish articles in different directories that directly link to your PDF documents

In order to achieve a higher ranking, it is important to use a set of well chosen keywords and relevant content, by optimizing PDF files. They can achieve a higher number of links and the opportunity to have more content associated with your website and your business, which would ultimately affect one’s ranking on the most popular search engines.

I had a couple of questions sent to me in the last week, including a message from someone in Sweden who may be a relative of mine. That’s pretty cool, because in America the only Lithman’s you will find are my relatives. But anyways, on to the real questions.

Question 1 comes from Nick of Whats the Fuss. How do you SEO a masked URL that points to a different URL?

This is a good question that I did not immediately know the answer to. I assume you build backlinks to it just as you qould any other domain. Because I don’t know exactly, I’ll point you to a thread on Digital Point that may be of assistance.

Question 2 comes from Greg of LoLLeR LAN. Do you think WidgetBucks will pay out a good deal of money for publishers since they do pay per click and will you think about using this type of advertisement on your websites?

I have never heard of WidgetBucks before you emailed me. I briefly looked over their website and was surprised to see their list of clients at the bottom: Best Buy, Wal MArt, Ebay, Target…wow. It looks pretty cool. I’ve opsted an image below of what the sidebar widget looks like.

I’m not sure if I will try this ad program because I don’t have any product review type sites. I imagine that this would be a nice compliment to other ad companies if you own a Tech site or something similar. If anyone here has used WidgetBucks, post a comment and let us know how it is.

Question 3 comes from John, who didn’t leave a URL. Do you have any secret projects you’re working on?

Of course I do. I always have something big I’m working on that I can’t tell anyone. Thanks for asking though :-) 

Well that’s it for this week’s edition of Ask David. Don’t forget that by simply asking me a question (any question you can think of), you will get a free back link.