I can honestly say Ive been through 3 seo companies and had about 8 interviews. Heres some info to chew on. My site needs to compete nationally, local is not going to bring volume 3 main keywords have about 200-300k searches monthly "broad" Fairly competitive but nothing major, the top guys are pr4s All these companies want $1500-$2000 a month and promise first page in 3-4 months. Well Im at month 3 and we have seen some traffic but none of the majors are moving for me. We use our blog/pinging, social media,bookmarking, high pr directory submissions, comment posting all pr 4+ stuff. So in short maybe to hit major keywords its a year long process not 3-4 months as promised. Oh my domain is 8 years old and has a major keyword in it so its not some new site. What am I missing here? Open to comments
Maybe if you are willing to pay, you need a real SEO company, not one of the SEO shops run by a SEO kiddie .... "Real" SEO's do not any of that.
"real" seo's will use all those methods and may more. To the original poster have you thought about asking them to work on a performance related deal?
Really? I only see them being used by the "SEO shops" and the "SEO kiddies". Have you ever been to one of the major SEO conferences? .. the ones where the real expert SEO's get invited to lecture at. Care to explain why NONE of them mention these methods as means of link building? I am happy for my competitors to build links that way, while I can spend my time doing the things that really make a difference.
I dont need to attend a conference to know how to effectively seo a site and get it to page 1 of Google and I use all those methods and more
So why is it failing for the original poster? Why is it failing for all my competitors - they all have 100x more links than I have (and they all from directories/forum posting; blog commenting; etc). I beating them easy.
Yes, this was going to be my next step. Compensation paid when my site ranks for the 1-3 rank on a major keyword. I think this is the way. This does open the door to black hat and im all white hat, here for the long term.
200-300K exact match searches per month is not "fairly" competitive. It's very competitive. Blog/pinging, social media bookmarking, high PR directory submissions, and comment posting are NOT going to get you to page 1. And I would be willing to bet that the "High PR" directories and blogs have a home page with high PR and NOT the page where your link is located. I'd also be willing to bet that 9 out of 10 times the page where your directory listing ends up is not even indexed and that the posts where you're blog comments are be placed are NOFOLLOW blogs. In both cases (where the page is not indexed or your links are not followed) these techniques are not going to help rankings at all. Social media is almost worthless from an SEO perspective for building links... Almost all are NOFOLLOW links. They can bring traffic, but not likely to help rankings. Having a major keyword in your domain is no more helpful than having a major keyword in your folder or page names in the path portion of the URL. Google only gives you a boost because of your domain name when it is an exact match for the search phrase. So if my domain name is keyword1keyword2.com and the user searches for "keyword1 keyword3" you will not see a boost in rankings. HUGE misconception. And while domain age is a ranking factor, it's one of over 200+ that Google is looking at and carries VERY little weight in the overall rankings. The problems: Sounds to me like there are two problems... You have unrealistic expectations to think you can get to the top 3 positions for keywords with 200-300K per month exact match search volumes in months instead of years... and the SEOs you're dealing with are not setting realistic expectations. based on their methods of generating VERY low quality links. Getting to page 1 is going to be tough and might take a year or two of steady work. "Unnatural" link building techniques (blog commenting, forum sigs, article submissions, directory submissions, social bookmarking, etc.) are NOT going to get you there... ever. These techniques have a major flow in that over time their effectiveness decays. They give your URL a little boost initially but it quickly decays and often ends up passing your URL absolutely no juice. Unfortunately MOST who call themselves SEOs can only do this type of low quality link building. Blog commenting is probably the WORST SEO technique known to man. First of all 99.99% of them add rel="nofollow" to the comment link so the link is absolutely worthless from a ranking perspective. It might drive a little traffic IF AND ONLY IF the blog is relevant to your site and the blog actually gets traffic. If you don't understand why I say all of these "unnatural" link building techniques are short-term instead of long-term fixes, then let me explain... I use blog commenting as an example, but the same decaying phenomenon occurs with directories, article submission sites, forum linking and