Should I go to an SEO company to promote my site?

Mar 24 2010
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Should I go to an SEO company to promote my site?

by admin in Web and Blog Design

I recently built a new site for a lovely lady who had gone to an SEO company to get her existing site a bit more exposure.  They took her money, and all they really did was add some keywords and a meta description and plonk some FREE tracker script at the bottom of her site.

They even contacted her claiming to be GOOGLE! Talk about dodgy.

It’s a little bit like taking your car to the mechanic’s. If cars are something you don’t know a lot about, you can really get fleeced – you often feel like you have no choice but to listen to what they say and pay what they ask.

At least with websites you get to test whether the SEO company was any good by the results that it gets you.  But how will tell whether it was them that got you those results? Perhaps it was just the quality of your content and the way the site was built in the first place?  But really you want to know before-hand whether your chosen company is any good, not wait til after you’ve paid to find out.

Here are some facts about search engine optimisation:

  • no-body can guarantee you a top spot in Google
  • SEO companies can’t do any more than a decent web designer can
  • website promotion is a constant job that takes continuous effort, it’s not “set and forget”

Choose a good web designer

A good web designer uses standards compliant coding. Nowadays that means coding in xhtml/css which when done correctly is clean, efficient, versatile, compact and easy to read.

People used to layout websites using tables (not the four-legged variety) of rows and columns. A tedious and cumbersome way to design and often prone to anomalies. Crucially, table based layout design is also harder for search engine’s to read.

How can you tell whether a designer uses tables or xhtml/css?  Well the easiest way is to ask them. But don’t take their word for it, go to their sites, right click and look at their source code. If it’s full of <table> and <tr> and <td> tags then they’re using tables. If it’s full of <div> tages, they’re most likely using more modern xhtml coding.

Not only will this way of coding a site make it easier for Google to index your site, it is also easier for your designer to make changes which could potentially save you money if you’re not using a content management system.

What your designer can do to help your search engine placement

  • They can insert your keywords, meta description and build your site using xhtml/CSS.
  • They can make sure your images have ‘alt’ tags which are a description of the image that search engines can read
  • They can make sure each of the pages on your site have relevant keywords in the Title tags of each page – this is very important
  • They can make sure your navigation is easy to follow to ensure that all pages of your site can be reached through your first page – this helps the searcg engines to index thew whole of your site
  • They can install Google Analytics so you can monitor the traffic to your site.

Besides that, probably not that much, unless you want them to create your copy and promote your site on other sites around the web.  Which leads us on to…

What YOU can do to help promote your site

  • First make sure that your site is well built as above
  • Get relevant sites to link to yours – this is very important for Google. All this takes is browsing the web and taking the time to enter your site into free directories, and emailing webmasters to exchange links with you.  Make sure that you don’t just add links anywhere and everywhere – make them relevant to your site’s content. So if you’re a weddings cover band, don’t get a link from a dog food manufacturer!
  • Write good copy for your site that contains the keywords that people will be searching for on the Internet.
  • Update your site’s content often. Frequently updated content is important for your site visitors and helps give them a reason to come back.
  • Be an active member of blogs or forums that are relevant to your site. Don’t just post plugs to your site, but actually offer a useful contribution. As you get better known your site will most likely get more traffic.
  • If you have a blog, link to other blogs and offer to write articles for other blogs that deal with similar subject matter
  • Emphasise keywords in your content with Bold and Italic. Don’t use underline as it’s often used to denote a link.

These are just a few ideas, but they’re all effective. And it just shows that even good SEO companies probably don’t do a whole lot more than you can do yourself in collaboration with your web designer.


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