Ever hire an SEO Agency and when you start asking questions about their work, they respond by saying “Leave all that to us, we are the experts”, or “It’s a mix of science and art, very hard to explain, but we know exactly what we are doing!”

Yeah, well you aren’t the only one.  Many of our clients have experienced that and many paid a LOT of money and never really knew what they were paying for.  Sure, it’s a science.  After learning a decent amount of  SEO, I can tell you – very few clients will want to try this on their own – it is definitely a FULL TIME  job that most of then would not care to deal with.  Thus, why is it such a secret?!

Many of my clients simply tell me, “it appears to be working”, but when I ask them for specifics, I get a “deer in headlights” look and nothing further comes from their mouth.  I guess they are treating it like “insurance” against being invisble”,  which is crazy because if they have decent content they will be in pretty good shape – certainly not invisible.

Apparently, this must be very common, because Google just announced they will REQUIRE partner Agencies to be transparent to their customers when using Google services such as AdWords.  When this goes into effect in February 2011, the Agency MUST disclose specific elements to their clients (and the client will receive a report directly), which include:

Clicks

Impressions

Spend

This will give Google the credit for the results, whereas now the Agency does not have to disclose the information and can take full credit for their “wizardry” when things go well, and disclaim everything, or get paid for more “needed” changes when things go bad.  This WILL affect those agencies who are not transparent – probably in a negative way.  However, it will affect Google in a positive way – with hundreds of thousands of accounts under third party management, it will now shine a bright light on, and weed out, bad SEO Agencies so that the negativity does not attach to Google itself.

This has been coming – it was initiated in the API terms of service years ago, then was admended, then conversation began again and a common phrase was being echoed by Google:   “Mythbusting”, I heard it many times in various conversations about transparency.

In conclusion, despite the Agencies who are going to rail against this,  I say:   TRANSPARENCY =  GOOD.  Just as in any other buying scenario, the more educated your buyer is, the better the sale.  This is simply good business and, I still believe, that most of the buyers will not go out and try to do it themselves – but at the same time, they will finally have some input into the process and will feel like they are buying a quality service instead of snake oil!

KUDOS to Google!!

You are if you sign in with a “Global ID” such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. from or to other websites.  It’s much easier to do that, but you need to know what you give up in the process to the site you use it with.  Here is a graphic that shows you what you tell about yourself:

[click image for larger size]

According to the infographic provided by Gigya:

Using Facebook as a Global Login ID:

• Across all sites:  46%
• Entertainment Sites:  52%
• News Sites:  25%
• B2B Sites:  37%

Using Twitter as a Global Login ID:

• Across all sites:  14%
• Entertainment Sites:  15%
• News Sites:  45%
• B2B Sites:  18%

Using YAHOO as a Global Login ID:

• Across all sites:  13%
• Entertainment Sites:  11%
• News Sites: 10%
• B2B Sites:  18%

Using MY SPACE as a Global Login ID:

• Across all sites:  7%
• Entertainment Sites:  14%
• News Sites:  1%
• B2B Sites:  3%

Using Linked In as a Global Login ID:

• Across all sites:  2%
• Entertainment Sites:  0%
• News Sites:  1%
• B2B Sites:  3%

AOL and ther IDs reported at 1% or less.

Source: Gigya. See the full infographic.