SEO: Can anyone recommend a good company?

Hi all,

I'm looking for a company to do SEO (search engine optimization) for my business' website.

Do any of you have experience with companies that do this?
Are there any you would recommend?
Do any of you provide this service per-chance?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Cheers
D

It's what i do for a living chief shant shill too much but the company I work for website's is http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk

though if you're just after a bit of free advice i'd be happy to help mate

Kelvin,
Thanks for the offer of advice. I think I have made my mind up to actually put my hand in my pocket for something web related for once instead of doing it all myself.

What I want to know before I pay anything though is how reliable the promises I've had are... SEO sales people seem so sure that we'll get to the top of the natural listings, perhaps I'm just synical but I'm reluctant to believe a word they say.
Ideally I'd like to pay someone based on the results they get. I don't mind paying something upfront but I feel uncomfortable with paying a large chunk upfront and the rest on a monthly retainer. What if the company I hire is shit and I I spend hundreds of pounds on nothing?

I'm not a sales person so i'll be straight with you, its difficult to predict how your gonna get on.

The main issues are, how competitive the words you want to rank on are, where you rank already and what your competitors are up to.

A decent agency should be prepared to build some performance billing in, maybe split the retainer fifty fifty with half based on perfomance. That way you share the risk. But they are prob never gonna volunteer that unless you push quite hard.

Very least you need to do is ask them if you can call any clients they have of a similar business and size to you and ask them for their feedback directly, if they are happy you can rest a little easier.

Plus if they do send you any testimonials through and want a second opinion on what they've done let me know...

Goes for anyone else with SEO questions on the forum let me know be happy to help as everyones helped me with bike related questions

People think that SEO is a bit of a dark art. What companies charge for the service reflects this.

Not sure what your budget is, but paying money is no substitute for well formed HTML, semantically correct content and reasonable meta info. Also, making sure that you have the correct robots file as well as anything that the excellent google help files suggest . Doing stuff like registering with Google local, get listed on any industry sites you can think of etc will also help in the long run.

Obviously this is what the SEO company would advise and do for you.

Still it will depend on how competitive your market sector is as to where you get ranked.

my 2p

Tamar? They've done some good pro bono work for me in the past.

What scale are you looking to do this on. I work on large enterprise type media and broadcast sites and work with these agencies, on this scale they cost alot, in the order of 50K for the last one. I will have a dig around and get all the contacts at each of the companys that I have seen pitches from and put a list together, with my impressions on how good they are.

My business is a small service based business. We get a handful of impressions a day, the competition is not fierce and as far as I can see none/very few of our competitors have any kind of SEO.
I have already done alot of the things listed by jaygee.
The site is http://www.couturedigital.com if you want to have a look.

Thanks for all the advice people. :)

For what you have got you are 90%, based on a 30 second glance, I would say make sure the pages are updated regularly and report them as such you seem to get crawled ever few weeks by google. Also, some thing free and ridiculously time consuming, do a search in google for something you want to be associated with, say 'home cinema' find what page in the listings you are, and click through to your site, then repeat and get everyone you know to do the same, google will move you up the natural search listing. See if you can get you site address onto every hifi, home cinema, home, interiors etc site and forum you can find to get your link backs up. Other than that your into paying for adwords and stuff, I don't think an SEO company can really offer you too much.

I can tell you that your google analytics script should be moved down to just before the end of the body tag..

There's a def a few things you could do straight off the bat, first what's your main couple of keywords. something like home cinema installation, audio installation etc...

You really need them in the title tags on the home page and the in header tags, plus in those combinations in the body copy, plus on the internal pages the all the rele combos like biometrics with security system, maybe some brand names etc.

Plus the off site link building stuff which is what really sorts the men from the boys when it comes to rankings

not all bad though, least it's not all in one flash file :P

I designed and built it myself, I know a little (basic) about SEO so have implemented what I know.
I always try to keep code clean etc. Really appreciate the input guys. Keep it coming if you have more. Feedback on the site is always appreciated. Try to keep it constructive please Tynan! :)

Slight hijack of this thread.. but how would one get into the natural-search SEO business? Is it even possible without a computing related degree?
I've done a bit of HTML coding (nothing major for a few years), and always try to pay attention to compliance and keywords, but don't have any particular knowledge beyond that.

it's actually more to do with marketing/writing than computing. Need to know the basics of html though...

Your based in brighton right? there's loads of firms down here, we probably going to be looking for graduates in the summer if you want me to let you know about it?

We get around 2 calls a day from SEO companies,
We have a guy who does things inhouse at the moment, I always pass calls onto him and tell him to get any tips he can out of them.
Although sometimes I would like to see what the companies can do. The horror stories I've heard from some companies we deal with the bullshit that SEO companies tell them make me not want to bother.

This site could do with some SEO.

Anyone want to provide some free advice? I can't promise to implement it, but if it makes sense I may.

i'll have a look mate, the website tends to rank well whenever i search for ss or fg stuff anyway

Thanks

It's the pagerank of the home page I'd like to improve.

I think it's a 4 right now. A 6 would be nice.

Bump.

Does anyone have any knowledge of the new(ish) Top Level Domains?

I'd like to purchase a ".digital" domain for a new venture I'm involved in. I wonder at the value of it as a search tool. In the sense of long term cachet the URL is great, however as it costs £574 a year I'm reluctant to fork out just yet before we have significant investment. I could be convinced if ".digital" TLDs have naturally higher SEO benefits for a related company to say ".fm", ".pm" or ".so"

Thoughts welcome.

Dammit has some knowledge of them but not I think from an SEO point of view.

Ed, I think it's probably a little too early to say and I'm no authority on it but I would say if you thinks £600 is too much of a punt then go for something else. If in 6 months it's working you should be able to switchover urls

Can stick you in touch with one if our seo bods if it would help?

Just interestesd why the first priority for your URL is SEO?

The way SEO is calculted has changed and these days it's more about the quality of links and reference to your site. IE get people to quote you and link back to you.

Little improvement will occur by having a key word in the url.

Definately not much compared to keyword optimisation in the the page title or even the body copy.

Also the desciption of your URL in the metadata ( description when you search on google )is just as important and you can easily insert key words here.

Obviouly dont go over board with the keywords as that will be flagged by google and your page will suffer, also you dont want the tone of the copy to suffer by insert too many keywords.

only worthwhile if you are starting http://www.Bobby.Digital

The way SEO is calculted has changed and these days it's more about the quality of links and reference to your site. IE get people to quote you and link back to you.

I think you are confused. Introduction of google penguin actually downgraded link juice in some ways. Unless you can get a link from BBC or Guardian it isn't worth chasing links.

Little improvement will occur by having a key word in the url.

False. In fact, quite the opposite. Having a keyword in the URL is SEO dynamite.

Interesting. Is there a breakdown of the factors it priorities anywhere? I'm genuinely surprised that URL keywords are considered dynamite. More so than quality incoming links?

(and when I say quality, I mean natural, unsolicited)