My First Website

[AndrewSNUG]

My First Website

Im in the process of setting up a new business and we are at the point of having our website created. My business partner is pretty set on the company we are looking to use but i like to know a little bit more before jumping in.

The company we are looking to use are Visualsoft http://www.visualsoft.co.uk/

We have been sold on these as they are apparently experts in search engine optimisation and we feel that it is important to appear as high as possible on the search engines to drive trafic to the website without spending to much on advertising.

I have tried to understand what SEO is and it appears its a mixture of a range of tactics. What i am wondering is, is there any guarntee that we will be ranked highly?

The site itself will not need a huge range of content i imagine it will be 15 pages max. However we may pump this up by using customer testomonies if it helps with the SEO. The site will include CMS so that we can alter if needed.

Is this easy to do?

Additionally the following will be included

1) newsletter - subscribe / unsubscribe
2) search engine registration and google sitemaps
3) Google Analytics

The quoted cost for the above is £2925+VAT do you feel this is a fair price?

[FireFleur]

Well there is no guarantee for the simple reason that other sites are competing as well.

2925 funny number, but ok 2925 / 50 = 60 approx so just ball parking here you are looking at about 1 and a half weeks of work from one person.

I would say they have budgeted for 1 weeks work there, and yes it is achievable in that time frame.

[deepoeticwizard]

If you work hard you will be ranked well, I only started my website 2 months now and I am happy when I learn new tricks and see my website move up on google. It is not doing as good as it can but when there are over 262,000 and I rank page 14 on a keyword.
It is really interesting but if you are the type that wants to wake up and see your website at first page youll be so dissappointed lol
Take it like losing weight, you have to stick to it and smile when you lose a pound :P

[AndrewSNUG]

wow i love this place i cant beleive i post a thread this late and get instant replies.

Anyway - thats half of the problem i have no real idea of what to expect. So my thoughts were we could be reasonably high due to the actual build of the site. Then we would work hard at placing it getting it seen and it would move up.

What have you been doing to help move your site up the rankings?

and further to my first post the company had previously done a website for one of my previous employers. The site looked good but i remember we used to pay alot for google adwords and the company does'nt come anywhere on what i would guess and the most logical tag words.

[DanHarrison]

The first thing to note is that getting a site to go up the rankings is not a trivial task. It requires a great deal of work, but it's not impossible for anyone to lean.

Among making changes your site for basic search engine optimisation (SEO). These 2 articles are pretty good at explaining the basics:
http://www.interspire.com/content/articles/13/1/Google-SEO-Basics-for-Beginners
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/search-engine-optimisation/basics.shtml

You'll also keep hearing you need to build backlinks, and I recommend this resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

Dan

[peterjhale]

Additionally the following will be included

1) newsletter - subscribe / unsubscribe
2) search engine registration and google sitemaps
3) Google Analytics

The quoted cost for the above is £2925+VAT do you feel this is a fair price?

bear in mind that for (2) above - there is no need for search engine registration as this was a practice in 1998 but not now - it's unlikely you'll need sitemaps for a 15 page site

and (3) analytics is a free resource which simply requires you to add a few lines of code to each page, and if you're using server side includes might take 15 seconds of time.

[DanHarrison]

Oops, sorry, I didn't answer your question!


I have tried to understand what SEO is and it appears its a mixture of a range of tactics. What i am wondering is, is there any guarntee that we will be ranked highly?

No guarantee whatsoever (because you can't directly control search engine algorithms). However, using a range of tactics, you will increase the probability of being ranked highly.


The site itself will not need a huge range of content i imagine it will be 15 pages max. However we may pump this up by using customer testomonies if it helps with the SEO. The site will include CMS so that we can alter if needed.

Is this easy to do?

Testimonials will help add to the content to your site, but they also serve to re-enforce your service (assuming people find the testimonials credible). Not sure what you're asking is easy to do. If you have a CMS, updating content is easy, yes.


Additionally the following will be included

1) newsletter - subscribe / unsubscribe
2) search engine registration and google sitemaps
3) Google Analytics

The quoted cost for the above is £2925+VAT do you feel this is a fair price?

1) There are free and paid for services for mailing lists. If you have a CMS, it's easy to integrate.
2) search engine registation is a con, you get into a search engine by just being linked to these days. Sitemaps are free and you can get free tools to do it for you if you wish.
3) Also free, and fairly easy to integrate if you have a template.

So I would say the price is massively expensive given the level of detail you've provided.

Dan

[admagic]

bear in mind that for (2) above - there is no need for search engine registration as this was a practice in 1998 but not now - it's unlikely you'll need sitemaps for a 15 page site

and (3) analytics is a free resource which simply requires you to add a few lines of code to each page, and if you're using server side includes might take 15 seconds of time.

