One of my clients asked me this question recently:

“I have been emailed by this company [url here] re their services. What’s your view on these types of companies? What questions would you recommend I ask to ascertain whether these sorts of services are worth the money?”

I reckon SEO is still worthwhile, though it’s just one of the things to do, and becoming less and less important.

I reckon you should ask these questions:

1. What other speakers have you worked with?
2. Are clients really looking for speakers using Google?
3. What is the best kind of qualified traffic you’ll get me?
4. What conversion metrics do you use to measure success?

And … most importantly … What about the fact that people are using Google less to search by topics?

The person I refer clients to when it comes to SEO is Ed Keay-Smith of www.adwordsmarketing.com.

If you’re asking this question, congratulations! It’s one of the most common questions I get asked about search engine marketing, and one of the most important.

The answer is that you should do both – pay for Google ads and continue to market your Web pages for the free listings.

Ed and I talk about this in the interview for Get Traffic Fast, and you can listen to that part of it here:

How do I make my website hit the top ten or 20, when searching say inGoogle (1ST WOULD BE BETTER). Is it to do with maths, in the construction of the site?

Answer:

The #1 factor that will get you to the top of search engines is to write valuable information that people would like to read. The search engine’s job is to serve the searcher, not the Web site owner. The more relevant and topical your information, the better its chances of getting a high ranking.

After that, you can consider various techniques for adjusting your page to increase your ranking. There are a number of simple things you can do to enhance your Web page, and thus boost your ranking.

How do I promote my site in search engines, without a great time-lag between new pages uploaded and returns from the engines?

Answer:

Use Google AdWords.

This is by far the quickest way to get listed in Google. It does mean that you’re paying them, but it also means that you get an extremely high level of control over your listing. Typically, I find that my ad gets listed within 5-10 minutes of me creating it! It also means that if the ad is not working, I can take it down within 5 minutes as well.

I think that perhaps you were asking about getting listed fast with the free listings. The trouble is that you have less control over the search engine “spiders” that crawl the Web regularly. That doesn’t mean you’re completely helpless, though. For example, if Google already knows about a page that’s changing regularly (your blog, for example), it will visit that page more often. So you can add a link from that page to your new page, making it more likely to be listed quickly.