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Hello ScubaDive;

Thank you for the information.

I would ask to see a client list.

At the end of the day you get what you pay for in any industry.

Ask to be given specific search terms that they have optimized for, on what engines and which sites.

You should be looking for a search company that has already provided proven results. The best deal would be to work on a pay per performance basis.

Ari

SEO is essentially best practices in web development. If you're going to build
a web site, these are the things you do to help it along in the search
engines. If your current web developer isn't pushing you in that
direction, find another. If you have an SEO-aware web developer, there
should be no need to pay an SEO consultant or expert.

In the end it is the content, uniqueness, quality, and usefulness of
your site that will help it most in the search engines. The search
engine companies work tirelessly towards including the most useful and
appropriate sites in their results. So instead of trying to trick them,
just make your site one that the search engines will use by providing
targeted, high quality, useful content.

The other side is just plain old networking, but on the web. Make sure
your site gets listed anywhere sites like yours are listed. For
example, I always make sure the page on Wikipedia that lists Wiki hosts
includes my site. Little stuff like that adds up.

I haven't done anything more than that and my site continues to be on the first page of Google for 'wiki hosting'.

Matt

I agree and disagree. You don't need to pay big dollars to get on search engines, but it is important to be on search engines as they can and do bring profitable referrals. There are important SEO techniques to implement while building a website which any webmaster should already be doing such as naming the images to fit the description, using alt tags, and clear URLs, meta information, keywords, etc. Once you have that in place, you should automatically start getting listed in search engines.

To be ranked at the top, one of the most important things your website needs to have is "link backs". The more website that link back to you, the higher you could rank in a search engine. These websites of course should be related to your own website. Spam websites will not make any difference linking back to your website. If you sell "widgets" and a thousand "widget fans" link back to your website, you would be ranked highly when people are searching for "widgets".

yah... i'm in the same boat with generating traffic to my site. i recently signed a contract with an seo company that supposidly guarantees results. they've provided me with some additional key words for my site, but nothing that i couldn't have done on my own (which i had already done). like someone commented earlier, i think you get what you pay for. some companies have an enormous budget to spend on pay-per-click advertising and seo companies, but i'm not fortunate enough to have that type of funding at this time. so i've done a little research and began asking my customers (via a survey) what they like and dislike about my site. i'm hoping that this will be the most cost effective approach to and increase in traffic and sales. i guess i'll have to ride this one out over the next 6 months and see how much my investment pays off.

I have to agree with you Nat. You must know yourself SEO before you pay one penny. My experience with SEO is a total vaste of time and money. If you are lucky to be on top on some search term great, if not move on.

There are reports of improved organic traffic from PPC on Google. Of course Google will not admit.

I own a small family business that sells online. Most of our traffic comes from search engines - both organic search and sponsored advertising.

Search ranking - no company can guarantee you search ranking. They can optimize your site (and keep in mind that each search engine ranks by a different formula) but the search engines determine your ranking. If you are putting your url out there eventually the search engines will find you. Being found but having a ranking of 937 for a keyword isn't particularly useful.

Remember that a web site is made up of individual web pages. Each web page should be optimized for 2 - 4 keyword phrases. Optimization is about content (including use of keyword phrases), organization (including links both inbound and within your website) and accessibility.

Obtaining top ranking takes time but it is possible even for small businesses. I have products that rank #1 on google and many in the top 5. I also have products that are in such a competitive area that I am no where to be found. Where it is not expected that I will get good organic results I use sponsored advertising.