Hello All, We have a company that offers secure email hosting and secure web browsing capabilities. The company was started in 2002 and has been growing at a respectable pace, primarily through word of mouth. Although little focus has been toward SEO, the page currently has a pagerank of 4 and has a few dozen backlinks. We now want to step up the SEO efforts in order to generate more traffic and customers. Our problem is that we are unable to determine which SEO companies are reputable and how much is a reasonable amount pay. Currently, our target keywords are "secure email" and "email hosting." These terms, however, seem very competitive and the CPC for both is around $10. Therefore, we expect the SEO cost to between $5-10 thousand. From your experiences, which companies are well respected in the field of SEO? Can our budget of 5-10 thousand result in top 10 placement for these terms? Do you have any other advice that might help us to achieve more targeted web traffic? Thanks!
I can take on a few clients right now. If you're serious then drop me a PM/email with your site details, realistic budget and traffic/revenue targets.
If you're looking for someone just to do link building then contact one of the Indian guys on here, it'll be 100 time more cost effective than getting someone in the UK to do it. If you're looking for a full monthly managed SEO package including on-page SEO, link building, directory submission, article writing and submission, than that's more my thing.
I usually do my seo work. 1. meta tags 2. titles 3. H1 - H2 - H3 TAGS 4. Bold keywords 5. Keyword density 6. keywords on domain This works 99.99 percent of the time No need to pay hundreds of dollars for SEO work.
99% of the time if you're not targeting any keyword terms that get more than 5 visitors per day? What about the links?
You can ask Sitepoint to recommend SEO company. Otherwise you can post your requirements within the forums. This way you'll be able to discuss options with other members. One more thing. do not follow any promises that someone would gain Top 10 rank for you especially in Google .This would happen for a while but not for more than a few months.
Perhaps the best advice is to ask alot of questions and trust your instincts. Talk to a few SEO marketers and compare them. A good SEO will make it clear to you that SEO is a long-term process - short term gains are not typical. And they should be forthcoming with their strategies, they may not explain all of their techniques in great specifics, but general discussion and tutoring of their strategies should be expected. Aside from SEO knowledge, it is very important that the person doing your SEO is a good writer. The work involves alot of copywriting - so, ask for writing samples.
Athlonin, it's easy to write down an SEO checklist of things to do but getting them done can be a challenge. This is what many so called "SEO experts" do. They do sales talk a lot and they can do little. So it's important to have a basic knowledge of how search engines look at pages before talking to people because many of them don't know what they talk about. Many of them always talk about cost effectiveness (read: cheap SEO) that don't bring results. Ask for their achievements such as rankings (you search for them yourself) and check the number of people using such phrases when querying search engines to ensure they're competitive enough to be considered. Yes, BILZ is right, look for someone who can write well. If you receive an e-mail from someone who offers the service and yet you find wrongly spelled words or grammatically incorrect sentences. Think again, you'd like to have your pages look professionally not only with design but more importantly with content. Ask people in the industry regarding the company's performance and see if it has a good reputation before considering to talk to them. I say it pays to spend enough time knowing these providers because after all it's your site that they will be working on. If you succeed in your SEO efforts you credit yourself for finding the right SEO person. If your site ends up getting banned or at least no improvement in sales, traffic or even pageviews then consider your time and money wasted, not to mention your site's potential growth hampered severely.
SEO and copywritting are two different things. Hire a copywritter to to write copy - hire an seo to do seo.
Hi athlonin ... Can take over some clients right now ... Please see this thread where I have featured My Services and drop me a PM if you want a quote ... Abhishek
We outsource our article writing, but it's very important for an SEO to be able to write good English. Imagine if you oursourced your SEO and then took a look at your site to find it full of spelling mistakes.
I feel Article Writing and SE Optimised writing are some of the things that should be qualities of a good SEO No offence.. Abhishek
My point is copywriting is and seo are different things. Writing copy is about selling or projecting a professional image of your company. My English and spelling is poor but I can helped many sites gain high rankings. I am sure there are many other SEO's like me. If you have the budget you should always outsource to a professional copywriter in my opinion.
If you PM me with your site URL and your targets in terms of sales/conversions then we can come to some agreement.
I don't mean having an SEO do the job does not require a copywriter. But part of the job of an SEO professional is to provide legit titles, construct appropriate sentences to fit anchor links and other text-related work. Having good rankings does not necessarily mean perfectly copy edited content. Bad spelling or wrong grammar words can still rank high. But it just boils down to having a professionally written copy that delivers conversions and not just rankings.