Can anyone recommend me an SEO company

louisaL

Hi I am looking for a company to sort out my SEO for my business.

Can anyone recommend me anyone?

I live in Buckinghamshire, but cover Bucks, Beds, Northants and Herts.

paddyrg

No. And not just being awkward, but I mean I could not recommend any company that claims they will SEO you. This is because search engine rankings are proprietary formulas that are quite deliberately NOT public knowledge (or they get gamed by these very 'SEO experts'), so they are all working blind.

However you can do some simple things to level your chances... keep a tidy site that has links to and from other respectable sites, do not have hidden text, but have just good relevant articles and information about your subject which repeat your target phrases (eg if you sell orange babygrows, and that's your audience, use the term 'orange babygrow' in context a couple of times). Metatags have meant zero for years now, and linkswap sites that try to get mutual links for SEO sake have long been seen through and will damage your rating.

Or pay money for premium listings.

Or, and this is quite a good one, make some short youtube vids demonstrating some product features. Do your orange babygrows have velcro seams for quick changes? Short demo film and a link back to your site, you'll attract a few customers.

pinkclouds

paddyrg wrote: »

However you can do some simple things to level your chances... keep a tidy site that has links to and from other respectable sites, do not have hidden text, but have just good relevant articles and information about your subject which repeat your target phrases (eg if you sell orange babygrows, and that's your audience, use the term 'orange babygrow' in context a couple of times). Metatags have meant zero for years now, and linkswap sites that try to get mutual links for SEO sake have long been seen through and will damage your rating.

True. Your products/services and content are the most important things - if it's good, people will actually promote it for you. Ask a friend to proofread or hire a copywriter, if necessary.

Keep the meta "description", even if you ditch other meta tags (and most of them *are* totally useless). Depending on the search engine, the results tend to be displayed as either text snippets from your content, a visual thumbnail or the description - so it's best to include it.

louisaL

Thank you for both your advice

steve1980

You can try Kathy at www.eyeformarketing.co.uk. She's very good and has done everything from small to large businesses.

raineshoe

I would never pay for someone to SEO my site. As far as I'm concerned they are rip off merchants. As someone else said there are plenty of things you can do yourself to improve your rankings and if unsure, search the web as there is a lot of info out there if you look that is free!

steve1980

raineshoe wrote: »

I would never pay for someone to SEO my site. As far as I'm concerned they are rip off merchants. As someone else said there are plenty of things you can do yourself to improve your rankings and if unsure, search the web as there is a lot of info out there if you look that is free!

In essence I agree with you, but there are people out there who do it for a living as their business rather than a faceless organisation.

Most web designers offer this service as part of the packages, are they also rip off merchants?

paddyrg

I think a big chunk of the problem is that nobody can demonstrate their results and so rely on fear and ignorance for business. Engine rankings are necessarily secret, the quality of the search results are all one offers over the competetion. If Google announced their equation in public, tomorrow there would be 10000 c'ppy bottom feeder affiliate sites filling the first 1000 pages of listings, and everybody would head to Bing in the space of a few hours. This means SEO sellers cannot *know* what they are doing fully.

And to compound things, none really have demonstrable results. How many SEO practitioners take 2 versions of the same site with the same domain name and length of stability online and compare the rankings on the same key phrases after a month? Unless you define the experiment parameters in advance, everything else is anecdotal. And be wary of overprecise statistics too, if anyone can quote a figure without a big handwave of "around about" they don't understand statistics enough to be allowed to use numbers.

And, for what it's worth, being on page 5 or 500 is equally useless if the searcher skims the first 3 pages.

And for which search terms are you optimised anyway? I can get you to the #1 google listing for an obscure and unique search phrase such as "orange tangerine babygrow diaphonous dichromic worgybab". In fact if you google that very phrase in a few hours, this thread will probably be the top listing. If I search for my domain (without the .co.uk), it is the first listiing returned. I have been lazy, the site hasn't changed in 2 years, and it does not much useful. But it is a distinctive word.

But then again, that may be a tailored result for me! I often look stuff up on the Maplin website. Google knows this, and so when I look to buy somethiing Maplin sells, it is ranked higher for me than a regular Dabs customer/site user. There is no universal single answer for positioning results, only many many personal ones.

And what is scariest is that many, many people selling 'SEO' services don't understand fully everything I have just listed above, yet will look you in the eye whilst drinking your £1000. They thing SEO is something you "do" to a website, and sell it accordingly. It is smoke and mirrors with a bit of common sense, a bit of good luck, a bit of misdirection, and a cartload of unproven horse manure. You have the common sense tips above, but beyond having a valid, useful, relevant and respected site, you are working on rapidly decreasing returns. If you like twitter etc then by all means do them, but there is no single simple solution or process to raise you to the top of the serch pile for common search terms!

*Update! This morning, this thread is #1 for "worgybab" - give it a try!*

Horace

I was doing some research for a client the other day on the very topic of SEO..I found one company making vacuous claims that they could get their clients onto the first page of Google, I found them on Page 6 which is hardly a great claim:rotfl:

It takes time but you can SEO your own site and add longtail keywords etc. etc. I am doing mine (it is always a work in progress) and now I have two sites to work with the task is even bigger.

The only people that can get you on the first page of Google and keep your there are the Google engineers themselves - this is something that I was told by the Director of Google UK.

pinkclouds

Horace wrote: »

It takes time but you can SEO your own site and add longtail keywords etc. etc. I am doing mine (it is always a work in progress) and now I have two sites to work with the task is even bigger.

The only people that can get you on the first page of Google and keep your there are the Google engineers themselves - this is something that I was told by the Director of Google UK.

So true. SEO is search engine optimisation. Nothing more than that. It's not a guarantee of success, merely an increased likelihood of success. However, that's not (in itself) a reason to DIY. If time is money, as the saying goes, then it might be the right option for some people to pay someone else to free up their time. It just depends on the circumstances.

paddyrg wrote: »

*Update! This morning, this thread is #1 for "worgybab" - give it a try!*

That's so funny! If anyone is interested, I believe the way it worked is because "worgybab" is an unusual keyword and the MSE forums have PageRank 5 and an Alexa rating of 1648 (very high) so this thread was quickly spidered and indexed, given a lot of importance and catapulted to the top of the results (tbh, can't believe there is a second result for this keyword!!). It shows the importance of choosing good keywords and the benefit of having good PR (or, at least, backlinks from other sites with good PR).

paddyrg

pinkclouds wrote: »

That's so funny! If anyone is interested, I believe the way it worked is because "worgybab" is an unusual keyword and the MSE forums have PageRank 5 and an Alexa rating of 1648 (very high) so this thread was quickly spidered and indexed, given a lot of importance and catapulted to the top of the results

That's exactly right - and the fact that "worgybab" has now got 6 mentions on this thread means it is without question the world's #1 authority on the subject. This is why I take 'I can guarantee you the front page of Google' claims with the pinch of salt they deserve ;-)