SEO's how to choose the right one.

[halo1234]

Hi, As per my 1st post, I have almost no experience in online selling & no real experience in the market place I intend to focus on. I've just bought an existing online designer clothing site. The site I think is very smart & just needs a few details tweaked & then stocking.

Now once launched I really want a fast increase in useful traffic. I think in this market I really need to have a high profile & so I really need the help of an SEO company. I've contact around 12 people & a few have replied so far. What I have trouble understanding is that they all see to offer the same level of service, but the prices seem wildly different. So my concern is that I'm missing something or I don't fully understand the difference. Price go from £449 to £5k per annum & the 1st company came top of this pole in 06 http://www.web4marketing.co.uk/news_january_2006.htm . So why go for the more expensive solution?

I'm fully aware that this area of the project will need significant funding & I don't have an issue with that. I just want to make the right choice 1st time.

www.uk-clobber.com

P.s I just registered the co.uk alternative. Should I make this the primary & park the .com?

Thanks

[Coding Monkey]

Like with any service, different levels of skills, different knowledge, different ways of achieving the results, different ways of helping clients, different ways of support etc etc etc.

[jaytech]

Hi Halo,

have you not looked locally to see whether a company deals with SEO? I would recommend that if you want best results. I would try to market the site to best I could depending on your budget of course.

If I were a to hire a SEO company, I would want full reports and stratigic measures on how they are using my budget. Alot of companies on the web are useless and charge you a huge fee just for submitting you to a list of search engines (which anyone can do) and applying keywords which are basic to anyone into your content. That will not get you results either instantly or (in effect) longterm

Have you got a unique selling point? what makes you stand out from the rest?

Have you thought about PPC and other marketing ideas? other than SEO, because if you dont get the right work done then you have basically gave the money away to a stranger and also your content from all the products should be enough keywords for the search engines.

so I would think about PPC and other ideas, there are heaps of ways.

if you need any further ideas or help just drop me a email


- Jay

[desk2web]

Regarding the domain names, I would suggest pointing the .co.uk to the .com name, or vice-versa - whichever you have all your web pages on so that if someone puts www.domain.com they see the same as someone who puts www.domain.com

[SEOscotland.co.uk]

Hi Halo,

I just had a look at your site and it looks very professional.

As an SEO the first thing that struck me was that your site is in a competitive market and would need the help of an SEO company to perform well in the search engines.

From an SEO point of view here are some points detailing the current status of your site. I refer to Google as it is the benchmark for SEO and is the hardest to get good rankings in.

WHAT's good?
The site will have been online for almost a year in April.

WHY is this good?
1. It has a Google PageRank of 3 which will be useful for getting other sites to link to you.

2. It will probably be out of the Google sandbox by this time which means you will start to rank for competitive keywords when you start to SEO your site.

HOW can you use this to your advantage?
Start a strategic linking campaign (one of the primary factors invloved in good SEO). Other sites will link to you if you link back to them.

They get the opportunity to benefit from your site already being indexed in Google if you link back to them. They will get indexed faster (if they are a new site) and they will receive a nice context specific link from your site which is effectively a vote for them in Google.

Of course, the link to your site from theirs will be properly optimised as a result of a good SEO firm doing their homework and working out the most effective keywords for your site.

WHAT IF you do all of the above?
You will see notably increased rankings for your keywords across Yahoo and MSN within the first 2 months and Google falling after typically 3-6 months later.

OK, points which which will hinder your site.

WHAT's bad?
Your site's index page has no on-page SEO at the moment. The title/ meta tags are not optimsed for your keywords and there has been no keyword research done to identify what you should be trying to rank for here.

Your site also uses session variables. These are used by your site to track visitors progress through your site, what pages they look at etc. These in moderation are fine - typically one or two %, & or ? symbols will be fine (they appear in the address bar when you click on a link) but your site uses many.

Your site also will have very little off-page SEO. Like context specific links pointing to your site from authority or hub sites. There are three showing in Google (backlinks) and two are from your own site.

WHY is this bad?
On first crawl the search engines will have no idea what your site is about due to unoptimsed title tags, meta tags and onpage SEO.

