Search Engine Optimisation

[Mike]

It seems that the topic of SEO comes up frequently but I have yet to see anyone recommend a good SEO company.

I always think that a really good company should get you up the rankings first and then charge an agreed fee to keep you there and until I find one that does just that then I think I'll steer well clear.

They all seem to want a bundle to set you up and then a regular monthly fee to keep you there.

On that note does anyone have any recommendations?

[Dave]

Mike,

As you know I have also asked this question previously and most peoples opinion seems to be keep your money in your pocket and try to do it yourself.

There are many companies out there that will acheive good rankings for you by abusing the rules which will eventually cause loss in rankings and in some extreme cases a total ban :eek:

I have not spoken to any companies but have been considering this company
http://www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk/

At the moment I am still busy building websites and links as well as running the business but at some point I also need to give serious thought to SEO

[Affiliate Wave]

Hey Guys,

I am a SEO consultant so consider me 100% biased :)

A poor SEO company (one that calls you looking for business with a cold call and a salesman normally) is exactly that, a company with a novice behind the desk who can probably do you more harm than good to be honest.

A good SEO is a tricky one for a number of issues:

1 - If a SEO is really that good he can make more money working on his own websites than he can on yours 9 times out of 10. Then when he sleeps his websites work for him where as when he works for you he is on an hourly rate. Thats why you see skilled SEO affiliates living in Dubai/Thailand/The Caribbean counting there money and not working client side.

2 - If he really is that good then he is likely to charge you a lot of money. The agency I work at would not consider less than £2000 for an on page SEO job and if you are in a competitive niche then this could easily be £20,000 or more. For that you are talking about companies in Finance, Travel etc that really stand to make a lot of money from our work so the ROI is most likely astronomical.

3 - Most people are not in niches that need that level of support, but the problem is that the gap in knowledge between the haves and have nots seems so great that eventually the market will saturate with the guys who know a little and can do a little.

If your niche is not that competitve then invest the 6 months or so it takes to get a competent level of on page SEO skills and an understanding of how links work to drive SERP positions.

If there are people stuck then post up your websites and I can give a few pointers (for free - I am not looking for more work :) ) and give you an idea of why your competitors are ahead and what you can do to compete.



Cheers

Stuart

[Adva Trading]

Stuart, I am stuck.

Can you help with few pointers?

(New store with Bluepark - One day old - some categories are empty, will be completed within a week):

http://www.magnetic-products-store.com/

[john]

Spell Bracelets correctly on the news headlines!

[little-linguist]

The title tag for your home page still says "your company ltd". You need to update this to say "Magnetic Products Store" or whatever you wish (e.g what you sell).

If your home page is your default page, you can do this in site--> configuration ---> site

[Gillf]

Hi

Noticed the SEO guy has not replied with help.... hmmm. Sorry I am a bit of a cynic. I've had a quick nosey around your site Eran and it looks like you are working hard, filling up the products etc. The site loads quickly which is good. I would be reluctant to be so up front about being new! I know generally honesty is the best policy, but trust is a big issue with online buyers and you might make them too nervous to buy if they think you are not an established business. If you have history of the business being established offline perhaps you should tell your customers about that. But that's more about conversion once you have visitors and SEO is more about getting the visitors there in the first place.

Our site is coming up for its second birthday and we exceed our bandwidth every month now... so I feel fairly confident I can help with some pointers to getting traffic. Here they are:

Get listed on DMOZ asap - its free but it can take a while - be very careful you get the right category with them. In theory you are only supposed to have one listing in DMOZ though I have heard tell of some people managing more. Get listed in Yahoo Directory - it is not free but it is a v. important directory. Get listed in any business directory you can find but watch the budget... you could end up spending a load of money. Investigate the Online shopping sites. Start contributing to any blog you can find that is related to your product and add a signature link (or even, if permitted by the blog, a link within the content). That gives you inbound links with no reciprocal link and a trickle of traffic genuinely interested in your product. Get your Google sitemap sorted. Set up an ongoing link strategy. A couple of things you should know about linking. Try to make any reciprocal links only with sites that have the same or higher Google page rank, always make them relevant to your product - non relevant links are as good as worthless both for ranking and qualified traffic. And NEVER pay for links... if Google finds you doing that you are in trouble. When you have your Google site map set up it is worth a read of the Google webmasters forum... you can learn quite a lot from there.

