It has immerged this week after much speculation that Microsoft has begun offering 2 SEO packages to anyone who owns a website.
This is an interesting move from the computing giant as they also own one of the 3 major search engines.
The service they offer looks to be fairly comprehensive, it includes reviews of:
- Site design, aesthetics and usability
- Titles, meta info, headers, keyword density, pages indexed
- URL structure, redirects, sitemaps, 404 error pages
- Inbound links and link building suggestions
- Keyword research
- Current rankings
- Competitors for your keyword targets
It seems to me though that most of the above will be automated reports from programmes designed to analyse the elements in question.
Depending on the size of your wallet you get some or all of the above. You also get 1-3 hours consulting time with an SEO expert.
The packages range in price from $5,500 to $8,600 which seems a lot for just 1-3 hours of time with a real person, after all, there’s only so much a program can tell you about a site.
It will be interesting to see how this service takes off, and whether they optimise sites towards Google’s website guidelines or for their own search engine.