Search engines don't like session variables, usually one or two will be fine but your site uses too many.

Off-page SEO - few optimised links back to your site speaks for itself in many ways. Search engines won't see your site as an authority in its niche and neither will users.

HOW can you fix it?
A good SEO company will be able to research your keywords effectively and apply them in the correct manner on your pages.

A good SEO company will be able to solve your session variable problem in a variety of ways such as effectively ustilising site maps or modifying your server-side .htaccess file.

A good SEO company will be able to effectively manage a strategic linking campaign to increase the amount of good quality backlinks that point to your site from authority sites in the same niche. These links will be properly optimised and varied so that your site doesn't look like spam.

These links themselves would be carefully hand selected and bring you large amounts of qualified traffic by themselves so that you don't need to rely on search engines for the sustainability of your business.

One update by the search engines and you could be wiped out.

WHAT IF you could fulfill all of the above needs?
Your site would do great in the search engines and bring you a constant stream of qualified traffic / visitors from other sites too.

---

The SEO companies you have contacted should have already given you detailed information on what I've outlined above. If they haven't and are just talking figures (money and traffic) I would look elsewhere.

Here is a useful article on what you should expect from a good SEO company - I use it as a rule of thumb when I'm tendering for business

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Website-Promotion-Help/What-You-Should-Expect-from-an-SEO-Proposal/


PS. You should redirect the .co.uk to the .com using a 301 redirect to avoid being penalised in the search engines for duplicate content.

PPS. As Jaytech said, SEO is great and can bring you shedloads of qualified traffic and be great for business however, spread your eggs, develop a whole online marketing plan. Use PPC, an affiliate program, add your website to your signatures in forums, do offline advertising, sponsor events, print posters, give out business cards.

The possibilities are endless.

If you have any questions please feel free to PM me.

Good Luck.

[Ozzy]

Hi Halo,
I am going to re-iterate what Dave and Jaytech have said about mixing PPC and SEO.
I'm fairly good at SEO myself having previous done SEO for bluechips and celeb websites - and will explain why my own website is number 1 on Google for just about every one of my main search terms.

Even though my site is number 1, I still back this up with PPC for search terms that I am not already number 1 for. PPC and SEO combined make an effective online marketing strategy.

Also, the expression of "you get what you pay for" comes in here. SEO is a lot of hard work that takes months to get up and running, and anyone worth their salt will charge a sensible price to cover that.

I now pay another SEO company to do my seo work for me as I dont have the time to do it myself, and am paying them just over £2,000 plus VAT per month for this. I have no problems with paying this as their costs are just a fraction of the profit they bring me in from the work they do.

[halo1234]

Thanks for all the feedback so far. I've had a few PM's from this forum that do go into some detail. All the other people I have contacted have either just given me a price, or not really giving me much info. There is one however that sent me quite a detailed report of what, why & how. The cost of £300 per month seems ok, but others are telling me that is way to much. Obviously I'm going to keep working on this till I'm sure I've got the right deal.

[Tin]

Hi Halo
I specialise in SEO and try where I can to offer useful help and information on this forum. This is not a sales pitch but here is my advice to you for what it is worth.

1. Get plenty of up-to-date urls containing the search string that each SEO company says they have targetted for their clients.

2. Ask for contact details, preferably tel no, of any clients the SEO company have worked for and explain that you will want to speak to a responsible person within that company to check the SEOs credibility and performance.

3. Don't ignore the above, get proof of performance and contact the companies concerned. In my opinion, 99% of companies that say they do SEO don't do SEO to the maximum but rather a very watered down mix of sporadic techniques.

Regarding the price quotes you have from £500 to £5000 it wouldn't be fair or accurate to assume that you would automatically get the better job from the 5K company or a poor job from the £500 company as other factors need to be considered. You need to look at the evidence (as detailed above in points 1 & 2) from each company and compare those not the price tag. The £500 company could be a simple one man business starting out with little overheads but oodles of determination, enthusiasm, hard work but above all, 'knowledge' whereas, the 5K company could be a big outfit with big overheads and a bricks and mortar business that needs paying for. Clearly there's more to what you can expect from one company to the next.

