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.