Things you can do straight away that won't cost are: make sure your page title tags are all different. (I did not check to see if you have already done this). Tick the "Apply SEO" box in the layout editor. (This only displays properly if your page content is longer than the side bars.

Hope that helps.
Cheers
Gill
www.ever-so-sexy.com (http://www.ever-so-sexy.com)
Luxury Lingerie & Swimwear Online

[Affiliate Wave]

Hi,

Sorry for the slow response, I am on vacation and just checked back in :)

The advice you have been given is pretty good. Try and get into DMOZ (a trick for this is to write some fantastic content about your subject so they will want to list you for being more than a store). It is possible to tailor content to get into more than one of the directory listings, though this will come down to how much of an expert you are in your area and how much value you can ofer on the subject (for example if you can write high enough quality content on the qualities of each of the metals there may be sub categories that match this). Also the advice on the other directories is good.

In terms of your website, you need to sit down and brainstorm all the keywords someone would use to find your products. This works on different levels. For example, prime keywords are words such as branded keywords, names of products etc. Then think about what someone searching for information on the subject would use. As a secondary task then create content around these themes, with more important words commanding more internet real estate and less important words taking less. Then compare this to some online keyword research tools (something like wordtracker can be useful).

Then it is the link acquisition question. I disagree with the advice on buying links, simply because noone can actually define a bought link. Is a Yahoo directory listing a bought link? If I pay a PR consultant and they get a telegraph writer to link to me is that a paid link? Money changed hands, and without it I would not have got the link so go figure.

The real trick is to buy your links and make them look like real links to content. For example, buying a link that links to a sub page about a related subject to the site linking to you is exceptionally hard to flag as a paid link. Just basically avoid any high profile website or any website that is openly selling links. Then you are as safe as you can be.

I could go on forever on this subject but the best advice would be something in the following order:

1 - Get your website up to date with relevant title tags etc as advised in another post

2 - Get listed in the main directories (such as yahoo, BOTW.org, DMOZ etc)

3 - Brainstorm all the words people would use to find your website and then drill these down. Use a package like wordtracker and find all the combinations and make a plan to cover this content in your pages

4 - Find similar websites (not competitors) and influence them to link to you.

5 - Pick and choose the other advice that makes sense to you from these posts, implement and experiment with new ideas.


Hope this helps


Stuart

[Hela]

Hi,
I am really new to this stuff and I do not know what DMOZ is, can someone help please. And how do I go about getting registered in directories, sorry for sounding such a idiot, but although I have had an online shop for a little while I have not really got very far.

Thanks for any assistance that might be available.

[Dave]

Hi,
I am really new to this stuff and I do not know what DMOZ is, can someone help please. And how do I go about getting registered in directories, sorry for sounding such a idiot, but although I have had an online shop for a little while I have not really got very far.

Thanks for any assistance that might be available.

Hi Hela,

Welcome to the Forum!

DMOZ is a directory of millions of websites. It can be very difficult to get listed because each request to be listed is verified by humans and because its so popular it can take many months to get listed. There is also no guarantee your site will even get listed but its well worth trying.

The important thing about DMOZ is that it is a feeder site for many search engines so getting a DMOZ listing will result in your site showing in many other search sites.

Visit http://www.dmoz.org/ for more information

[Hela]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for that, I have submitted, so I guess we will just wait and see.

This forum is great, I hope that at some point I know enough to help others.
Thanks
Hela

[powertoolworld]

Hi Dave

Firstly - thank you for your help and advise when I called you a few months ago.

Secondly - I have done my own SEO. I bought a book - How to get to the top of Google and stay there - David Viney.

It takes some reading and may be better done in stages as I have done but it is straight forward ( had to be for me!!!). This is the first site I have ever done and I have pestered Richard with stupid questions at all times of the night and day ( He has been fantastic!!!).