Ask each company what they are going to do for you, research into your exact market and analyse your own competition. This is actually far easier than you'd imagine and the knowledge you need makes you the best person for the job.

If you want to ratify whether an SEO company is any good before you use them, send me a PM, I'll send you my phone number and you can ring me. I'll happily tell you exactly how to find out whether they can do what they say. No strings, no fee, just plain simple advice.

You're the one in the driving seat so make sure you 'identify your expectations' of the SEO company, 'verify their core skills', 'do you're own keyword analysis' then make an informed decision on who you should use.

Hope that is both informative & helpful to you.

[Enigma121]

Halo,

Our SEO pricing depends on the search terms you are looking to optimise for and the "competitiveness" of these terms. This directly influences the amount of work needed and therefore our price. Nice and simple huh?

£300 sounds a lot, but the amount of work really does depend on how much competition you have and how much rework your site is likely to require to rank better.

If you can provide a list of phrases that you are looking to optimise for, our SEO team would be more than happy to provide you with a competitive quote. For full details of what we can offer see http://www.enigmaconnections.com/search_engine_positioning.jsp

[TechFox]

Why pay for search emgine optomisation when you can download Web CEO for FREE

Web CEO is the world's best SEO software package. Its 10 tools help you promote your site in search engines, analyze your traffic, and maintain your online property.

Find Web CEO at http://wfh.techfox.co.uk/promotion.htm

[SEOscotland.co.uk]

Web CEO is by no means a substitute for proper SEO. It has some useful tools yes, but tools alone don't provide results. You have to know how to use them effectively and understand their significance.

Anyone quoting figures out of thin air - steer clear of.

Before talking figures you should expect to see WHAT they will do for you, WHY they will do it in that way, HOW they will do it and expected timelines and results.

This would include how much time they are actually spending per month working on your SEO and how that time is being spent. It's pointless saying £500 per month without a justified breakdown of whats being done each hour.

As Tin says, do a little homework that will help. Check out some SEO sites, read a few articles to get the flavour of how it works, you don't need to grasp it all in-depth but just a little knowledge will help you know how much a good SEO is worth to you.

[I, Brian]

Rand Fishkin posts a list of recommended SEO firms here:
http://www.seomoz.org/articles/recommended.php

As for service prices differing - different SEO companies specialise in different areas, so it's important to get an idea of what sort of SEO services you are actually looking for - ie, consultance, on-page development, link development, etc.

[BlackBerryUK]

Hi there,

amazing how the difference in price can be - the same happened with web design. Some designers charge per page, others as a whole package and no limitations and both would end up giving you the same price.

I had a look at your website and I would recommend the following:

If you would like to show more in GOOGLE (you will need to get more links from other sites to you). The best way to go about doing this, is by approaching free directories and exchange links with other websites.
- You also need more content on your pages
- Headings/titles
- Some of the pages are returning nothing (you really need to work on that as well)
- it seems to me the designer concentrated mainly on the images, you really need text links across your website. You might consider working on more internal links <--- this will help you a lot with MSN and Yahoo.

Finally.. if you need any advice on SEO - PM. I do this as a full time job and I know the in's and out's of it.

Good luck
T

[c2webdesign]

£300 a month does seem a little high, but it does depend on the number of hours they will commit to working on your site, plus their success rate.

Please bear in mind that Google is the most dominant search engine but for a new site competing for a popular keyword chances are you will be 'sandboxed'. Meaning you will not find it possible to gain a good position in this search engine for a specified time (usually between 6 months and 1 year).

Best to try and optimise first for MSN start gaining traffic and linkbacks to help you build to Yahoo and Google.

When delving in to the tardis that is SEO there are many contradictions, much advice but fundamently it boils down on making sure that your the best website on the internet for your keyword.

How do you become the best well;

- Keep the website updated with fresh content and new pages

- Maintain a sitemap

- Referals (text links in to your site from related websites)

- Good valid website coding

- Relevant Title tag


Best of luck.