I wish to pay a company to get my web site ranked high on the search engines. Are there any you reccomend?

http://www.2thetop-website-design.com/

A guy I know. Very smart when it comes to search engines etc.

Greg Moore

I personally think all these companies that u hand couple hundred bucks are ripping you off - why not spend a day going to all the popular search engines and make the huge effort of clicking the 'Add site' link and filling in a form - and donate the money u saved to either charity or myself ;)

Submission is something that I'd personally do myself. The difference is what your site does once it's submitted. meta tagging, keywords, content positioning etc etc etc... I haven't got a clue what search engines really want to see so that's when someone comes in handy I think.

But yes, just handing someone a few hundred to just submit your site to FFA lists is bordering on madness. :)

Greg Moore

Originally posted by akashik
Submission is something that I'd personally do myself. The difference is what your site does once it's submitted. meta tagging, keywords, content positioning etc etc etc... Or before it's submitted; really the best time to deal with those important positioning factors is before the site is even listed. But I'd certainly agree with your main point: submission these days is a minor task. There are only a few relevant search engines that even accept free submissions, and Google -- arguably the most important -- spiders so aggressively that you almost never even need to submit to them. Really the only essential place to submit is the Open Directory at dmoz.org, because once you are there everyone else who matters will pick you up through spidering.

Submission isn't worth paying for. Optimization is. But really in spite of the thread topic title, that's probably what jcwacky meant since his actual message said "to get my web site ranked high on the search engines." I find that people tend to use the word "submission" inaccurately this way all the time! :)

Submission is a science. The only ones that ever gave good results were www.handsubmit.com

Ken Sproul, the owner, has become a m8 by now... submitted a lot of clients with his company and I can only say A+++ !

Originally posted by ShareFile
Submission is a science. The only ones that ever gave good results were www.handsubmit.com
That site, too, emphasizes that it's optimization before submission that's important. So I applaud that.

Unfortunately, they do fall into a common behavior in the seo business, trying to make things seem much more complicated than they really are by intentionally confusing readers. For example, from that site: If you don't submit your web site to exactly the right category and if you don't follow the rules of a search engine, it will consider your submission as spam and skip your web page. Simply untrue in the case of search engines, sometimes true in the case of directories. They aren't the same thing, the distinctions are clear, but this statement gives the impression that if you try to submit to Google or Altavista or Fast by yourself you'll be running the risk of having your submission considered "spam" if you don't know some sort of sacred secrets. It's simply not the case, and I wish there was more education and less obfuscation going on in the seo business.

Originally posted by JayC
< snip >

I agree with you and will guide Ken here and I am sure he will value any input and make changes accordingly ;)

I run a website for a polictical campaign (as a volunteer) and we are #1 on Google for the name of the man running for office.

Although he does have a fairly odd name.

Thanks to meta tags we also arrive in the top 10 for searches for both the other candidates in the election.

This was simply done by adding it to the google database and letting there unbelievable searching algorithims to do their magical work :D

Originally posted by Studio64
I run a website for a polictical campaign (as a volunteer) and we are #1 on Google for the name of the man running for office.

Although he does have a fairly odd name.

Thanks to meta tags we also arrive in the top 10 for searches for both the other candidates in the election.Congratulations... but don't thank your meta tags, which have no significance in Google's ranking algorithms. Google ignores meta keywords completely, and uses the meta description as the site description returned on the results page only in certain circumstances (usually using snippets of the actual page text).

But your site and each page for it, no doubt have several occurences of the candidate's name. Probably anchor tags of a significant number of your incoming links have that name, and your document titles and html TITLE tags. And your heading tags, and on and on... those are the elements, along with PageRank value of your incoming links, that are brinigng about your positioning.

But the thing is, unless there's someone else with that name with a web site completely built on the theme of his name there's no way you shouldn't be number one when using the name as a query... this is exactly the kind of slam-dunk search term that seo firms using the "we guarantee top positioning" ploy use.

Just submit it yourself. That’s what I did and got listed on all the big ones.

Its not rocket science.

Cheers

Good Luck