I just created a community website (url in profile), and want to get it into the top 5 on Google when someone does a search for durango colorado. First of all, is this possible? Second, approximately how long will it take and how much will it cost? Third, I need a professional, reputable company to do this for me- any suggestions?
Considering that there are only 234.000 results for that keyword in Google.com and that your layout still has some space to be improved and to rank for that keyword, yeah it is pretty simple.
I have no idea how much this sort of thing costs, so it's hard for me to say what my budget is. I'd like to see results within a few months, but again, I don't know how long it generally takes for changes to take effect.
If you want to try to optimise the site yourself, I can give you some assistance. I can run you a report on your site using whatever keywords you want. It will compare your site against these keywords, and the top ranking competative sites for these keywords, for any search engine you desire. That will give you a very good indication on how and where to alter your site to achieve higher rankings. PM me if you're interested. Actually this offer stands to anyone that's interested. PM me - Lets say $20 per report, sounds a fair price for DP memebers.
Honestly, I'd suggest you start learning about SEO on your own and attempting to implement these strategies yourself. Otherwise you will constantly have a big bill from an SEO firm to pay to get your rankings up there and then maintaining your ranking is another continues project in itself. For your keywords you can get results within as little as 3 months since the competition for those terms isn't severely intense. Your money would be better spent actually doing the work yourself... ofcourse unless your time is more valuable then the cost of hiring a SEO firm (Usually the case with big companies). In that case be prepared to pay atleast $X,XXX over 6 months to get a top 5 ranking. That's the type of prices you will get from real SEO firms who actually know what they are doing and aren't just sending you auto generated reports from some SEO software.
Make sure those words appear in your homepage title, in an H1 tag...and a few times in the text body. I would say an SEO that knows their way around your script should be able to it pretty cheaply - even if you Google something like "top10 SEO tips" you will probably get enough information if you know how to implement the changes yourself.
You are dealing with a relatively low competitive phrase. You should be able to learn enough to do it yourself. I think you have a couple nice people here willing to share some knowledge for a great deal. I'm always willing to help if you're trying to rank for moderate to extremely competitive national keywords or phrases.
The first thing you need to do is analyze your competition. How many backlinks they got? From where? That would be your offsite seo. number 1 for durango colorado is durango.org with Inlinks (19,872), so you might want to shoot for number 3 durango.com with only Inlinks (3,458).
Thanks for the responses. So I'll need offsite and onsite SEO from what I understand. Which should come first? Does it matter? Also, I can set aside time daily to work on it myself, but have no clue where to start. Anyone offering their mentoring services needs to realize that they would have to really hold my hand through this for quite a while I suspect. And the more I read, the more I know I want white hat only services. (Hey, at least I know the difference between that and black hat! I'm learning something!)