Did I get a good deal?

15 replies
  • SEO
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I've been posting consistently on my blog for the past 6 months, 3 posts weekly on Monday Wednesday and Friday on the topic of self-development/personal development.

I accumulated over 70 posts. The thing is, I did not take into consideration in doing SEO and Keyword research on any of those posts, as I am still learning.

I decided just to hired a freelancer to go through all 70 posts and incorporate keywords and change up my posts so that it was SEO friendly. They made most of my blog posts turn from yellow to green (not all, as they informed me that is not the goal).

I paid $250 for their service, about 7 days works. They were from Romania however and their English was slightly broken.

Was that a good deal I got? I mean, now I can continue writing my blog posts with keyword research/SEO optimization in mind without having to backtrack to my previous 70 posts haha.
#deal #good
  • Profile picture of the author PBMax
    Is it a WP site? If so, you could've easily uploaded the Yoast plugin and changed all your posts from the "all posts" page in the CMS backend for FREE.

    So, yes, sadly you wasted your money having an ESL guy do your English SEO.

    However, lessons are for learning. Next time you'll know.
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    • Profile picture of the author selfstarterguide
      Yeah it is a Wordpress Site.
      And yes I have the Wordpress SEO by Yoast installed.

      I've learned my lesson and won't hire someone to do this again!

      Would you mind simplifying the process that you mentioned? I'm not familiar with the terminology or how to "upload" the Yoast plug in and change things in the CMS.

      Is there a place to find a step by step process to adjust SEO for next time?

      All I got from the $250 was 70 posts edited from ESL person; a set of keywords, a SEO Analysis report, and some SEO tips for next time lol.
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      • Profile picture of the author PBMax
        Originally Posted by selfstarterguide View Post

        Yeah it is a Wordpress Site.
        And yes I have the Wordpress SEO by Yoast installed.

        I've learned my lesson and won't hire someone to do this again!

        Would you mind simplifying the process that you mentioned? I'm not familiar with the terminology or how to "upload" the Yoast plug in and change things in the CMS.

        Is there a place to find a step by step process to adjust SEO for next time?

        All I got from the $250 was 70 posts edited from ESL person; a set of keywords, a SEO Analysis report, and some SEO tips for next time lol.
        Actually, for all that the beer guy is right, $250 is pretty good. However, free is better.

        If you have Yoast activated, then you already have the ability to edit your title and meta data on the posts.

        On the left side of the backend dashboard, look for "posts." Hover over it and click "all posts."

        From there you'll see all your posts (20 per page I think) and your SEO data for each. Click on the little floating pencils next to each section and write your titles and meta data.

        Rinse and repeat for all.
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        • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
          Originally Posted by PBMax View Post

          Actually, for all that the beer guy is right, $250 is pretty good. However, free is better.

          If you have Yoast activated, then you already have the ability to edit your title and meta data on the posts.

          On the left side of the backend dashboard, look for "posts." Hover over it and click "all posts."

          From there you'll see all your posts (20 per page I think) and your SEO data for each. Click on the little floating pencils next to each section and write your titles and meta data.

          Rinse and repeat for all.
          I'm not trying to be a jerk, but SEO is about a lot more than what Yoast provides. That is really just scratching the surface of good onpage SEO.
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          • Profile picture of the author PBMax
            Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

            I'm not trying to be a jerk, but SEO is about a lot more than what Yoast provides. That is really just scratching the surface of good onpage SEO.
            However, it is all about what the OP paid for. Optimizing the articles which is exactly what Yoast does.

            Sure the page itself needs to be laid out in a certain way, minimize the OBL, etc, etc...
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            • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
              Originally Posted by PBMax View Post

              However, it is all about what the OP paid for. Optimizing the articles which is exactly what Yoast does.

              Sure the page itself needs to be laid out in a certain way, minimize the OBL, etc, etc...
              Sorry. If someone asks me to optimize an article on their site, I take that to mean the entire page, not just the article itself. That's what I was talking about. And if you are doing it for 250 articles that is a boatload of work. Silos, internal links, proper URL structures, image optimization, titles, LSI keywords, Schema, page size, page speed, etc.

              Yoast really doesn't do squat for the content anyhow. It counts keyword density which is useless and makes sure the keyword shows up a few times, also useless.

