Question
I'm almost finished a new ecommerce site that has taken me 2 months of endless hours. No surprise there as my computer skills are limited and at completion the site will contain approximately 2000 products.
I am using a web host that provided all of the basics that I wanted and all I have to do is stock the store, set up email, etc. I have already invested a sizeable amount for that service. To this point I am within my projected budget.
I feel the next step is search engine optimization and I'm wondering if that is something I should attempt myself. At this point I feel I should just pay the host to do this for me as I do not have the time or expertise that I feel would be needed to do it properly. I am quite willing to spend more money for this service but I have no idea how much a reasonable investment would be. Am I looking at hundreds or thousands?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Please.
Answer
A link would be nice so I can see what needs to be done. A lot depends of your abilities. For example can you edit your meta tags? Can you edit your pages in the "html mode"? How do you feel about doing the SEO work yourself?
Answer
Or you can contact me by another means PM, email or messenger (yahoo mandm50s)(msn cobaltlady1)
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A link would be nice so I can see what needs to be done.
No can do. I haven't launched yet. Probably not till month end or so.
For example can you edit your meta tags? Can you edit your pages in the "html mode"?
Yes.
How do you feel about doing the SEO work yourself?
I really don't have much time. I've devoted time from our slow period to get it this far and now the busy season for the other divisions is beginning. I get the impression I could be spending many many hours on SEO in order to do it properly.
I'm in and out all day so if I don't reply immediately that is why. I still appreciate any opinions.
Answer
Joint Runner,
I'd recommend that you take CobaltLady up on his offer to help with your Meta Tags. It'll be by far the fastest way to get them done right.
And even if you decide not to do them all yourself, at least you'll have a good enough idea about what needs to be done (and good samples/examples) that you can easily pass the work off to someone else.
It may be that Mike can help even without seeing the actual site. I'm guessing that you guys could forward html pages back and forth and get some good input.
Elaine
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Goodworks has a good idea. If you want to try it just let me know. I will just give you ideas and you apply them. I think SEO charges and webmaster charges are out of control. Who ever built your website should have enough knowledge of SEO to get you going but that's another story. If you want to try it yourself just let me know. It's really not that hard once you know what to do.
Mike
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Thank you kindly for your offer Mike. I'm going to talk to my host and see how much their service costs. If I feel it is unreasonable I will definitely contact you. There comes a point at which you HAVE to do things yourself whether you want to or not and it's usually the price that determines that.
At this point I was just wondering if anyone had an idea as to how much one should be willing to pay for such a service.
Answer
Well from what I have read it can be $100-300 per hour. One thing to ask for are some example sites they have done. Then contact the site owner and ask them questions like how was the service? how many unique hits do the get daily? How many from each of the big 3?(google, yahoo, msn) What placement do they have for their major keywords?
Good Luck
Mike
Answer
Perused one of my e-tail marketing letters the other day, and found this to be timely in response to your inquiry.
If nothing else, there are some good tips on what to watch out for.
The Biggest SEO Scam of All
While there are many ethical SEO firms serving Internet users today, a few notorious practitioners also exist. One of them called me just the other day.
“We can get your site to be number one in the search engines for the top 20 search terms you choose,” promised the telemarketer. I don’t usually give telemarketers the time of day, but somehow found this fellow to be intriguing. It was a cold and snowy day in Michigan right at the moment, and somehow I felt warmer just hearing him glow about the sunshine beaming through his own office windows.
“Show me results,” I requested. So we cruised the web together, and he showed me some client sites that really did have top rankings. At first glance the sales spiel sounded rather inviting, but after taking some time to consider and evaluate his company, I determined that what this friendly young salesman offered was nothing more than a scam.
As I did my homework, several red flags jumped out at me. By researching his company on the Internet, I learned that they employed no less than 250 telemarketers soliciting SEO clients on a continual basis. With all due respect to the size of this company, I found it hard to believe that they could service the numerous SEO clients they were recruiting in a very meaningful way.
I asked the salesman about this the next time he called. He informed me that their SEO service was highly automated, built on proprietary technology that was so ahead of its time that no other firm could compete. In case you didn’t catch it, the previous sentence contained red flag #2. In the words of the old adage, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably it.”
The above was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Upon further questioning of my enthusiastic sales contact, I learned that it wasn’t really my url that they wanted to promote. Their plan was much more beneficial--for themselves, that is. They would set-up urls to be doorway pages to my website. Their urls, not mine, would be optimized to get high in the search engines. They would maintain control of and ownership of the urls, so if I ever went out of business, they could sell all that traffic—and value I had paid so dearly for—to one of my competitors. Pretty nice deal for them. I pay them big bucks on an annual basis to drive traffic to a url which they—not me--own. Of course, I would benefit from whatever sales came through their url as long as I continued to ante up cash.
I had a good friend who fell prey to this scheme a few years back. An unscrupulous SEO “specialist” talked her into paying big bucks for a website with a url which the SEO firm owned and controlled. The SEO firm then billed my friend much more than they had originally contracted for. When she balked at the bill, they threatened to shut down traffic to the site.
While this firm also promised hordes of traffic and top search engine listings, the only significant traffic my friend ever got was garnered through pay-per-click. To make matters worse, the SEO firm hid links to their sites throughout the html of her website.
Another fault I found with the SEO firm mentioned first in this article was the search terms they crowed about taking first place for. To say the least, they were rather obscure. It’s a pretty impressive accomplishment to come up first on the web for the search term “furniture” or even “log furniture”. But if you design a page that brings up your company first on Google for a search of “Birmingham Tuscaloosa Avenue Dry Cleaners”, big deal. And that’s what this SEO firm was doing.
Although I never seriously considered dropping $3000 or whatever it was for their services, the final clincher came when I asked what type of traffic I could expect for digging into my pockets.
“I can get you an average of 100 hits per day,” he told me. Then he showed me stats on some of their clients sites that had, over the course of a year, built up to 100 hits per day. I don’t know about you, but I want a lot more than 100 unique hits per day on my website. I’ve achieved those kinds of numbers—and better—by myself. Why should I pay them for what I consider to be mediocre results?
Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in SEO firms, and because of the success I’ve been having on some of my top search terms, may engage in that business myself someday. But after researching the issues carefully, I would warn fellow webmasters to beware of any SEO firm that:
• employs a boiler room full of telemarketers
• automates most or all of their services
• insists on gaining and retaining control of the url to be promoted
• focuses on lengthy and obscure search strings
• touts sites that are garnering a mere 100 hits per day as examples of their success.
Of all the bad practices mentioned above, the one I found most offensive was the idea that the SEO firm should own or control my url. While owning the url would seem like a good idea for the SEO firm (they could always collect their fees by threatening to shut down the site), it isn’t so nifty for the client. If I pay a firm to build my business, I want them to do just that—build my business. To pay a firm to build traffic to a url they own is really like paying them to build their business—and that, in my opinion, is the biggest SEO scam of all. -Cari Haus 4/17/2005
Answer
Kathleen that is actually what makes me so angry about these rip-off artists. The same can be said for the "webmasters" that charge outrageous fees for designing websites then build them in "frames or dynamic url's" without a tiny bit of very basic seo. I just wish people would do more research into the person or company they are giving their hard earned money to. As you well know it is not hard to do any of these things but some good basic steps and a lot of research bundled with a bunch of patience.
Mike