Is there such a thing as a consumer's report type list of good SEO companies to use for promoting a blog? Does anyone pay an SEO company to promote their blog and if so, who? Is it better to establish your own links, use paid advertising, post frequently, etc. and ping a lot of sites?
Ozzie decision on whether or not use a SEO firm for promoting a blog would depend on the kind of goals a person has in mind. For instance if you are only looking to earn some extra cash using blogging, then paying thousands of dollars to a SEO Firm wouldn’t be justifiable nor recommended. On the other hand, if you are launching a blog with which you want to make some serious cash or want to use it to promote your offline portfolio, then using an SEO Firm is certainly justifiable and worthwhile. Also not every one has the knowledge or the time to do serious link building and promotions for their blog/site, in which case an SEO Firm would come in handy.
yogesh, thank you for your comments. They are helpful. I also visited your link for Free SEO tips and found many of them very helpful.
"For instance if you are only looking to earn some extra cash using blogging, then paying thousands of dollars to a SEO Firm wouldn’t be justifiable nor recommended. " Is it necessary to spend thousands of dollars? Would two or three hundred dollars help a small blog get readers or would that little amount be like throwing my money away?
Thanks Ozzie, glad you found those articles interesting. Those couple of hundred dollars can go a long way if you spend them wisely, you can certainly buy some good links; get some one to submit your blog to 100's of free directories and maybe spend some money on getting visitors through PPC campaigns by using Adwords and Stumbleupon. However the biggest thing that you need to focus on is generating quality content that is posted on a regular basis, this is the only way you will get return visitors, which is essential for making any site successful.
If you want traffic and others - attention popularity..then any SEO won't help for blogs but 100's of social bookmarking sites are waiting for your posts to be added there..... De.icio.us Digg Yahoo Myweb2.0 Netscape etc are on top. Bloggers are getting 1000s of visitors from social media....
Hi, I spent a few hundred dollars on some SEO which doubled the traffic on my site. I also went from a couple of dozen indexed pages to about 1000 as well as improved SERP for my main pages with better focus. I was very involved throughout the process. It is impossible to predict results, but I think you can probably clean up your site so that it has some pretty good SEO for a few hundred dollars. The guy who did my SEO has a link on my site. Rich
Thanks Sat123 for the suggestion of social networks. I'm already using a couple...technorati and readdit. I'll start using the ones you listed as well.
Richrf, I've bookmarked your site and the site of the SEO company that you used. Thanks for your reply and the helpful information. Your site looks very good and I hope it's doing well.