SEO – rip offs-R-us
I sat in a meeting at the university today and listened to a sales pitch by an SEO company. We get calls at The Plan Collection for these all the time.
I need to setup one of these companies. They are usually run by a couple of jokers who know very little about SEO. In this case the jokers were looking for easy money. They wanted 10k for a 'keyword analysis' and 10k to optimize 10 pages. Holy Crap!
The 'analysis' involved a bunch of people at the university running around coming up with the 'things they want to advertise' - read keywords. Not sure what that leaves for the SEO company to do. I guess they can type it up. Makes them a pretty dang expensive secretary. They then wanted to charge to setup an adwords campaign - you know because Google makes that process so hard.
My tip?
Start with SEOChat.com. This site is a vibrant community of real SEO pros that will tell you all kinds of neat stuff for free. Work a little and save yourself the tens of thousands of dollars.
Justin Ball is a software consultant and entrepreneur with a passion for Ruby. He evolved from a C++ and .Net monkey into a python programmer and finally found Ruby. In the rare moments when he isn't writing code, talking about code or measuring his code productivity in profanity per hour, you can find him on his bike in the mountains or on the roads surrounding Cache Valley. 
