Pizentios

I have recently recived a call from a company claiming that they would do research for my company for search keywords. They claimed that my companies sites would be the at the top of the search results for our industry.

However, i seriously doubt that i need a company to achive this. I know you can use meta tags to attract traffic, but i am sure there are better methods out there, since the hay day of meta tags was in the middle of the 90's.

Do any of you guys have experience in doing this? What methods do you find to work best? Do you think it's worth talking to a company such as the one that called me?

The company in question is located at www.uswebsitebuilder.com if you want to take a look at what they have to offer.

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big_k105

Well I have been doing alot of research in SEO and I personally think hiring a company to do it is kind of dumb but thats not saying that they won't do a good job.

http://www.clickz.com/experts/author....php/64983_all
Those articles seem to be pretty good but I haven't finished them. I think most of what she is saying is telling you about good and bad SEO experts. There are alot of so called Black-Hat SEO experts and they try and guarantee that they can optimize keywords for you and that you will be in the top spot but in reality there is no way to guarantee anything in the game of SEO because search engine algorithms change to often and most people don't know exactly how they figure out ranking.

http://www.silverdisc.co.uk/articles/seohats/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/home.htm

Those are 2 sites that I have been looking at but if you do a search for seo information you can find out tons of different types of info about it. Just remember SEO is an on going process and if someone says they can do it for you once and you will be on the top for along time, they are wrong its not even possible to stay on top for ever. Look at PFO we were on the top of the serps for "programming forums" and "programming forum" for along time. probably damn near 2 years but last month we dropped off we are 5 from the bottom of a list of a 100 sites for those serps so anything can happen. If I find more information in my research I will post the links here.

edit: another good thing to look into is google site maps http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/

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Pizentios

cool, thanks for the loads of information :-) It should take me a bit to read it.

i tend to agree that hiring a company is a waste of money.

Any body else have information or experience with this topic?

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Pizentios

After chatting with IR on-line about this topic i went back to google and did some more searching (with different keywords that i picked out of our chat). I found a few interesting links.

This Wiki artical
Is a over all look at SEO. It discusses what defines a "white hat" and a "black hat" SEO expert. It also talks about the history etc of SEO and even talks a bit about some of the legal issues with SEO.

This Wiki artical
Explains what Resources of a Roesource is. RoR is a method that uses an xml file to describe the content and other resources of your website to search engines, not just google.

The official website for RoR is here. It has loads of information and what looks like some helpful tools for creating your RoR file automagically.

so i think it's possible to get the results that those companies claim to give on your own with a bit of work. I am going to continue researching this topic and posting my findings here.

I think in time it might even be worth making this thread sticky.

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DaWei

This is very, very true. I have a friend who paid out the kazoo, the guy delivered him number one (for a couple of search phrases), now he's not even on the charts.

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big_k105

I will be interested in what you find. I will also post any findings I find here so if anyone else besides me and Piz are interested in this stuff you can read it too.

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BIG K aka Kyle
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Pizentios

that's why i'd like to figure SEO out a bit, so i don't have to rely on what somebody else claims to deliver. Plus it's a useful skill to have if your into maintaining websites.

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Infinite Recursion

After chatting with Pizentios, I set up RoR on my personal site. I'm also looking into Google Sitemaps... I'll watch the traffic to my site and let you guys know if I see any significant increase. For the record, I agree... paying a company to put you on top of the charts is ludacris.

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paulchwd

SEO -- wouldnt it be nice if we could just call up Google / Yahoo and all the rest as ask them what do you want from us -- lol

as for Keywords - ask a bunch of your friends / family what they would search for. That is the best method and the free method. Also, the main search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo (not sure about Yahoo)) don't relay too much onthem anymore, they care mostly about the text in your site.