The SEO (search engine optimizing) business has emerged as a major player in the Internet business marketplace. Webmasters and website owners always arrive to a stage where they wonder why their business fail in making money, despite catchy domain name, excellent design and amazing Flash animation in the home page. The first one to blame is the webmaster, which is always at hand because he only has to deal with servers, hosting features, market analysis, programming languages, HTML design, art, copywriting, customer support and related tasks.

When the webmaster realizes the need for visibility and SE free traffic, usually looks for SEO services. Selecting a SEO company is not easy, because their methods are secret, and their results difficult to compare. It is common to detect SEOs that are not available because they are busy selling their own stuff and enjoying the results, and SEOs ready to sell services in order to collect some money while learning how to do the job.

Most of the SEOs charge a fixed fee, which can depend on the number of pages, number of keywords, languages in case of bilingual sites, and maybe words, in extensive websites. Internal links are another pricing factor, because linking usually goes together with complexity.

If we need to make a SEO quote we also assess the current SEO status, because is easier to work with a new site, where any result will be welcome, than optimizing an established website, with decent PageRank, many incoming links and a structure that needs to be respected to avoid loss of existing traffic. It is also likely that someone had started doing SEO work, and the obvious steps are already taken, forcing us to concentrate on subtle, controversial or hard-to-implement changes. We made a first attempt to an online SEO cost calculator based on number of pages and keywords, but we still use a lot of guessing and risking for our budgets.

The client very often wants us SEO to work on a SE-positioning-results basis. So, if we do not get results, we do not collect any payment. Inexperienced site owners are an easy prey. I can offer them a first screen in Google under Joe Average Butcher store, and get away with it. However, when clients demand a first screen under sex site or mp3 CD we are in some trouble.

Measuring the difficulty and/or merit of a given positioning status can be useful for:

- charging SEO customers on a results basis - establishing the value of a SEO technique, tool or company - appraising domains or developed websites - choosing keywords before starting a SEO campaign, in order to pick up reachable targets (not to easy, not to difficult)

The existing competition for a keyword has two meanings in this context. One is the probable difficulty of ranking, because it is likely that good SEOs have entered that market. The other is the possible value for the client once we manage to rank at the top, since a lot of searchers will probably mean a lot of traffic as a prize for any good ranking.

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