Echo what Peter Says -

And go one further to say, for someone who knows what they are doing on a service like aweber, setting up the news registration and autoresponder is max half an hour - and most of that is deciding what you want in the text of the messages - and the call to action for the sign up.

[fisicx]

Peter has already said waht I was thinking. If all they are delivering is a CMS then they aren't doing any SEO work. The 15 pages of content is the material the search engines will use to determine your ranking, I assume that your are writing this yourself?

But this raises another question, how do you know it will be about 15 pages? The preparation for any design should include a thourogh analysis of the cusstomers needs and how best to meet those needs. This means doing keyword research, market testing, information and workflow managment and of course coptwriting. It is this preparation that is essential to ensuring the site is effective (and successful). Once you have everything in place you can think about the layout.

So waht exactly is it your are getting from the developers? What SEO work are they proposing to do?

[UKSEOAgency]

my first quesion when speaking to any developer claiming to be performing seo is a simple one

Is your company primarily a SEO company or a Web Developer?

The approach is different from both sides. An SEO will work primarily to ensure the website is search engine friendly, and make the CMS usable to a human with a little training (and be on hand to speak through any upcoming issues you may have) whilst a web developer will want to get the project out of the door as quickly as possible to move on to the next project as there is no reoccuring value in spending longer on one clients site.

[zoezoe]

My First Website


The company we are looking to use are Visualsoft http://www.visualsoft.co.uk/



The quoted cost for the above is £2925+VAT do you feel this is a fair price?


Going by their own website the answer is NO. Their website is not accessible, its written in a tiny font and tiny images that cannot be resizes. tehir portfolio is very small with lots of black websites and white text (not a great combination!) and others which say "coming soon".

15 page website, with SEO could cost 3k could be cheaper. Why not PM me with your SEO requirments - we would happily do the 15 pages for a half of that price and that includes a CMS and training so that you could SEO the site yourself!

[jonpugh114]

my first quesion when speaking to any developer claiming to be performing seo is a simple one

Is your company primarily a SEO company or a Web Developer?

The approach is different from both sides. An SEO will work primarily to ensure the website is search engine friendly, and make the CMS usable to a human with a little training (and be on hand to speak through any upcoming issues you may have) whilst a web developer will want to get the project out of the door as quickly as possible to move on to the next project as there is no reoccuring value in spending longer on one clients site.

Not the best idea, the whole architecture and code structure needs to be built around search engines, with the SEO strategy defined from the start.

I've taken a look at Visual Soft's ecommerce work before, and I quite like the look of it from a design perspective and they're also good from a usability standpoint. The source code doesn't reveal any big errors, maybe a table for section layout here and there (tut tut) but mostly semantic markup.

I'm not sure about their SEO strategies, but they shouldn't really be charging for SE submission and Google Analytics.

The price seems on the high side, but you may be paying for what you get.

It's always best to get alternative quotes, so please PM me if you'd like another perspective.

Regards,

Jonathan Pugh

[creospace]

It's hard to say what is and what is not a fair price for a job, you could post any price from £50 to £5000 and you'll get a range of opinions from folk here as to what they think about your deal.

I'm sure that (well I hope) that the design company in question is providing much more than just those things, especially in their track record of success. They clearly have a good broad range of styles design wise but have any of the sites been successful? Are they ranking high for their primary keywords etc?

I don't know what industry you're in so I'm making a bit of a sweeping statement here but one thing I'd pick up on that I'm not sure has been covered is that probably in the first year you'll need to rely on non search engine based traffic that is going to cost money. So that is traditional advertising, marketing, Pay per click advertising and so on. It might take longer than a year to get good serps (search engine results) based traffic and it might take less but don't bank on it. Don't let any company tell you other wise and certianly don't listen to any guarantees. Make sure the budget for this is in your business plan.

So returning to your original question, if the owners of the sites that these people have built tell you that they have had great success and do well in the search engines then there's a strong possibility so will you and their claims are valid, if not then well probably not and you would be wise investing your money elsewhere.

I hope that was of some use. If you want to discuss it more and don't want to divulge your business area then feel free to send me a private message and I'm happy to offer more advice.

Gary

[RK1981]

I paid around double that for an e-commerce site with Visualsoft... whilst the design is great, I personally was annoyed that I couldn't add the google analytics myself (it's a free tool)...instead I had to pay them. There were several features like this that grated on me, to be honest. They laud themselves on the technologies and down play the design but, to be honest, I picked them because I liked the look of their other e-commerce sites..(although some are gradually becoming fairly similar looking now).

