I regularly buy these services across UK, Europe and US and you need to be extremely careful . . . There are more quacks and charlatans in SEO than in any comparable section of marketing because what works in one market does not necessarily work in another. Normally they will want to sign you up for a year or two and you will get little or no return for your money. Check out any potential vendor by asking to see case histories and Google Analytic results verified in person by their clients. Good Luck!
I regularly buy these services across UK, Europe and US and you need to be extremely careful . . .
There are more quacks and charlatans in SEO than in any comparable section of marketing because what works in one market does not necessarily work in another.
Normally they will want to sign you up for a year or two and you will get little or no return for your money.
Check out any potential vendor by asking to see case histories and Google Analytic results verified in person by their clients.
Good Luck!
100% true. SEO is full of people who think that getting rid of frames, clipart and adding a few meta tags to your site is good enough to include your page ranking. They also make heavy use of blogspamming and forum posting (two things that people hate and will end up adversely affecting your ranking). Apart from firms that charge a LOT of money, SEO is mostly snake oil.
If you want to boost your natural listing on search engines, with a little bit of research and nous you can do it yourself.
Find out what your target market looks for on search engine (do some searches yourself and see what your competitors do), incorporate it on your website in a relevant way. Keep content fresh and updated and if you can get mentioned and linked back from external sites it will all help.
I think you may need to go down an agency route for SEM but I hoenstly think SEO you can do in house if you spend a little bit of time reading up on it.
Just comes down to regular and relevant content on your site in the end. Don't try and trick Google though - they're scaringly clever and it could have an adverse effect.
Just to back up m2 and Leroy, our CL admin account gets emails every day in relation to raising our SEO, and strangely enough these 'companies' always seem to have a hotmail or gmail email address !
I regularly buy these services across UK, Europe and US and you need to be extremely careful . . .
There are more quacks and charlatans in SEO than in any comparable section of marketing because what works in one market does not necessarily work in another.
Normally they will want to sign you up for a year or two and you will get little or no return for your money.
Check out any potential vendor by asking to see case histories and Google Analytic results verified in person by their clients.
Good Luck!
Hello sir,
Thanks for this. We got a quote from a company but at £800 a month they are taking the piss - I'd rather go on a course and learn it myself!
The doc they provided talked about Google Analytics but only said "We would require READ access to the Google Analytics, so that we can analyse our work and also
provide you with an independent reporting suite that is accessible at any time" - so I might go back to them and see if they can prvide us with some results of previous conquests.
Since I switched my site to Wordpress and installed a plugin called 'all in one seo' my traffic has increased. Not sure how easy it would be for you to switch depends on what type of site you have but wordpress is a really excellent cms and not just a blogging platform these days.
I used to do a lot of work on this, but I suspect a lot of sands have shifted since I was involved. Like others have said, be very careful about paying consultants to do it. Also, don't get trapped into the short-termist trap of paying for 'hits'.
I can thouroughly recommend this guy, as someone worth talking to. He does a lot of work with the University of Derby and with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Get yourself booked on one of his courses, or at least look at his online help.
[cite]Posted By: Nug[/cite]Since I switched my site to Wordpress and installed a plugin called 'all in one seo' my traffic has increased. Not sure how easy it would be for you to switch depends on what type of site you have but wordpress is a really excellent cms and not just a blogging platform these days.
My site is with word press too but I got some one to build it, did you build you website from start on wordpress or do you know if they have templates on there to build from as my mate needs to build a site?
All you need to do is find out the other websites that they are listed on or linked to from, and get yourselves added alongside them.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to run a Google search for "[competitor] directory". This will find all of the directory websites that your competitor is listed on. (And the fact that Google already knows about every page returned means you are not wasting your time adding yourself to a website Google isn't interested in.)
Visiting each of those websites to see how you can add your company to their directory takes just minutes.
Set yourself a reminder to do a couple on a Friday afternoon before you go home and, over time, these links and mentions of your company (called citations) will help you rise up the Google rankings.
[cite]Posted By: WSA[/cite]I came across this advice recently:
"piggyback some of your competitors' efforts".
All you need to do is find out the other websites that they are listed on or linked to from, and get yourselves added alongside them.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to run a Google search for "[competitor] directory". This will find all of the directory websites that your competitor is listed on. (And the fact that Google already knows about every page returned means you are not wasting your time adding yourself to a website Google isn't interested in.)
Visiting each of those websites to see how you can add your company to their directory takes just minutes.
Set yourself a reminder to do a couple on a Friday afternoon before you go home and, over time, these links and mentions of your company (called citations) will help you rise up the Google rankings.
I don't know if this is relevant.
Have you done this? Would you know how to do it as i just put in competitors directory into google and just got back results for blogs ect
Best way I have found to find out who your competitors are getting links from is actually yahoo, type in to the search bar linkdomain:www.anysite.co.uk and it will give you a list of sites linking to that site.
[cite]Posted By: WSA[/cite]I came across this advice recently:
"piggyback some of your competitors' efforts".
