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I hired an SEO company in 2004 to work on one of my sites, and it did pretty well, but since things have changed I decided to try them again on a different site.
I paid them for two hours at $150 per hour and told them to work on just the splash page.
Please do a view/source and tell me if you think it was worth $300.
http://www.musclebearcub.com/splash/splash.html
Its only worth the money if you get higher SERP listings and more traffic $0.02
From what i recall though, you had pretty high listings on the majors SE's anyway so not sure why you are trying to improve already good listings on the first pages of the engines.
Regards,
Lee
Lee, you're probably referring to my main site, but this is a brand new site.
That's why I wanted to find out the latest tricks from the experts.
They just completed the work this morning, so I won't know results for a long time. Just wanted to see if they missed some important SEO tricks.
Ah okay, well to be honest, ill i can see in the HTML is that they added some new meta tags.Quote:
Originally Posted by LavenderLounge
I dont see any alt text on images, all the images have generic names, no target vaiables with keywords in them etc.
Just looks like a standard page that anyone could knock together.
Regards,
Lee
Hey Mark,
It looks really clean and precise - they certainly didn't miss anything.
BUT - what is with the light grey text at the bottom of the page. The colour is so close to the background it could be misconstrued. I don't know what the exact rules are but Google and Yahoo have both expanded their "colour-on-colour text" spam rule to include close colour matches as well.
Now, question. Did they do anything for you that you didn't know how to do yourself? If so, the learning experience is probably worth the $300 becuase you can copy the style that they used (if it works) and continue on your own!
M.
Frankly, as Lee said, doesn't seem like much was done in the way of SEO. Keywords that aren't used in the alt tags, or description, seem well, counter productive.
I don't see anything done SEO wise, worth $50 really, let alone $300.
my two cents
Mary,
The text color is one of the things I'm hoping to get feedback on. Anyone else see that as a problem?
Between you and me, you guessed my strategy!
Gaystoryman,
I had the same reaction. The initial quote was for 10 hours minimum (which would have been $1500) so I sent them $300 and told them to do whatever they could.
There was no indication that they could have done anything more than repeat the same process on all the other pages - something I could easily do myself.
Just checking to see if (a) I got ripped off or (b) are there other services that I am missing that would be worth paying extra.
But what did they do? I mean I don't see anything really that they did.
Was it the title/description tag? That's way pricey for a few words, and the keyword tag is stuffed, which doesn't work well these days. Two or three alt tags? I really just don't see what they did, unless they also did the design work, but from a SEO point only, I don't see anything done.
There are 9 alt tags out of 26. For $300 I'd expect them all done, and a 'title tag' in the links,
just my opinion
you might want to give this a read - as well as back out to the home page and check out some of the other articles: http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/...uncovered.html
I don't see that they did much of anything, and putting that closing text into a font color that 'hides' it has been a no-no for sometime now.
um
why is there text that almost blends with the background?
im no seo expert but isn't that something frowned upon?
all images should have alt tags
meta description
meta tags are not really needed IMO
that page needs more targeted text IMO
They are when there is little other 'written' content on a page :)Quote:
Originally Posted by jIgG
Regards,
Lee
Or the Meta on the landing page to your enter link is for someone else's site.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
Mark....
Not to brag... but....
I have page 1's under gay muscle, muscle men, male bodybuilders, muscle video, male muscle. etc etc!
You have my private email address.
Why dont you write to me?
(No, as a matter of fact, the SEO that was done for you is useless. PLEASE write to me, and I will tell you how to get googlebot to do what you want it to do!)
Shaun
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...&q=male+muscle
(4 of those are mine)
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...n&q=gay+muscle
(2 of the top 11 are mine)
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...n&q=muscle+men
(2 of those are mine)
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...e+bodybuilders
(3 of those are mine....)
May I email you, too, Shaun?
DEV....
me, too - shaun, you seem to REALLY know your stuff!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DEVELISH
Lavender, my day job is for a web development firm. We design websites for attorneys as well as offer SEO packages to firms that need help with their SE placement.
In the world of SEO, none of the major search engines determine placement with meta tags or alt tags anymore (or atleast this is the opinion of most in the seo - development industry right now). And they certainly frown on the "hidden text" trick used with the text at the bottom. Most SE's are placing so much emphasis on placement of content, relevancy of content, internal and external links, etc right now. $150 an hour is a good going rate for any type of SEO work for any site, but if all they did was add a few meta tags and hidden text, then i doubt you'll see any better results than if they would have never touched it.
We used to always design several copies of the same page and upload them to run research studies on how each would place. They would all have the same content, just positioned different with differenttags placed around the page. The one that would rank the best, is the one we would use as well as follow for other sites until we noticed the pattern changing.
$0.02
Yep :) Google isnt hard if you can think like a robot!
The secret to SEO is there's no secret.