My site went live Monday 28th July and was 14th on Google on Saturday 2nd August, thats 6 days!!

I recommend this book (cheapest on thebookdepository.com) and this site to everyone because both are brilliant.

[Dave]

Hi Dave

Firstly - thank you for your help and advise when I called you a few months ago.

Secondly - I have done my own SEO. I bought a book - How to get to the top of Google and stay there - David Viney.

It takes some reading and may be better done in stages as I have done but it is straight forward ( had to be for me!!!). This is the first site I have ever done and I have pestered Richard with stupid questions at all times of the night and day ( He has been fantastic!!!).

My site went live Monday 28th July and was 14th on Google on Saturday 2nd August, thats 6 days!!

I recommend this book (cheapest on thebookdepository.com) and this site to everyone because both are brilliant.

Hi Chris,

Glad I was able to help and welcome to the Bluepark Forum.

Thanks for the pointers on SEO Book. I am also working on my own SEO and Pete @ fatbannafeet was kind enough to e-mail me some information but I may also have look at what you recommend. Trouble is 24hours a day is not long enough!

Good luck with your site

[Green East]

I do all my own keywording and with my previous website became stagnant at a certain point. After paying £200 for a two hour SEO lesson, it turned out the only thing that was wrong was I had the word FUEL in the keywords 7 times which classed it as spamming. Any singular word should be in the keywords no more than 6 times.

Also for those that are brave enough to tackle their own keywords, we use a combination of Web CEO (free download) and...

Site Solutions http://www.sitesolutions.com/analysis.asp?F=form using their web Site Analysis tool, but avoid the all the other tools on their site as you may pick up a computer virus.

However, even using these two tools, Web CEO will tell you to put in as few keywords as possible (correct) and Site Solutions tell you to put in loads of keywords (go for yellow).

I tend to find going getting as much of Site Solutions to green as possible, THEN going to Web CEO and correcting the last few glitches works really well.

Lastly, though this should be first, Google Keyword tool is best for selecting you keywords to begin with.

Just submitted my Green East this week so will be keeping a close eye on how that comes up once it gets indexed.

[powertoolworld]

Advice from Kay

Use the following to optimise your site

1. Web CEO (free download)
2. Site Solutions http://www.sitesolutions.com/analysis.asp?F=form using their web Site Analysis tool, but avoid the all the other tools on their site as you may pick up a computer virus.

This is amazing I used this last night thinking "nothing ventured nothing gained"

Oh yee of little faith!!!!!

I was pleased with14th now I am celebrating being at 4th on Google ahead of major e-commerce sites which spend £1000,s and employ teams of IT pros.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chris

www.powertoolworld.co.uk (http://www.powertoolworld.co.uk)
just for another link!!!

[james wilkins]

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of using proven methods to ensure high rankings for a website in search engines such as Yahoo, MSN or Google.Depending on who developed your site and how it was built, you'll find a million different reasons for this. Many web developers believe it is the site marketer's job to ensure the site is found in search engines and vice versa. Most don't bother submitting your site to the important search engines, assuming you or your marketing department will do it. Or perhaps it wasn't in your original development budget.
--------------------------
james wilkins

/www.drivenwide.com

[Green East]

This is amazing I used this last night thinking "nothing ventured nothing gained"

Oh yee of little faith!!!!!

I was pleased with14th now I am celebrating being at 4th on Google ahead of major e-commerce sites which spend £1000,s and employ teams of IT pros.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chris

Hi Chris

Glad it helped, it cost me :mad: £200 to learn about sitesolutions to help with the fuel treatment site. Now we have realised that Validating the site is important too but the site is too badly coded and needs changing from html to CSS or something more modern. What's in fashion now?

We are trying to rid all errors and warnings off the Green East site. Front page and categories are ok'ish but the actual product pages we are struggling with seriously.

As for SEO, 'greeneast' 1st position on most UK search engines and probably loads of global ones too. 'Green East' 1st page on 9 main UK search engines.
Watch the rest follow!!!