There are a number possible answers and i will examine them from the most likely to the least likely.

1. Google has changed the Goalposts Visible page rank is not an absolute measure, but a summary of real page rank simplified into ten bands.  These bands are fluid, so it is very possible that the actual page rank of your page has not changed, but as Google moves the banding limits your visible  page rank has dropped.

2. That you have lost some links. Websites go off line, pages get re written, pages drop out of Googles index, links get changed and made to no follow all the time. If you have any number of links it is very likely that  you will be loosing links on a regular basis. If you are not creating links you will be loosing links.

3. That you links are being devalued.  At the moment Google is taking a strong line on purchased links, if they see that sites have been purchasing links or manipulating its page rank algorithm in some other way it is likely that they will drop there page rank or drop out of Googles index all together. This effect on some of the pages pointing to your site will be to reduce your sites  page rank.

4. It is a Google penalty on your site for link buying, link selling or other manipulation techniques. If Google thinks you have engaged in these kind of activities, it is possible it will place a penalty on a sites visible (and real) page rank.

As I said the mostly likely reasons are at the top of the list and the rarer reasons are at the bottom of the list. If you merely slip one page rank I would look at reasons 1 and 2, if you drop numbers of page rank give more thought to issues 3 and4.

Is page rank still relevant anyway? Not as any kind of meaningful target for an SEO campaign, but pay some attention to it, sudden drop in visible page rank could often mean you are  either suffering from a penalty in Google or receiving links from some sites which are.

Anyway things not to do when looking for SEO agnecy or consultant.

1) Dont Automatically Select The Number One Agency In The SERPS For The term ‘SEO’,

Both of the people I have known who have done this have regretted it and do not have a good thing to say about the agnecy involved.

Obviously someone in the agnecy knows what they are doing for them to rankin that position, but judghing form results the skill level is no reflected across the agency, and the staff have too many customers and potential customers to be able to do a proper job.

As a principle agencies ranking number one for major SEO terms willeither take on too many clients or bump there fees up to a high price to allow potentila custoerms to self select.

2) Dont Take Snap Shot Results As Proof OF Compitence
I have worked at one company which inheritted an SEO customer that already has geat results, The salemens then used the great results we hadnt got from this custoemr to sell to other custoemr in the same market sector, claiming we run SEO for the number 1 site.

Judge results but look for results which are imporvment over time and are more sales related than position related.

3) Dont Take Guarentees At Face Value
As a first principle I don’t trust SEO guys who make guarentees at all. It is an art not a science and if we are honest we cant guarentee results,we can increase chances and make predictions, but we shoudln’t make gaurentees.

Experience as told guarantess are worthless (we guarenteee you a number 1 position on google, for you gbrand term or soem term that has no value), misleading Guaranetess ( included PPC positions ) or juts outright lies.

Find someone who will guarantee you the extras sales which you are actually paying for an I will actually eats my own hat.

4) Dont As A Customer Decide On Your SEO Strategy
If you approach an SEO agnecy telling them what you want them to do then you are removing one of the most effective thinsg they can do for you, which shoudl be create your SEO stratergy. Defines you goals and allow the agency or consultant the stratgey to get you there, and the package required to fulfill that strategy.

However dont allow a salesman to propose your SEO strategy either. If required pay for technical consulatation before an ongoing contract to make sure a SEO technician/ consultant has created your strategy.

Why is it so important, because the wrong stratgey will see a waist of resources and a very ineffective campaign, and a lower ROI in the long term.

Howvere most agencies will bring an SEO technicain to help on technical support in the pitching process if reuqired.

5) Dont Be Impressed By A Long List Of Tangbile Work To Be Completed.
One of the hardest questions regarding SEO is cost, and the only way the value of SEO work can be attributed is by ROI. We are prone to think of SEO in what tangiules do I get back in return for my money.

How man articles are written? How many directories am i submitted to? How many reports do I get? How many hours onpage optimnisation do I get? We then try to associate tangibles with worth an the process gets sticky.

In looking at price with SEO the question needs to be how much ROI am I going to get back at the end of a 12 month process. Focusing on actions makes you agency jump through hoops. focusing on ROI makes them perform.

Add these five warnings with the five previous peices of positive  in my last post and you will be more confident that you can choose the correct SEO agency for your campaigns.

Things to do

1)  Get a Personal Recommendation

Most of the good SEO operatives I know don’t need to tout for work, they will have people referred to them by contented customers. I know that not all of us know people who have had successful SEO campaignsimplemented  for them, but if you know someone who has. Use the people they recommend.

Double check what work they have done, what changes they have made to the results, how difficult the two markets compare to each other, but a personal recommendation is the way to go.

2) Talk to a Current Client

When talking with a contractor or agency as to talk with one of there current clients, be aware you will be given the ‘pet client’ to talk to, and not the run of the mill client. But this will still allow you to get a feel for how the company works and operates and what relationship they have with there clients.

This one a step to take with a pinch of salt, but if an SEO firm does not have ahappy client you can to its time to look elsewhere. If you are aware of the SEO companies client list you try to pick the client you want to talk to, or talk to the client they claim they have done great work for.

3) Ask for Client Case Studies

Ask for case studies of what change the SEO firm have made to a client, ask in terms of sales and profit not positions and visitors. A big mistake is to look at one of there clients current positions, what you need to know is where the client started? what’s the change? what was the effect of the change? how long it took? and what was the budget?

Without that kind of information knowing that client A ranks in position B for term C is very limited information.

4) Get to meet the pople who will do the campaign.

Companies that only allow customers to interact with salesmen and account managers probably don’t have quality SEO staff.  In my experience in agencies SEO deals sold or managed exclusively by none SEO staff (read account managers or salesmen) usually screw up. SEO is a technical business and if decisions about sales and campaign direction are not decided  according to technical knowledge things go often badly very quickly.

Too many big SEO agencies are smart officers, gifted saleman, clever account management without the techincaly capable staff to make things really work for the client.  make sure there are articulate, gifted technicians you can speak to.

5) Get a clear explanation on what a company will do for you

A good seo company will be willing to tell you what they intend to do for you, why they intend to do it and what effect this expect it to have (ball park). They also should have the capability to do this. A company that either will not or is not capable of clearly explaining what is does for its money should be avoided.

Ok do those 5 things and you will remove some of the risk factor from choosing an SEO company. Next article I will examine  5 really stupid things not to do when hiring an SEO company.

What do I mean by strategic, I mean a big picture thinker, someone who looks at the whole SEO campaign when they think of any particular component of the campaign, someone who has a game plan, and will then focus any day to day action towards that game plan. Someone who understands there are multiple SEO techniques and can choose the appropriate one for the situation.

Digging deeper the first requirement for a strategic thinker is thinking in the long term, tacticians are short term thinkers, they want to know how to complete there task, in SEO game this means moving up a few places, competing for a new keyword, doing the component parts that make up the long terms strategy, but without linking this to a longer term sets of goals.

In SEO I would expect a strategist would have am outline of a long term plan that would span 2 to 3 years, have numbers of tactical stages which can be measured by milestones, and all tactical decision will be made in pursuit of this longer term strategy. Failure to have the strategic view will lead to pointless tactical successes, wasted resources and campaign under achievement over the longer term.

The second requirement is a commercial focus, SEO is not about positions and traffic it is usually SEO is about sales and profits. If it is not about sales and profits it is about another business goal which is more often not at least one step removed from positions and traffic. A tactician will judge success in terms of what position he has achieved and what traffic he has generated, a strategist will look at how much he has sold and what revenue has generated for his client.

An SEO strategist needs to be able to identify and recommend the right SEO techniques for the right campaign. There are many variations of SEO techniques none are correct for all circumstances, and most techniques have applications in some circumstances. I have seen SEO operatives blindly use the same technique that worked for the last campaign on any other campaigns that they run when it was completely the wrong technique for the campaign.

The worst example was this was an SEO operative who went from aggressive link building on new sites, which he had successfully done, then spent 2 months aggressive link building on a campaign for an old site which already had 200,000 back links but no on page optimisation. His days of worked bore not fruit and had no success.  When he changed tack and spent 1 hour doing on-page optimisation and saw the site come in top 10 for most terms within 48 hours.

SEO is not about machines it is about people, this is a much a people business as it a technical business. To be direct a good SEO consultant should be able to consult. Most importantly this means to understand your client, his or her requirements and be willing to learn as much about his business as possible, it is also being able to communicate to your client in language he can understand, and on points about which he cares about (we are talk pounds not positions.)

This is the role on managing expectation, gently correcting misconceptions through education, sharing knowledge, allowing the client to apply the knowledge about his business than he has.

These to my mind are the differences between a strategic thinker ( an SEO consultant ) and a tactical thinker (an SEO operative); any thoughts?

• Choose the correct keywords

• Create a page for each keyword

• Write good content specific to each keyword for each page, this will include unique page title, unique content and attractive meta description.

• Format the page correct making sure the keyword is prominent in all the correct positions, title tags, headers tags, alt tags, bolded text.

• Make sure the internal inking structure of the site is correct, this means using the correct anchor text, or alt text in links, and make sure the site links from the right pages to the right pages. Also make sure that your linking structure focuses towards important pages not chaff pages

• Obtain as many links as possible with as many variations of keyword pointed towards the home page of the website.

• Obtain strong authority links from relevant site, using keywords relevant text in link anchor.

• Obtain links deeper into the inner pages of the website, with anchor text relevant to the keyword of that particular page.

• Report on the performance of the campaign paying prime attention to traffic, rather than positions.

• Review campaign performance, change keyword selection or linking strategies to reflect the data you have reported back.

The figure that was banded about was around 40% for position one dropping to 20% for two and further from that. However after looking at the stats it is obvious that  a mistake was made the percentages we calculated by comparing the positions clicks, to the total number of clicks. However this gives average percentage of clicks not searches and this was in error. Because what we all want to know if we get  50,000 searches for this term how much traffic do I think I shoudl be getting.

Remember only 70% of searches click on a natural listing , 30 % click on paid positions, also many users don’t click at all and refine there search or wander off and eat their tea instead.  Taking this into consideration the averages are much smaller with only about 22.6 % of searches becomeing a click on the first listing. As far as I can make out the figures should of looked like this.