Companies that sell SEO services

Factual Questions
1

Do they really do anything? I read tons of stuff about SEO on blogs and forums and everybody seems to contradict each other. I was wondering if companies that sell SEO services really do what they say. Or is it a ripoff?

Has anyone here had any experiences with one?

2

What is SEO?

3

Here are two past threads in which I posted about SEO:

Any experience with hiring search engine optimizers?

Promoting a business on the Net & in search engines…

I am off to bed now but I will be back tomorrow to discuss more!

4

In my experience SEO services fall into two types. One type would be Web designers who want to charge you money to modify your site to make it search engine friendly. The other can do the same but also will do the work of promoting your site for you and getting you links back to your site. They might be a part of a full service marketing firm or a marketing firm that only does Internet marketing, but they won’t be singularly focused on changing *your * page.

Both are fine and you definitely need your own site optimized for search engines before you’ll have any success. If you don’t have the time or talent necessary to do it yourself paying a firm makes as much sense as paying a Web design firm to make the site in the first place. Just remember that having your own site in order is a necessary but not at all sufficient requirement to good search results.

Going out and getting relevant targeted links to your page is necessary to really improve things. Talking to a firm that can work on that for you can make sense to but you should make sure there’s really value there. I’ve been meaning for almost a year to meet with a few SEO firms I’ve heard good things about but in the mean time I’ve had a marketing intern spend part of their time trying to get good relevant links to our site. I imagine a professional firm might be able to do better but compared to the cost of a $10/hour intern I’m not sure it’ll be enough better.

My impression is that a lot of people, especially techy web people, try to define an unncessarily bright line around what SEO is. For instance, my publicist can get a lot more relevant links to my site than some SEO specialist or an intern ever could. But he’s not trying to improve my site’s inbound link count, he’s trying to get people to carry news about the company or review a new product. It just happens that a lot of the people we want covering us are online only or online and print.

Unfortunately we don’t have major news we can push out all the time, so in between I have the marketing interns do what they can.

5

Search Engine Optimization spans a wide field of activities. Some things are basic best practices, others are highly targeted and coordinated marketing efforts. It all depends how much money and effort you’re willing to put in.

Basic: Create a web site whose pages follow recommended web standards and have plenty of text content for search engine spiders to grab onto. Specifically:

  • Use H1, H2, etc. tags to describe page structure
  • Use ALT and TITLE tags for all links and images
  • Avoid using Flash, Java, or other technologies that create a black box that search engines can’t penetrate
  • Create URLs that are consistent and easy to read (i.e., “our-minneapolis-office.php” is friendlier than “page.php?oid=124431238”)
  • Have a page that logically makes sense and actually talks about what it’s supposed to. In other words, if you run a construction business, your page text should tell relevant things about your construction business, rather than being filled with a bunch of hot keywords that you THINK search engines might be interested in.

Advanced:

  • Create “landing pages” that are optimized to specific topics
  • Create online ads that link to those landing pages
    So if you advertise in Minneapolis on Google Local about your Minneapolis office, have a landing page linked to that ad that actually talks very specifically about the Minneapolis office, not about your other locations or your business in general.