SEO

Soldato
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Just want to gauge your thoughts on companies who provide this service.

Worth every penny or best left to the individual to optimise their site themselves (with dedication could one do a good enough job of it)?!
 
You're right.

It was wrong of me to assume everyone would know what SEO means..... Just thought with this being a tech form and all..... You know

Still no reason to assume your set of abbreviations is known by others. You'll come unstuck that when you hit the real world. ;)
 
Actually ignore that.

Any advice would be much appreciated.... Spoke to some broker over the phone yesterday. Have since spoken with 3 different providers promising to get my site noticed.

After giving it some thought I'd like to know whether or not it would be worth while giving it a try myself.
 
Go to Google, read their spiel for webmasters and take note. Beyond that a good, well laid out website with decent content should not need expensive SEO which could potentially lead to rank evapouration or banning later on.
 
How new is the site? As it will take several months for it to even appear on search engines. A lot of the basic SEO work can be done yourself, to make sure the site is seen easily but the main thing to note is that search engines love new content, so keep adding bits to the site, changing wording etc and it will help a lot.

Only pay a company to do it if you don't have the time / ability to do it. Most will guarantee first page or first rank however this is bs as no-one can guarantee that (also.. first page on what keywords anyway?).
 
Spoke to some broker over the phone yesterday. Have since spoken with 3 different providers promising to get my site noticed.
They don't sound like the kind of people you want to be working with. When it comes to SEO you can't really 'promise' anything with any certainty, and promising something as unquanifyable as 'getting your site noticed' is just fluff.

Make sure you have set specific goals you want to achieve (new site visits, previous visitors, conversions, sales etc.) and watch them like a hawk.

Also give them a list of keywords you'd like to be ranked highly for in Google, and make sure your site isn't appearing on any crappy link building sites, which are just lists of domains and keywords.
 
My bro-in-law went for the "a good SEO company would be top of Google when searching for SEO". Bar the issue of interest conflicts I don't see much more of a flaw in that logic.
 
My bro-in-law went for the "a good SEO company would be top of Google when searching for SEO". Bar the issue of interest conflicts I don't see much more of a flaw in that logic.

I fear that is oversimplifying quite a lot. Get 4 or 5 friends to google the exact same phrase and see how different your results are.


As mentioned, make sure they don't use black hat techniques or you probably will find your site missing from google one day. You should be talking to them about your general marketing strategy and who your clients are / who you want to target. Whether you are marketing locally etc.
 
I fear that is oversimplifying quite a lot. Get 4 or 5 friends to google the exact same phrase and see how different your results are.
I wouldn't imagine they are very different at all. I expect international differences but if I had my friends Google a keyword in the UK and look at the pure organic results I'd expect them to be consistent.

If they weren't I'd probably shout at them because they're logged into G+ or some other social tool that's skewing their results.
 
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