Did I get a good deal?

by 15 replies
17
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.
#search engine optimization #deal #good
  • 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.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
      • [1] reply
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • [1] reply
    • 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.

      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.
  • WTF does Yoast even do anyway, SEO wise?
  • 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.
  • Hello selfstarterguide
    $ 250 is not much, but 'the next time someone tries to speak the language better !!! ahhahha
    • [1] reply
    • 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.
      • [1] reply
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    Did I get a good deal?

    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.