Many thanks for your help, any advise you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Chris Holgate
Refresh Cartridges
Their E-mail as follows:
< snip / no emails please / snip>
[edited by: heini at 7:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 7, 2003]
[edit reason] emails not allowed, see TOS for explanation please [/edit]
Not advise full stop.
If you are looking for advice or an SEO the best place would be to put a posting in the Commercial Exchange forum on WebmasterWorld.
For £900+ I would be looking to get serious results from a player with some credibility and client references.
Good luck and welcome to webmasterwrold.
Shak
What exactly are they going to be doing
You'd have to ask them that. There are any number of techniques that someone offering SEO services might use, ranging the the risky to the risk-free and from the usually effective to the usually a waste of time -- and money.
You should get from them, or anyone else you think of hiring to do SEO, a pretty clear idea of what approaches they'll use. Certainly don't expect them to give away all of their secrets, but you should go in knowing what the general plan will be.
Find out exactly what they are offering and visit the above companies to see if you can afford to run and manage the listings yourself.
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Our technical team have taken a look at your website blah de blah and although it has metatags and it is optimised, it will not be as effective as the methods we use.
Your site has at least 30 different phrases that you need to be found by, this has already diluted the search by 30 times. A few years ago metatags were effective in getting you good positions but because the competition is so high now and there are literally millions of websites on line, they have become less and less useful.
We actually create a whole network of pages that are optimised for each page, and together with link popularity and optimum submission time we can achieve excellent positions, hence the money back guarantee.
<They listed a pricing structure, but basically, you're looking at £1000 for 40 phrases>
This will allow you to cover all of your products in one go and the more phrases you have the more exposure your site will get.
You have an extremely user friendly and easy to navigate site, so there is no reason that once we have got you to the top of the major search engines you will start making some serious money!
Basically you can achieve the same in a much better fashoin yourself: write pages for all searchphrases you are targeting, which
have the phrase in title, header, description.
Interlink the pages by using the phrases in the link text.
Make those pages so that a user landing on those pages actually finds them useful and gets inticed to buy/sign up or whatever action you want them to take.
To me, what you describe does not sound like a good offer. At the very least you should ask them to give you an example on how they work.
if you sell widgets, they'll add a page about widgets to their site and put your link on it. after a couple of months, the search engines will have picked up that page and will start listing it and you'll start getting some clickthroughs. a couple of months later, the period you paid for has expired and you have to pay again or your pages are removed.
if it IS the site i'm thinking of, their optimisation was "ok", BUT, IMO, they didn't choose very good keywords / search terms and they could have done a much better job with a bit more time and effort. the pages were little more than "a bit of information about xxxxx" - nothing to entice the visitor to actually click through the link to the real site.
i also think the diversity of the information on the site probably dilutes the value of the site as a whole - a site about widgets will always do better for a search on widgets than a site about a few thousand different things with just one page about widgets.
IMO, you can get much better value employing someone yourself. even better, stick around here for a few months, read, learn, implement ...
Kind Regards
Chris Holgate
