Hi,

Is it best to learn how to optimise your web site yourself? Or is it better to pay a professional? Will the professional be able to give better results? How much do these services usually cost?

What about web sites claiming to guarentee a top 5/10/20 position in any number of search engines (e.g. http://www.yahoon24h.com/top20.html)?


Thanks, Robin.

Whether you do it yourself vs pay a professional is a matter of time & effort. If you are totally new to SEO then you would need a lot of time (months) to get upto speed on how to optimize web sites for good search engine placement vs a SEO consultant that would be able to work immediately in the right areas. By teaching yourself - there is no reason why you couldn't do an equally as good a job as somebody who does it full time - but SEO is not an easy or simple task - so its really a trade off between your own time & dedication to the task vs paying a consultant. SEO consultants are not necessarily cheap - but the return on the investment could be significantly better than any advertising route.

Regarding the link you posted. This company will list you in their directory (which will probably bring you 0 traffic & be a waste of money) - and also submit you to 'thousands' of search engines. Any service that offers to submit you to thousands of search engines is just a waste of time. There are only a handful of search engines that count & will bring you any traffic. These type of services could actually get you banned from the important search engines.

I don't see how that company can even come close to living up to it's "top placement guarantees" - they only mention keywords - Search engines like Google totally ignore keywords & keywords alone will not bring you any kind of ranking on any search engine - unless the target phrase is completely non-competitive & only gets a few searches a day. It's interesting - that company is not even in Google's index themselves!!

Web hosting is a highly competitive search phrase. If you could pay $50 and get a good ranking - then everybody would be doing it.

No easy or cheap solution exisits to get search engine traffic for web hosting. Lots of SE traffic is available though at $5 a click on overture.

Originally posted by NovaW
I don't see how that company can even come close to living up to it's "top placement guarantees" - they only mention keywords - Search engines like Google totally ignore keywords & keywords alone will not bring you any kind of ranking on any search engine - unless the target phrase is completely non-competitive & only gets a few searches a day.Exactly the trick. They can make the guarantee because they get to pick the keyword phrases for which they're guaranteeing placement. Among the typical choices, then, will be the client's company name or domain name (yeah, that's a toughie), and extremely unique phrases that happen to in the client's website copy. For example, I could guarantee top 10 placement for "VW Audi Dealer Amityville" if the place at which I bought my car was my client -- they're the only VW/Audi dealer in a place called Amityville in the world, after all -- not to mention the only one on the web. It's interesting - that company is not even in Google's index themselves!! It's surprising how commonplace that is. Well, maybe not when you think about it.

Really with almost no exceptions the reputable seo firms don't make generic ranking guarantees, and most people in the business would say that do so would be counter to industry "best practices."

Thanks for both of your replies.

Do you have any recommendations for optimisation services?

I don't have any recommendations - but I think there are quite a few SEO consultants who post on this board - I guess they may read your posts & PM you with proposals.

JayC posts here frequently and is involved in SEO I believe - I can't recommend him per say because I don't know him - but I can say based off his posts here - that he does know SEO & has impressed me.

If you don;t understand exactly how the search engines work you need to pay someone to do it for you if you want good results.

I hand submit to get great results in all the top engines Yahoo, Google MSN etc..

What you have to be careful is people that say they can give you top 10 rankings and they are either fools by saying they can get you in the top 10 with a single key word.. What you need to do is think like the search engine and like the consumer. If someone is looking for a hosting company that offers PHP and MySQL and they type in "Hosting" they are going to get millions of choices but if they type in cheap php hosting they are going to get those hosts with those requirements. I could not tell you how many hits we get off that key phrase every single sad. We are #14 in yahoo #15 in Google #11 in MSN, AOL

We have some clients (not hosting) that we have gotten and still maintain after a year #1 spots in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

What you have to be careful of is these companies that will get you in the top 10 with oddball keywords phrases like "purple hot hosting servers" sure you might be #1 under that key phrase but how many customers are going to look for you there :D

Think like the search engines.. Be one with the seach engine. Oh By the way.. Don't waste your money on yahoo's $299 bargain.. I have never paid them and all my sites get listed.. They will list your site if you set it up correctly...

We charge upto $1000 for search engine rankings based on the type of business. We get that also and if we can't get the results we don't charge..

Don't be fooled by SEO people unless they are going to give yoour money back or even better not charge you until the results are in.

Remember Google does not use metatag keywords to rank like the some of the others... :D

SEO is a lot of work and reading and understanding what the different ones want

Okay that is all I will say... So I guess the questions is should you pay someone? If you want results and you are not sure how to do it yourself the answer would be Yes..
Can you do it yourself? Yes.. read look at the structure of the top 30 sites in every SE, don't copy keywords, don't spam the SE's, don't hide text with the same color as the background. If you play by the rules of the SE's you will do fine.
Or let me do it for you. ;)

Robert

In addition to the comments from GWDGuy & JayC, which by the way are all very good, if you are going to jump into the SEO game you will want to think about doing SEO for an extend period of time. Some of the engines take a while to even get noticed, some times up to 8 weeks. If your initial submits don't give you rankings that you like then you will have to modify your pages and resubmit, which may take another 8 weeks.

SEO should be part of your overall marketing plan and not temporary. SEO can add a lot of value to your business if done correctly, with the right tools. If you don't have the tools and knowledge then we may be able to partner with you.

SEO is well worth the time and investment, but don't fall for any stupid promises...
Submitting your site to human-edited directories can help a lot, though it depends a lot on your target market. If you are part of a huge market (eg. US) then you are up against a lot of heavy competition.
If, however, you are aiming at a particular geographical area or industry sector it might be easier.

There is a free site at www.selfpromotion.com
Not a great looking site, but a lot of good information on seach engine optimization can be found there.

That site is looking very promising. Does anyone more SEO-knowledgable want to share their opinion?

What about the 'Tooter' submission tool?

I have been using Selfpromotion.com on and off for the last two years.
The information and resources available on the site are excellent. Unlike a lot of the other 'services' you do not get spammed nor does it support submission to the thousands of search engines etc., junk that so many talk about.
Tooter gathers the information which each search engine / directory requires and then either submits it for you or points you to the correct manual submission page. From what I have seen of it the scripts etc., are setup in such a way as not to spam the search engines etc., so your submissions are more likely to be accepted.
One of the other useful features in there is the links to a lot of the topic and regional specific sites that you might not have thought about submitting to.
Hope that helps! :D

You will probably want to visit the www.SearchEngineWatch.com forum. This is where all the top SEO's hang out. This is if you are doing your own self promotions. SEO takes a lot of time and energy. If you don't have the time or energy you may want to think about outsourceing this to professionals.