Should I use this SEO and how much should I pay?

short answer….
no, don’t use him….
a real good seo would cost a fortune indeed

He’s right about one thing: go for the keyword phrase that you want. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go after longtail keyword phrases while you’re working on your desired phrase.

Without knowing which SEO you’re talking about, it’s hard to say whether or not you should hire him. Some SEO’s are very good. But if you take the time to learn how to do it yourself, you’ll have more fun and probably do a better job in the long run than any consultant you hire.

I learned my lesson the hard way…

I found a guy who was VERY prominent on the SEO boards. I didn’t find him there, but another way. However, he wrote many articles for some of the biggest websites (including webmasterworld and seochat).

He had a good record at helping out websites and a good name in the SEO industry overall. His websites, too, were ranking in the top 10 for SEO terms (seo optimization, search engine optimization, etc..)

We had a deal that I felt was advantageous to me… that deal was something like this: He had to rank me in the top 3 on Google AND Yahoo for a set of 5 phrases. I would pay him 50% to start and 50% ONLY if he got me ranked as was stated in the contract.

He changed around my site(s) to be more SEO-friendly…. Couldn’t get them ranked in the manner he was supposed to, but wanted the last 50% anyway.

One day, I went to change content on one of my sites… and it was completely removed (all page he downloaded and zipped up for himself and removed from the server).

He kept them hostage until we discussed payments again. In the end, he agreed that I was right, but still wanted 1/2 of the remaining 50%.

I learned my lesson, learned SEO, and do it all myself now.

Thanks for your help. I am going to give it a go myself. Can’t be that hard right if you put the work in? If I find i’m struggling I can always go down the SEO specialist route in future.

I agree its best to learn yourself, but it’s hard and there comes a point when you think “hmmm – how much further can I take this”. It’s tough, not least because there are no “answers”, only assumptions, although many are pretty accurate.

The problem with hiring an SEO is you don’t know what you are going to get. I would imagine a scenario where both SEO and Customer are both happy and feel they got/gave VFM at the end of a project is near impossible. Managing expectations in SEO is far from easy, because there are no guarantees.

How much should a good SEO cost per month?

£1000, £2000 , £5000, more???

I am using seo companies for directory submissions only. That costs some money but saves a lot of time. Regarding my experience it’s worth that.

Here is a phrase we are all familiar with. If it’s too good to be true it likely is not true,” or something like that. You get my idea. I have been in the Philippines now for 4 months. I have been putting together a team of SEO specialists. Here are some of the things I have learned that may help you make a decision on where you want to go with all of this.

1. Doing your own SEO work is very time consuming.
2. Doing your own SEO work is a complicated task if you want to do it correctly.
3. Submitting your site to link directories can cause you more grief than benefits. Yes there is a downside to this and some of it includes massive spamming and links that can harm you rather than help.
4. Doing SEO is a science nowadays. If you use Blackhat tactics your site could be sandboxed by Google and worse case scenario “unindexed” by them forever.
5. Know what to ask for when having SEO done for you. It isn’t enough to know that you can be on the 1st page of Google for certain keywords. The important thing here is longevity. I could likely get you on the 1st page of Google too, but you would have to pay good money to stay there. That’s the hook. So, be careful with these promises.
6. Longtail keywords can be more profitable in a highly competative market.
7. When you have people submit your website to linking indexes/sites are they doing one-way or two-way links? And, are they submitting you site to relative areas i.e. gambling sites etc.
8. Are your SEO people doing follow ups and actively seeking and trying to obtain anchor texting links to your site.
9. Have they reviewed your competor’s site or the stats on the top Google ads for your keywords.
10. Is your website optimized for Web 2.0?
11. What title tags are you using and are they on all of your pages on your website?
12. Are they going to do any deep linking on your website especially for longtailed keywords?
13. What other services are they going to provide like article submission, blogs and so on?
14. Are they going to inject RSS feeds on your site?
15. Are they going to insert a Google Site Map on every page on your site?
16. What meta tags are you using and how can they be optimized?

I could go on for hours but I think you get my drift. How can you pick and honest person? Well that may be a tough one. There are many people out there who actually enjoy taking advantage of others. Choosing a decent person with morals and ethics is a difficult task.

I have a website called http://www.welovebogota.com. I had it designed for my g/f. I just really started SEO on it here in the Philippines. If you Google it for say, “rooms in Bogota.” It is number 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. She actually has two sites but the one is under construction at the moment. I have done most of the work on these sites myself and it is very time consuming. I am setting up a process now whereby I can maintain her presence on the internet with relatively little work from me. I simply write a few paragraphs a day and she is number 1. In Yahoo she is #3 and #5 for her two websites welovebogta.com and apartmentinbogota out of 3, 420, 000 websites. I just did the SEO and registered apartmentinbogota just before Christmas.

I have taught myself what is needed for SEO on these sites. I would never just “trust” someone to do this for me until I knew what questions to ask and what I needed to do. I have had people work for me who worked for call centers here in the Philippines that specialize in SEO. One man told me that if they were running behind schedule they would use Blackhat tricks.

For example, they submit to say 100 link directories and they don’t care what categories they submit to or if it is two way links. They have a Directory Submission software that does this automatically and it doesn’t take into account key factors in quality linking.

So, if I were to submit your site to a link directory and placed it under pornography what value do you think Google would give it. Basically nothing and maybe a negative. But if you run a link checker software program you will see it as a link and sometimes a reciprical link. Again, Value=0.

In sum, it is important to have a website that is Web 2.0 optimized. That way every time you do something in terms of quality SEO it will gain 100% benefit from your efforts. And, if you do good SEO your website will gain very good PR ranking and quality SERPS and have longevity. Don’t be fooled by instant PR rankings by Blackhatters and so on. You will pay dearly in the end if they do not take your best interests to heart.

I am here in the Philippines to have a number of domains developed the correct way from the bottom up. I can have state of the art website developed for $1,000 and this includes a huge kickoff with SEO and a blog designed to compliment my site. My websites are being done with PHP, Web 2.0, CSS, Javax and MySQL data base. WordPress will be integrated into the data base so that I can edit my content with ease. Simply by typing in http://www.holdempokerinsider.com/admin. That initiates my wordpress editor and away I go. No ftp stuff. I can go anywhere with my laptop and edit my websites on the fly.

It is important to note here and many who know about SEO is that it never ends. You are always thinking about and doing different things to promote and market your product or website. For me, it is important that I have all the structure in place so that my days are not spent totally on promoting my businesses. So, what I have been designing here is a kind of network of SEO techniques that feed off each other and generate traffic and links to my websites. Once this “network” is place it should only take a few hours a day to maintain 5 to 10 websites by myself.

And if I want to go somewhere on holidays I can maintain my websites with some simple editing with WordPress.

My websites are not as complicated as some poker websites so that is why the cost is lower. I am retired on a fixed income so I came here to have my domains developed and will return to Canada when everything is finished.

I hope I haven’t you all to tears,

Franko

What he said plus “semantic web” optimisation :hattip:

What he said plus “semantic web” optimisation

Simmo you are a walking book of resources, thanks! I am now off to read and learn about this “semantic web”:hattip: