Ask Kalena

Hi there - it looks like you're the first person to view this page. Congratulations! Relax, I'm kidding. But seriously, if you like what you read, I'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe to my feed, if only to make me feel more popular :-)

On behalf of the tutors and staff at Search Engine College, I’d like to offer congratulations to our most recent graduates:

Search Engine Optimization 101

• Bob Schaller
• Dominique Neveling
• Micky Stuivenberg
• Laura Paradise
• Ellen Stender
• Bill Casey
• Bruce Gow
• Diane M. Pentheros
• Beth Evans
• Jeffrey Wieland
• Scott Spain

Search Engine Optimization 201

• Cheryl Hardy
• Kimberly Bock
• Laura Paradise
• Micky Stuivenberg
• Bruce Gow
• Jeffrey Wieland
• Colleen Lee
• Scott Spain

Pay Per Click Advertising 101

• Rick Hardman
• Evgeny Galkin
• Laura Paradise
• Bruce Gow
• Jeffrey Wieland

Web Site Usability 101

• Bruce Gow

Link Building 101

• Laura Paradise

Certified Search Engine Marketer

• Harshvardhan Kharshingkar
• Laura Paradise
• Bruce Gow

Congratulations to you all! Please contact your tutor if you haven’t yet received your hard copy certificate, Status Page or certification seal. Please stop by Search Engine College from time to time to download updated lesson material, contribute to Search Engine Wiki or check our Search Engine Marketing Jobs Board to use your certification to find a job in the industry.

Popularity: 5%

Hi Kalena…

I’m after some advice from a professional and I immediately thought of you as I’m one of your SEO students. I’ve set up my new website and I’ve just had my first request for a quote. However, I’m not sure how to quote, what to base that on, or how others are doing that.

Would you be able to let me know how most content/SEO writers quote for doing websites? It’s really for writing new websites, so not simply editing existing ones. I’m not sure whether to base that on the number of pages/words or on a time spent basis, or what. I don’t know what the norm is.

Could you give me any pointers?

Thanks very much!
Micky

Dear Micky

There are some very good pointers for this in the bonus lesson that comes at the end of SEO 201 so you might want to download the bonus lesson PDF and look at that.

Basically, it’s always better (in my opinion) to quote an hourly rate and then work out how many hours each page will take you to copywrite. If it’s easier, you can always provide the customer an estimate (e.g. each page should take between 2-3 hours at my standard hourly rate of $150 + taxes) and then invoice the final cost after the job is done.

This will require you to keep timesheets and be accurate with your time measurements. It also gives the client the option of reducing the number of pages to be done if they want to save money instead of expecting you to lower your fees. Something else I offer clients is the ability to save 10% or 20% if they purchase consulting hours in bulk e.g. hourly rate is $150 but drops to $135 per hour for 10 hours or more purchased in a single month or to $120 per hour for 20 hours or more in a single month.

You might also find my past blog posts about Home Based Business helpful, particularly As a freelance SEM, how should I structure my fees?

In that last post I talk about Freshbooks online invoicing software that has built-in timesheets and a start-stop timer so you can monitor time spent on projects and bill clients accurately. Apart from the fact that it’s very low-priced, I simply could not function without this software!

Good luck with the business.

Popularity: 9%

I’m signed up to receive Google Alerts whenever a new web page gets indexed by Google that contains a reference to Search Engine College.

It’s a great service and I often find spam blogs and sites that have scraped entire pages from our site so I can report them quite easily. But today I came across quite an amusing blog post that has obviously been translated into English by either very poor quality translation software (maybe Babel Fish?) or by someone whose grasp of English is pretty rudimentary.

Check out the highlights:

For those people who are not that computing machine literate person and are not up on the up-to-the-minute computing machine jargon, where are they going to travel to acquire their necessary cognition about SEO? One illustration is through Search Engine College. Their chief end is to offer easy, merriment and low-cost courses of study in not only hunt engine optimisation but in other hunt engine selling topics as well.

Does this mean we have to replace SEO (search engine optimization) with HEO (hunt engine optimization)? *chuckle*

Popularity: 6%

It’s no secret that the courses at Search Engine College are hugely popular. Our students consist of people from all walks of life, including webmasters trying to learn search engine marketing skills to help promote their small businesses, marketing staff at advertising and web design agencies and existing search engine marketing professionals keen to obtain formal certification to help advance their career.

2007 saw us reach the significant milestone of having students enrolled in 30 countries. Our massive growth has resulted in more work for our tutors and administrative staff and also prompted the need to hire more staff. As a result, we will be increasing the cost of our courses early in 2008.

So if you have been thinking about enrolling at Search Engine College but just haven’t gotten around to it yet, December will be your last chance to enroll at our current prices. You’ll have 12 months to complete your course from when you first enter our online classroom, so even if you don’t think you have time to study right now, you can enroll at 2007 prices and study whenever you have time in 2008.

Not only that, but if you enroll from this page, you can snap up one of our individual certification courses for $50 off the regular retail price. What the heck, it’s the holidays, right?

But this discount is only available until midnight Dec 31 and you must buy from the link above and choose the coupon code SECMEMBER from the drop-down list as instructed.

Happy Studying!

Popularity: 4%

Have you noticed that Search Engine Marketing education seems to be the flavor of the month right now? Look at all the education-related events that have happened in the past month:

• Matt Spiegel of Search Engine Watch talked about the biggest crisis in SEM: the lack of qualified search marketers and the need for further education and internships to address this crisis.
• We heard about the launch of Market Motive, a new, subscription-based training website founded by Michael Stebbins and John Marshall, both formerly from ClickTracks and Avinash Kaushik, a web analytics guru.
• Search Marketing Now announced a SEM Basics training webinar to be held this month.
• Search Engine Strategies announced SEM training classes will follow their Chicago conference this month.
• SEOmoz held a SEM training seminar at the University of Washington. (Ok this occurred in October, but it was still recent enough to warrant inclusion).
• The eMarketing TalkShow held a webcast about the unlimited career opportunities available to persons with SEM training and experience.
• Search Engine Watch decided to launch a regular column called SEM.edu dedicated to SEM training and education.
• Microsoft announce their training and accreditation program for Microsoft adCenter called adExcellence.

It’s great to see the industry better addressing the two problems that have plagued it for years: the lack of trained professionals and the lack of educational options for webmasters wanting to learn SEO/SEM.

Of course my Search Engine College colleagues and I recognized this in 2004 with the launch of our courses, but I digress!

Popularity: 6%