signatures, etc. Assume that you somehow manage to actually find a "dofollow" blog. And the blog owner has just posted a new post. And your "expert" SEO manages to actually "plant" a comment link with your targeted keyword phrase as the link text and SOMEHOW he gets it past the admin/moderator THEN you may get a boost from the blog comment. But its effectiveness is short-lived. When the post is new, it's linked to from the home page of the blog (and the home page is linked to from every page on the blog). It's linked to from the 1st page of the category (and the category is linked to from every page on the blog). It's linked to from the 1st page of the archive (and the archive is linked to from every page on the blog). If the blog has a Recent Posts widget then it's linked to directly from every page on the site. So that post is being passed a LOT of internal PR initially and the post therefore passes on a little PR to your URL through the comment link. So your URL gets a little boost. Then 10 posts later that post where your comment lives will likely roll off the home page and out of the Recent Posts widget. The post just lost its strongest links (the home page link and the Recent Posts widget which linked directly to the post from every page on the site). This greatly reduces the amount of "link juice" that the post has to pass on to your URL via the comment, so the "effectiveness" of the link decays. After 10 posts in the same month, the post will roll off of the 1st page of that month's archive and will be linked to from the 2nd page of the archive. But only the 1st page of the archive is linked to from every page of the site. The 2nd page of the archive gets linked to from the 1st page of the archive, so the "effectiveness" of the link decays again. After 10 post in the same category, the post will roll off of the 1st page of the category and will be linked to from the 2nd page of the category. But only the 1st page of the category is linked ot from every page of the site. The 2nd page of the category gets linked to from the 1st page of the category, so the "effectiveness" of the link decays yet again. If the post did not get any inbound links from external sites while it was on the blog's home page and gets pushed too far back into the category and archives, the search engines will often deindex the page at which point the comment link passes your URL absolutely NO link juice. This same phenomenon occurs with article submissions as the article rolls off the "Recent Articles" page... with forums as the thread rolls off of the 1st page of the forum... with directories as more and more directory entries are submitted. These "unnatural" link building techniques require that you build more and more links just to maintain your existing rankings. If you use these techniques and stop link building, the ranking you had achieved will generally dwendle quickly. The solution: The BEST SEOs build many few links, but higher quality links. They don't target directories, forums, blogs, etc. They target traditional web sites. Traditional web sites are generally static in nature. They change rarely unless it is to add an occasional page. They don't experience the "archiving" phenomenon that I described above. Unfortunately, this type of link building 1) takes more time and 2) requires skills that 99% of the SEOs out there either don't have or cannot market. Most so called "SEOs" are technical in nature. They are very often web developers and web masters turned SEOs. Or someone in a 3rd world country willing to work for peanuts to do mundane, monotanous chores for next to nothing because "next to nothing" goes a long way where they live. They often learn a few buzz words and suddenly they are an "expert SEO". But "natural" link building does NOT require technical skills. It requires true marketing and sales skills... it requires networking... it requires talking to people... preferably in person... it requires thinking outside of the box to come up with creative and imaginative ways to convince other webmasters that they WANT to link to you. And unfortunately, most SEOs do not have the proper skillset for the job.
Social Media, Thank you very much for such a well thought out post. I know everyone has there own recipe for seo. What we have been doing is what you describe above. The only thing that we got off track on was the search volume. The top 3 keywords get around 200-300k broad searches, not exact. The exact search range is 20-40k a month. This is why I think its not such a big deal, plus there are no large companies in my niche, all small business owners. The top site is a pr 4. So setting up link partnerships must be the way to move up the serps.
So it seems its all about locating targeted niche links and building relationships in order to increase the ranking in the serps. The rest of the so called "SEO" tactics described in my opening post must be propaganda based. Maybe its ok to use these tactics if you are marketing a non competitive niche or local marketing.