I know how much my fees are, and if you ask me I'll be happy to tell you. The more research I do and the more postings I see makes me wonder.

I've always tried to provide a fair service for a fair price. Some recent articles have lead me to believe not everyone is doing the same thing. Is an in-house Search Engine Optimization person for your company worth 250 000 per year?

I know someone is going to argue with me, but I would say no. Most of us are specialists to be sure, but we're mostly self taught. Many SEO's don't even have a solid grasp and still rely on META tags which they probably generated with a free online tool. (I swear if I see another "revisit-after" tag I'm going to scream.. ok I do scream somewhat regularly.)

Now of course, I'm as big of a fan of getting paid more as anyone else. Fair is fair though, and you can learn as much or more about SEO as I know by listening to Google, doing research online and visiting search engine forums. The reality is that the basics of SEO like good page design, proper tagging, quality tagging and reputable inbound links have not changed. How search engines detect pages which are designed to fool them has definitely gotten more sophisticated but a quality interesting page has always ranked well in Google and probably will for quite some time.

If you're researching either my company, Get Clicked SEO, or another SEO company, get some background information first. Do some basic research on search engine optimization so you can at least understand what services you're getting for your money. Feel free to start here with my SEO articles. I certainly don't believe that the cheapest is the best, but I am fan of value for your investment. With some basic knowledge about what you're buying, you're far less likely to get ripped off.

Labels: search engine optimization, SEO