You can learn SEO in under an hour and unless you're paying for link building, site restructuring, or viral marketing the money spent is a complete waste.
wasted money...
1st thing a professional SEO consultant would do is w3c validation
your page has like 43 errors:
I'm sorry to say, but I think you got ripped.
First of all, your title is almost useless. Muscle Bear Cub - HOT HUNKY HAIRY HORNY MEN. First of all, next to no one is searching for "muscle bear cub" so it's a poor choice as your main keyword phrase. I would have gone with something like "Hairy Muscle Men - Horny Naked Men - Muscle Bear Cub." I might even drop the middle phrase and just go with one keyword phrase and your branding.
In my opinion, you also have too many words in your keyword tag. And a keywords tag is almost useless if you don't use any of those words on your page.
And after all is said and done, you have next to no text on that page. For $300 I would have written you a lot more keyword rich text. I would have also encouraged you to remove the text from your graphic and make it text overlaid on top of the graphic.
I'd be nervous about that grey on white text too. It's just too close.
Here are a couple of rules of thumb when hiring an SEO company:
(1) Post their URL here first and let some of the SEOers on the board have a look at their site. It could save you some money and trouble. I can tell within a couple of minutes of looking at an SEO site whether the company knows what they're talking about.
(2) If anyone says "guaranteed rankings" RUN.
(3) If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
Michael
I wrote to the SEO company and asked them to reply to this link to defend themselves.
If you're looking for SEO advice, go to Google Group Webmaster Help, Crawling and Indexing. Though you'll find some noise, trolls, and useless advice, sometimes you'll get solid pointers from Googlers and you'll also find a handful of people who know what they're talking about.
Who decided to use hidden text on the bottom of the home page? That's just suicidal.
Also, its pointless to optimize META keywords, especially for query terms like "streaming video", "hardcore", photos", "pictures", "galleries", "anal sex" that are highly competitive.
You have 1,770 pages indexed in Google, ~10 pages in the main index, the rest supplemental. You need stronger inbound links to get the rest in the main index. Did the SEO company you hired do any link building at all?
Your root page redirects, which is almost always a bad idea, especially when the server returns a 200 status code instead of a 301.
window.location = is absolutely the wrong way to redirect a page.
Non-www version returns a 200 as well, which opens your site up to cannonical issues. You need to install a 301 redirect instead. Then set up preferred domain in Google's Webmaster Tools.
Your urls aren't keyword rich and I can't tell what a page is about from the page TITLEs. Keywords in the TITLE tag is one of the most powerful on-page optimization factor so its important to write unique titles and target keywords that are within your reach.
Mind you, following all that advice still won't get you anywhere till you gain more inbound links. Paying for a link ninja or link monkey may be worth the money if they get enough quality, value-passing links, but I would not sign a check or press a PayPal button till I see results in the SERPs.
Just curious, what exactly did the SEO company do for $300?
Most of the time the price has nothing to do with the value you get; it has more to do with how much an SEO values his/her time. It's not an outrageous fee for 1~1.5 hours worth of consulting, but if the SEO company is clueless then it won't get you anywhere.
I wrote to the SEO company I hired, http://www.online-tech.com, and asked them to reply to the critiques posted here at GWW. He send the reply below, (which didn't say much) so I called and asked for further explanation. We were both very polite, but got nowhere.
I am writing it off as a waste of money. Anyone else have dealings with them?
-----------------------
Mark Kliem:
We at Online Technologies are very disappointed in your email that claims we did not do sufficient work within the two hours you wanted us to utilize to do optimization for your site. The agreement we sent to you had a minimum of ten hours and you crossed it out and put in two hours. We accepted it and put in a solid two hours on your job and then we are criticized for the work we did. Clearly that is very upsetting as I am sure you would feel the same way if the tables were turned.
In order for us to see what you think can be accomplished in two hours, we would like you to let us know what you want accomplished in "two hours" so we can review the tasks you have in mind. We will then get back to you so we can discuss this matter in greater detail.
Sincerely,
Online Technologies.com
Mark,
Walk away. It's my opinion that these guys wouldn't know SEO if walked up and said, "Hello, I'm search engine optimization."
Consider this:
Their SEO page is titled "Online Technologies - Search engine optimization"
They should have reversed the order of their title if they were optimizing for "search engine optimization."
Second, they mention "search engine optimization" exactly once on a page that is supposed to be about SEO.
They have no meta keywords or description tags on their own page.
They use a graphic title for "search engine optimization."
On their search engine optimization page they talk more about "search engine marketing" ... why didn't they optimize for that keyword phrase instead?
They use no H tags on their page, nor do their images have ALT attributes.
I could go on and on, but I would just walk away. This looks like a hosting company that just happens to "do" SEO.
Michael
I dont understand this page. Its all images, how can a search engine read images?
Marc - It can't
But it can read the Alt:text attached to them.