Is this SEO company doing things right?

I was under the impression that if your webpages were code-compliant, it'd be better and easier for search engine spiders to go thru your site, and thus result in better search engine results. Within my own work, this proved true in most situations.

Today I got back to work on a client's website which I had poured thru for 2 weeks making W3C-compliant. He let me do that along with a few other SEO tricks as a kind of "practice" as he wanted better SEO, I'm actively learning SEO and I've been his webmaster for almost 2 years.

Last month he hired a SEO company for a few hundred dollars a month, and they've made changes to the site which result in non-compliant pages. They've also resorted to a lot of keyword repetition in the meta tags (as in 35-45% of keywords and description are the same word), which I thought was a negative as it seems spammy.

So now I'm totally confused on SEO... a lot of the things they're doing seems contrary to what I thought was right. At face value the company seems legit and includes many big name companies in their client list. I don't really keep track of SEO companies so I don't know which ones are legit and which ones aren't. Do these techniques seem right to anyone?

 

w3c is not the biggest things seo companies worry about, but in a professional manner i think they should have kept the standards..did they do web design aswell or something?

About the keyword thing it really does depend on the keywords they were going for...

 

If you want AngelusC, PM me the URL -- I'll take a look and let you know.

 

I have seen a lot of top ranked sites that do not comply with W3C and repeat keywords in meta tags as you mentioned. The only way to have an effective SEO program, is to compare the elements your site uses, with the exisiting top 10 ranked sites for the same keywords you are targeting.
These elements include a comparison in the keyword density in the meta Title, Description, Keywords, plus the body text, the outbound links, headline text, same site links, image alt links and more.
Then you have to have a good inbound linking program. Unless the SEO company you mentioned does all of the above, your site will not get better SEO.
It is better, in my opinion, to do the SEO yourself, rather than hiring a company, with the IBP-9 Webpage Optimizer. I am using it, and it seems to be working for me, as my sites are being ranked much higher on the keywords I am after.
The cost of the IBP-9 Webpage Optimizer is about the same your client paid, and it will also teach you what you need to know about SEO.

 

No, they didn't do any design at all, I created the website about a year ago and last month made it all 100% compliant.

We had a telephone conference with the SEO company and they also said compliance isn't very important when it comes to SEO.

bceagle, I understand that it's better to do it myself, but I'm already so stretched-thin at work that I actually don't want to learn anything more! The only real reason I even dabble in SEO is for my non-work websites. Plus this is the kind of client that wants results yesterday, so even less time to even try to learn new stuff.

 

sketch, I just noticed that I posted to the wrong person (above).

 

Compliance should be the least of your worries when it comes to SEO in my opinion. In all honestly it's not even worth the effort getting sites to 'standards' because that effort doesn't pay.

W3C is overrated.

 

From an SEO perspective this is very true. But websites aren't just for search engines. Your visitors should come first.

Compliance will certainly help with future-proofing your website and give your audience the widest possibilities to view your site as you intended it to be viewed.

I think W3C will come more to the fore as alternative platforms for viewing content become more prevalent.

 

I think it really doesn't matter.
More than 98% sites on web are not W3C-complaint.

 

I think it's all realtive, if you can make a page standards compliant, then great, that's ideal. Pages that have a few things wrong then you're probably not going to notice a difference, however if the coding is a complete mess then yes, you could suffer in the SERPS because of it.

I'd be more worries about the spammy tags personally, okay, the site probably won't get penalised becase of keyword repitition in the metas, but if that's the sort of work that they do, then it makes you wonder in what other areas are they messing up?

 

w3c standards have nothing to do with SEO.
Search engines, mostly, evaluate the text part of the document only
and ignore the code part.

 

Why don't you talk to the client and ask him if you could talk to the SEO Specialist assigned to him so that the two of you could make some arrangement regarding the site... That way you could maintain the site standard compliant and they can still do the job they're hired to do? Afterall, he has been your client for two years...

 

This doesn't mean that they are any good. They might just have an impressive sales team/technique, but it doesn't follow that they know 100% what they are doing with SEO. Meta keyword stuffing is just pointless, and won't help one bit.

Sometimes SEOs stuff meta keywords purely to show the client that they are doing something, knowing full well that this isn't what is going to make a difference in ranking. Sort of a "clients expect it" mentality.

 

It has been my experience, that when you apply SEO type of changes to a site, the design of the site also has to be changed to reflect the changes.

 

tiboh, I have already done this (in fact it's in my last reply). What I posted here is more of a personal concern than anything, given my lack of SEO experience I have to give the company the benefit of the doubt. The issues I raised with my client was that if they were going to be sloppy in the way they update the pages (they accidentally pasted over some quotes and closing tags, no biggie to fix), the updates had better go thru me.

bceagle, while I'm not exactly sure why you're bringing up design, but I suppose it depends on the site itself and how it was created. We've had a good track record of taking over websites, cleaning them up and making updates without affecting visual design. The only visual changes that should be allowed would be to things like the navigation or page headings.

 

W3C compliance will not hurt or in any way effect you in the serps.

No website is infallible to code problems or typos. Google so far except the human nature of building websites.

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8553629667451959310 (Towards the end of the video...sorry can't post live links yet, newbie).

 

There should be absolutely no need for that, unless you count textual changes as an aspect of the design.

 

Actually, legit techniques does not give you quick results but it decreases the chance of getting the website banned from the search engines (especially Google), but illegite techniques gives you quick results but increases the chance of being banned.

Try to research the testimonials and comments recieved by the company because that may help you know if the company is llegit or not.

 

check google.com to see

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com

Thats how important it is

 

Web purists will say it's very important. With regard to SEO, not much.