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I've found your forums and I have to say they are absolutely brilliant, I've picked up a lot of good advice so far which is invaluable as I must admit to being a complete novice when it comes to SEO and related topics. Anyways, I hope you can help me with my queries, because I've been spending a lot of money lately on SEO work and am a little concerned I've been getting ripped off.
I run two websites, one on OScommerce and one on Zen Cart, which I believe are fairly similar. Anyway, I'm putting most of my emphasis on the Zen Cart site, which I opened around 2 months ago. I've recently paid £500 to a SEO company who tell me that they will optimize my page for 100 keywords, and should be able to obtain top 10 listings in Google for the main keyword [main keyword phrase].
They have created a sitemap on my website, linking to an optimized page for each of the 100 keywords. Now they tell me it's just a case of sitting back and waiting for Google to index. So the first part of my query is whether or not this sounds like a good strategy, or are they taking me for a ride?
Secondly, I questioned them about whether or not Google would start to pick up keywords that they're not optimising. For example, if I have the phrase [another keyword phrase] on the site, would Google (eventually, over time) pick this site up and include it in their results?
They've told me no... I'd need to spend £2000-3000 to get this done, but I have noticed (albeit on Yahoo and not on Google) for my old sites that this appears to be happening without me paying the money. So again, I'd appreciate your feedback there.
Thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate your help!
[edited by: pageoneresults at 12:37 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
I appreciate what you're saying, but having paid the money, what do you think of my problem?
too many delimters in urls
poor link anchor text
poor keyword title and description creation
alitany of other problems
it was never designed for search engines and I've never seen and oscommerce site where the products themsleves ranked well.
I am assuming you are using it because it is free?
You have got what you paid for
What the company has done might work, but you just never know. If you were paying for results as opposed to paying for SEO, this fee would be a LOT higher. As Nippi said, it sounds as though you got what you paid for.
The following that I reffer to are user "contributions" on the OSC site.
On the URLs, I have used the SEF Link Transformer on the oscommerce .org site. It converts the page names to a more "friendly" format.
On the METAs I had used the Dynamic Product Meta Tags in the past. Seemed to help a lot on this issue.
I no longer have the site on-line but when it did exist it obtained descent reults on the product pages.
IMHO,
Brian
I beg to differ. We have a specialist store that outranks Amazon (just an example, given how much people love to complain about Amazon taking over the results) and can easily get top 10 rankings across the board, should we focus on the product and feature it on the site.
Get yourself a programmer who is SEO aware and get him to mod_rewrite enable it for you AND fix the anchor text issue. I've even seen a couple of companies offer this as a part of a value add package.
Regards
[webmasterworld.com...]
Do you have a link to those contributions? it would be much appreciated!
Go to the OS commerce .org site. From there on the top navigation bar click on community resources. Then on the left hand side navigation click on contributions. Then in the search box input SEF Link Transformer for the first mod and then go back to search and insert Dynamic Product Meta Tags for the second mod.
Take care,