All you need to do is find out the other websites that they are listed on or linked to from, and get yourselves added alongside them.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to run a Google search for "[competitor] directory". This will find all of the directory websites that your competitor is listed on. (And the fact that Google already knows about every page returned means you are not wasting your time adding yourself to a website Google isn't interested in.)
Visiting each of those websites to see how you can add your company to their directory takes just minutes.
Set yourself a reminder to do a couple on a Friday afternoon before you go home and, over time, these links and mentions of your company (called citations) will help you rise up the Google rankings.
I don't know if this is relevant.
Have you done this? Would you know how to do it as i just put in competitors directory into google and just got back results for blogs ect
I did this and only problem is that you will get loads of phone calls trying to sell you things
I've got a trophy company based in Crawley so I just googled "trophy company in crawley" and got a list of about 7 or 8 directories who nearly all have a free sign up but I warn you, you will get phone calls to sell you upgrades, etc etc
Also thomson local and yellow pages (yell.com) are free sign ups unless you want a bigger ad then you have to pay, but you also get a listing in the books when they're printed
I did this and only problem is that you will get loads of phone calls trying to sell you things
I've got a trophy company based in Crawley so I just googled "trophy company in crawley" and got a list of about 7 or 8 directories who nearly all have a free sign up but I warn you, you will get phone calls to sell you upgrades, etc etc
Also thomson local and yellow pages (yell.com) are free sign ups unless you want a bigger ad then you have to pay, but you also get a listing in the books when they're printed
But some of them calls can turn quite funny if you play along ;-) I had the same company try to sell me gas about 6 different people from the same company in 15 mins, even had to put one on hold while I answered to one of there colleagues
Comments
I regularly buy these services across UK, Europe and US and you need to be extremely careful . . .
There are more quacks and charlatans in SEO than in any comparable section of marketing because what works in one market does not necessarily work in another.
Normally they will want to sign you up for a year or two and you will get little or no return for your money.
Check out any potential vendor by asking to see case histories and Google Analytic results verified in person by their clients.
Good Luck!
Find out what your target market looks for on search engine (do some searches yourself and see what your competitors do), incorporate it on your website in a relevant way. Keep content fresh and updated and if you can get mentioned and linked back from external sites it will all help.
I think you may need to go down an agency route for SEM but I hoenstly think SEO you can do in house if you spend a little bit of time reading up on it.
Just comes down to regular and relevant content on your site in the end. Don't try and trick Google though - they're scaringly clever and it could have an adverse effect.
Hello sir,
Thanks for this. We got a quote from a company but at £800 a month they are taking the piss - I'd rather go on a course and learn it myself!
The doc they provided talked about Google Analytics but only said "We would require READ access to the Google Analytics, so that we can analyse our work and also
provide you with an independent reporting suite that is accessible at any time" - so I might go back to them and see if they can prvide us with some results of previous conquests.
cheers for your input
I can thouroughly recommend this guy, as someone worth talking to. He does a lot of work with the University of Derby and with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Get yourself booked on one of his courses, or at least look at his online help.
http://www.davechaffey.com/SEO-Best-Practice
My site is with word press too but I got some one to build it, did you build you website from start on wordpress or do you know if they have templates on there to build from as my mate needs to build a site?
"piggyback some of your competitors' efforts".
All you need to do is find out the other websites that they are listed on or linked to from, and get yourselves added alongside them.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to run a Google search for "[competitor] directory". This will find all of the directory websites that your competitor is listed on. (And the fact that Google already knows about every page returned means you are not wasting your time adding yourself to a website Google isn't interested in.)
Visiting each of those websites to see how you can add your company to their directory takes just minutes.
Set yourself a reminder to do a couple on a Friday afternoon before you go home and, over time, these links and mentions of your company (called citations) will help you rise up the Google rankings.
I don't know if this is relevant.
Have you done this? Would you know how to do it as i just put in competitors directory into google and just got back results for blogs ect
No sorry. Perhaps someone else can help.
I did this and only problem is that you will get loads of phone calls trying to sell you things
I've got a trophy company based in Crawley so I just googled "trophy company in crawley" and got a list of about 7 or 8 directories who nearly all have a free sign up but I warn you, you will get phone calls to sell you upgrades, etc etc
Also thomson local and yellow pages (yell.com) are free sign ups unless you want a bigger ad then you have to pay, but you also get a listing in the books when they're printed
I've got a trophy company based in Crawley so I just googled "trophy company in crawley" and got a list of about 7 or 8 directories who nearly all have a free sign up but I warn you, you will get phone calls to sell you upgrades, etc etc
Also thomson local and yellow pages (yell.com) are free sign ups unless you want a bigger ad then you have to pay, but you also get a listing in the books when they're printed
But some of them calls can turn quite funny if you play along ;-) I had the same company try to sell me gas about 6 different people from the same company in 15 mins, even had to put one on hold while I answered to one of there colleagues