              For $250 though, if all the SEO company did was tweak all the title tags, he still got a bargain.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    If they actually went through 70 posts and made SEO friendly adjustments to all of them (more than just editing titles and meta descriptions which is probably all they really did), then you got a great deal. No way in hell would I even read 70 posts for $250, much less work to improve the SEO on each of them.
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  • Profile picture of the author selfstarterguide
    You both are amazing in helping me understand this to a higher degree. I admire the point of views both parties have provided me.

    What the person did seemed mainly within the article itself. She bolded/italicized and changed the image to have a "name" attached to it rather than a jumbled amount of letters. She then wrote up focus keywords and replaced my original ones.

    Her english was broken so I didn't want her to add additional content but she did write some meta descriptions, which I was fine with.

    Thanks for the advice, truly.
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Seems like a good deal to me too. I see no way to offer anything like that for under €1000 (+VAT), and even that's would be just for quickly going through the articles (10 min each). If there's keyword research to be done it'll take much more than that. For bigger changes such that the ones that Mr. Friedman refers to sky is the limit.

      Originally Posted by selfstarterguide View Post

      What the person did seemed mainly within the article itself. She bolded/italicized and changed the image to have a "name" attached to it rather than a jumbled amount of letters. She then wrote up focus keywords and replaced my original ones.
      Focus keywords are just a simplistic helper feature that allows you to see wether you mention the main keyword in the article. Just have that keyword in the title and content, and you're on green. I'm hoping that it wasn't the way you controlled the quality of her work.

      Bolding isn't that useful, but sub titles are. Not quite sure what you're talking about here. I usually don't bother with image names, but it doesn't hurt to optimize them too.

      But I'm not trying to say she scammed you by not doing much. I have no way to verify the work so I can't make claims on it.
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      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author deezn
    WTF does Yoast even do anyway, SEO wise?
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  • Profile picture of the author Slade556
    I'd say you got a really great deal! However, next time, try to hire someone who knows their English! There are plenty of freelancers from Romania who're very familiar with the English language! Or, you know, from other countries.
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  • Hello selfstarterguide
    $ 250 is not much, but 'the next time someone tries to speak the language better !!! ahhahha
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by selfstarterguide View Post

      You both are amazing in helping me understand this to a higher degree. I admire the point of views both parties have provided me.

      What the person did seemed mainly within the article itself. She bolded/italicized and changed the image to have a "name" attached to it rather than a jumbled amount of letters. She then wrote up focus keywords and replaced my original ones.

      Her english was broken so I didn't want her to add additional content but she did write some meta descriptions, which I was fine with.

      Thanks for the advice, truly.
      Bold and italicized words really is not SEO. If anything, it looks more like spam to me.

      The focus keywords are not part of the article, right? Those are just added in Yoast and then show up as your meta keywords I believe. If so, delete those. Totally useless. If anything, they are just giving away keyword ideas to your competitors.

      Also, the meta descriptions you might want to consider deleting. I prefer pages with no meta description. Google will then pick out a piece of content from the page that best matches the search query. In this way you have a dynamic meta description, which can actually give you better click through rates. It's the way Wikipedia has been doing it for years and they rank for damn near everything.
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      • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
        Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

        The focus keywords are not part of the article, right? Those are just added in Yoast and then show up as your meta keywords I believe.
        No, focus keyword doesn't appear on the page. Yoast has spoken against meta keywords, and has those disabled by default and hidden somewhere in the settings.

        If you fill in a focus keyword you can have Yoast SEO check if it appears on the page. Then you get a nice green dot in the post listings. I've never found the feature useful, and in my opinion it's a bit dangerous for the newbies. AFAIK it doesn't poll any services to check wether the keyword is relevant one, so you might end up being satisfied with your optimizations for words that nobody has ever searched for.
        Signature
        Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
        Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

        What's your excuse?
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        • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
          Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

          No, focus keyword doesn't appear on the page. Yoast has spoken against meta keywords, and has those disabled by default and hidden somewhere in the settings.

          If you fill in a focus keyword you can have Yoast SEO check if it appears on the page. Then you get a nice green dot in the post listings. I've never found the feature useful, and in my opinion it's a bit dangerous for the newbies. AFAIK it doesn't poll any services to check wether the keyword is relevant one, so you might end up being satisfied with your optimizations for words that nobody has ever searched for.
          Oh yeah. Okay, I remember it now. Sorry. I hardly ever use Yoast.

          Pretty worthless.
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