As for their SEO services... I believe they're good for long-tailed search terms but I think they could have guided us better on how to set-up the store for navigability/search terms to start with. Once I started understanding how everything worked, I had to slightly redesign my store to take these things into account, because the original site didn't have the flexibility to cope with the needed changes. Also, I wasn't given the ability to add & change the meta-data for each page & the home page to start with - it wasn't functioned in to the back-end of the system. This, I feel should be given as standard, but instead they classed it as 'advanced metadata capabilities', which led to a lot of emailing back and forth (though I eventually got it enabled for free).

Visualsoft also seem quite swamped with business at the moment, though I've been told they now have dedicated account managers handling each account, which should make things easier.

Am I happy with Visualsoft overall? I suppose so, but I'm still averaging only 35 visitors a day (before the redesign it was about 15). I understand the game a bit better now & am submitting myself to directories etc but I think that appearing high up on the search engines takes time, dedication, advertising & luck - I certainly wouldn't brag about their SEO services. Design was why I went with them & I'm happy with that element.

[silklink]

Uuuum, what is your company?

Nobody can really give you any clear answer to your questions without knowing your company, what it does, and how much business it expects to get from the internet.

SEO has become a blinding science for many new business people, but essentially it is about you being listed with your competitors.

How this is achieved is really dependant upon the type of business you are in. A simple example is where I needed to hire a bike for a day out with the family. I searched on Google and found a place that offered what I wanted at the price I wanted to pay. I phoned and booked and that was that. When I arrived, I found a bike shop opposite the shop I was dealing with.

Now, the question is: does SEO work? You could think that, but on closer inspection, I found that the shop opposite wasn't on the internet. So just having a web site that was listed on Google works very well for a bike hire shop. So what might happen if the shop opposite gets a web site?

If your businesses is in competition with many other like-businesses, then SEO becomes more important. The more competition you have, the more you need to spend on SEO. It's not about always being at the top, but is certainly about being one of the top listings. It's also about having wording that can differentiate your business from the others so that humans can glance through a list of 10 or so firms and choose yours just because yours has words they are looking for.

Good luck

[QVA - Emma]

My First Website

Im in the process of setting up a new business and we are at the point of having our website created. My business partner is pretty set on the company we are looking to use but i like to know a little bit more before jumping in.

The company we are looking to use are Visualsoft http://www.visualsoft.co.uk/

We have been sold on these as they are apparently experts in search engine optimisation and we feel that it is important to appear as high as possible on the search engines to drive trafic to the website without spending to much on advertising.

What makes them experts in SEO? Have they given you examples of sites in their control? Have they been open about rankings? Have they made you aware that by having a new site, a new domain you will be competing with already established companies - without knowing what sector you are in it is impossible to comment how far up you can expect to get - if at all - for your chosen/researched keywords/phrases.

I have tried to understand what SEO is and it appears its a mixture of a range of tactics. What i am wondering is, is there any guarntee that we will be ranked highly?

There is no guarantee - if they tell you otherwise walk away!

The site itself will not need a huge range of content i imagine it will be 15 pages max. However we may pump this up by using customer testomonies if it helps with the SEO. The site will include CMS so that we can alter if needed.

Is this easy to do?

Even sites with 5 pages can rank well if optimised correctly - you are looking to convert your visitors too so this is a factor.

Additionally the following will be included

1) newsletter - subscribe / unsubscribe
2) search engine registration and google sitemaps sitemaps are not always needed - it depends on content and dynamics - I personally always use one for a new site. They are relatively easy to do yourself but why sepnd the time learning if it is included? Out of interest it may be worth asking what they will charge if sitemaps are not included. (sitemaps are a great way of submitting to a search engine without registering with a SE)

3) Google Analytics - Is a free Google tool and can be done easily yourself BUT for those saying "do it yourself and keep an eye on it yourself" there are some people who do not understand or have an interest in having to trawl through a bunch of figures, percentages, bounce rates, conversion rates, set up goals, review visitors, check returning visitors, benchmarking etc etc why would they? They are busy people running a business - these things should be explained and monitored by someone who understands them and can alert them when there is an issue. The majority of my customers could have set it up themselves but they chose not to as they do not have time for, or understand the how's and why's. I have reports sent to me which I then convert into laymans terms for them - when there is a problem I let them know and also what the solution to that problem is. Rant over :D

The quoted cost for the above is £2925+VAT do you feel this is a fair price?

Other than the above what does it include? Training on the CMS? E-commerce? Content writing? Monthly support?

Regards

Emma