firms that charge for SEO

[skaterdav85]

So my friend's company got a proposal from a firm to build a site and one of the things on there was SEO. Basically what the company wants for their site is to be one of the top listings on Google when you type in a particular phrase relating to their products. I'm not too sure how you would go about doing that. Is that something you'd pay for with Google? Or is it something that just happens over time as traffic increases to your site? I know you can do little tricks to your html here and there that aren't frowned upon, but I'm sure there is more to it. What do you think the firm would probably do to get the site ranked high for certain keyword searches?Also, the particular search words are not something common like 'dvd player' where there is a lot of competition im sure.

[wirehopper]

SEO is difficult to measure. You could have the company establish a baseline measurement for the current site SEO performance and describe how they will improve it, and ask them to quantify their proposal.LinkedIn, facebook and twitter are popular ways to increase the distribution of site content and events.I've heard that 25% of SEO is the site content, 75% is the quality and quantity of inbound links. Quality means the page rank of the referring site.A good site, that allows visitors to find information quickly, and includes valuable content will do well. Resources:http://www.google.com/webmasters/http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/http://websitegrader.com/http://alexa.com/As a side note, I have blog and often post spam I receive (and mark it as spam). Those pages get the most hits - probably from people checking on the email. That's improved the page rank for the blog, and the site.

[chibineku]

SEO really seems to be a matter of following some basic principles and having patience.As wirehopper said, quality content and relevant inbound links are gold. If you have those, then you will get a good ranking. There are other factors, though it's hard to quantify how much impact each has.Avoid labouriously repeated content. Duplicate content will be punished by web crawlers. Poor sites often tend to have hundreds of instances of the important keywords. Make sure your code validates. Redirect using the proper status codes in order to retain any link value you have built up. For example, I am developing on sinaesthesia.co.uk but my site will be migrated to aromaclear.co.uk. I have been working on my site and posting links to problem pages on this forum for many months, so search engines know about sinaesthesia.co.uk. When I migrate the site, I will use apache's mod_rewrite to do a 301 permanent redirect to the new domain. This means that I don't lose the value of the links from this forum. The only possible downside is that search engine spiders may realise that this is a coding website and nothing to do with the products aromaclear.co.uk will be selling. Apparently the invisible keyword and description meta tags are becoming less important, as is any other invisible page content, because you can hide irrelevent content in there simply to try to broaden the range of search terms which will cause your site to appear in a search engine. Who wants to get a page selling psoriasis treatment when they were searching for how to grow cabbages, simply because I threw a whole dictionary into my keywords meta tag?There are some other pieces of advice that don't affect search engine ranking necessarily, but might make people more inclined to click once your page comes up in a search engine. Pretty URLs, for example, are more appealing than raw ones.By a raw URL, I mean something like:aromaclear.co.uk/product_details.php5?sessid=234234923050234923092349&category=psoriasis&productid=3A more appealing URL might look like:aromaclear.co.uk/products/psoriasis/conditioner/3People are more likely to be able to remember it and it's clear that this is what they were after. There are a lot of SEO companies offering better rankings, and I'm fairly sure it's all grey- or black-hat SEO, which can even involve spamming forums and groups with links to your site. Almost like an affiliate program, but where there isn't any real affiliation. Genuine links to your site from others that share subject matter are really the holy grail, and that takes a good website, honest content, advertising and patience to achieve.

[locbtran]

Just going to put in my 2 cents. SEO takes a lot of patient and can be very frustrating at times but is well worth it when you see the final result. My site Snooples.com frustrates me tremendously but I am happy with the product so far.

Basically what the company wants for their site is to be one of the top listings on Google when you type in a particular phrase relating to their products.

The problem with SEO is you need to stick with it cause you can be on top of Google one month and back down on the 3rd a few months later. You need users (old and new) to be constantly coming to your site.

quality content and relevant inbound links are gold

I can not stress enough the importance of this line.

By a raw URL, I mean something like:aromaclear.co.uk/product_details.php5?sessid=234234923050234923092349&category=psoriasis&productid=3A more appealing URL might look like:aromaclear.co.uk/products/psoriasis/conditioner/3

Google love appealing URL because there are keywords the bots can pick up as appose to the raw URLFinally, don't submit your website to multiple search engines because you are wasting your time and money. When you have submitted to the 3 major search engines - Google, Yahoo and Bing and lets not forget the dmoz.org. Other smaller search engine will pick your website up.