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Im new to all this, but here goes.. Ive been looking around on the web for Web Site positioning (optimization). It seems that companies are charging a small fortune for this service, in excess of $2000 for a top 10 spot. Do they use any special techniques? are there any special Tags I should be using in my HTML. Do these companies do anything different to get results (eg special software) or would they use the same techniques as the average programmer would! Im a bit confused on how they can guarantee a top 10 spot, could I do this myself??
thanks
<could I do this myself??>
Yes you could do it yourself by reading and reading and reading here in wmw.
This handbook is the best you ever read, and it also fresh by the day.
Use the site search on the top of the page and look in all forums and do some question when you dont understand and i promise you will get very good answers.
Good Luck
/Ove
The cost varies due to, knowledge - experience - demand. The more knowledge and experience a person or company gets, the greater their demand the higher their price.
This is not always indicative of their usefulness however. Find out, in writing, what they are offering for the fee. Does it include PFI (pay for submission) sites such as Yahoo ($299.00), Looksmart ($299.00) and Inktomi (depends on the pages submitted) (note those 2 alone are $598.00) add PPC (pay per click) on top of that and the real costs go up, making a $2k fee not so bad. But if all of that is 'additional' then find out what you are paying for.
I guess I could pay Yahoo direcly instead of an optimization company??
Yes.
>and even if I do pay for it, I might be on page 101 of the searches?
Yes.
>I guess I could pay Yahoo direcly instead of an optimization company??
Yes. However, if you decide to submit to Yahoo yourself, you should spend some time reading first. Read the information Yahoo provides for submitting a site.
I would recommend reading this - [webmasterworld.com...]
Then go to the Yahoo Forum and spend some time there.
Once you are listed in the directory, it's next to impossible to change you description or category.
If you can't spend the time, I would say you're better off leaving it up to the "professionals" :)
Excellent point, mdharrold. I didn't even think about that.
But also keep in mind that Google does not index every site. Especially if it's a new site, with no incoming links.
In that case you could try to get listed the ODP(dmoz.org) for free which will then put you in Google, which will THEN put you in Yahoo at least for your business name.
If doing it yourself is what interests you, then by all means save some money and do it yourself. With a little studying and a little patience you can do the same great job as any professional out there.
Its not hard to make a web site, but some people such as the webmasters in here are experiences enough to make their services worthwhile.
I have to admit $2000 sounds pretty steep. In comparison, I am making a relation of mine a web site for his garage, with the $1300 including design of his ten page site.
Half of this will be me making sure he is ranked well on the search engines, which in my case I am lucky enough to say there is little or not competition for keywords. (this is because SE Scotland doesnt have many similar sites up and running)
So Im more or less guaranteed the ranks, just need to make sure ive submitted him to get the ranks!
This works fine for us because he, and his employees are not used to making site, and i know a bit (but still learning lots).
I guess it depends on what presence you want to have on the web, but definetely shop around and plan ahead before you part with $2000 for what you really are not sure what youre gonna get :)
As for DIY SEO, with this and other fora, newsletters, guides and tutorials, it's never been more achievable.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that all SEO companies are worth what they attempt to charge. In fact, I'd say that most are definitely not. The reason this forum is so valuable to me (and the reason other forums are not) is that this place has an incredibly high concentration of people who actually know what they are talking about. Makes a hell of a change from any of the other forums on SEO that I've ever found.
There are so-called SEO companies in the UK who are trying to charge £999 plus tax to just make a basic submission to the three directories (one Yahoo Business Express submission, one Looksmart submission and one submission to DMOZ for £999!). There are companies who charge £500 for a single doorway page that isn't even well optimised. I sincerely hope that these companies don't actually get much business, but that's their charges.
That certainly does not mean that all SEO is a rip-off or over-priced though.
I, and several others here, have been specialising in and studying the specialised business of online marketing and SEO for years. This gives us a depth of knowledge, a range of talents, and an experience that simply cannot be rivalled without you also putting in a heavy time investment.
You can dramatically shorten the learning curve by reading here. Most people here are researching and gaining new experience almost constantly, then sharing the fruits of that with each other, thus sharing the workload of research between us all.
That's still going to take you hours and hours each and every week though. What you have to decide then, is which is more cost effective for you: spending the time, or spending the money?
SEO isn't just knowing a couple of tags, and even SEO by itself is just a small piece of the grand scheme of internet marketing and ecommerce knowledge. If you want to hone these skills, you are going to be here long and often, and get to know us all pretty well. :)
Please also see [webmasterworld.com...] - a prior, closely related thread entitled "Why are SEOs so expensive?"
Ammon Johns
I'd do this with an Overture account, targeting less competitive keyphrases.
You'd be gone as soon as the money ran out, but I'd have fulfilled my "guarantee".
There's recently been a couple of threads on this, I'll see if I can dig them out.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[searchengineforums.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
thanks again Andy
