i see websites with keywords in my industry at the top spot in google. It doesn't make any sense. One is not directly related to the keywords and it seems to be by accident.

The other has no inbound links either and simply copied a paragraph from the first page into the description tags.

Im convinced seo is a crock and i shouldn't waste my time.

But if your convinced im wrong and can convince me of it I will pay you to get my site into top lists on the big G.

Dont pay us, pay google, thats what your competitors did.

You may wish to check with our site owner, skyhawk133, who has devoted a good deal of time to SEO over the last few years, with a great amount of success. I believe there are a few articles on SEO on the site as well.

Search engine optimisation takes many forms, and the reason your competitors are ahead of you on certain keywords is normally a mixture of luck, age of domain, links and on site SEO. the fact sites with no relevancy are appearing for your keywords is a good indication of an area where SEO will work very successfully.

But lets start with trying some of the simple things,
On site SEO
Do you use heading tags? H1/2/3/4 etc avoid using the strong tag and style a h4 tag to do the same job, place your keyword within the heading tag but keep high relevancy for example

books dvds movies computer magazines stuff

is a non relevant title

High quality books and magazines

is a relevant title and has a greater weighting, to many keywords in close proximity causes a negative effect. Think of it as them cancelling each other out!

Next the use of alt attribute in images these are good partly because its a legal requirement in europe but also because it offers a free keyword plug, it also helps for image searches, this is what is picked up when you search images in Google for example, the same goes with the title attribute.

To carry the onsite theme on the number of links and the way they are anchored can have a positive or negative effect on a page, this can be carried forward to external pages for example

click here
is not relevant but well anchored link
dvd & movie collections
is relevant.

This is just a few real simple basic tips, most SEOs' will take you much further but I would suggest rather then paying some one to do the SEO work for you, have a look at some one doing a good site review this can be done as the basis of long term strategy. A good review will cover on site and off site as well as other issues like the various legality issues.

SEO is an art..
It involves many techniques.....
Use Adwords and get that required traffic...

This post has been edited by ajaymatrix: 20 May, 2007 - 08:32 PM

I have been an SEO for the past year, and all I can say is it takes time. Keyword placement does not increase your sites ranking over night. Google is "known" to sandbox websites, and because of this up and coming websites need to prove themselves. Pagerank is a very important tool to use, study your competition, study who is page 1 listed and follow in their footsteps and try link exchanges with these companies. Increasing your page rank will raise your site naturally and in time you will have page 1 listings.

Information Architecture "Poler Bear book" published by O'Reilly, is a great resource to study, not only for SEO but website design and information architecture.

SEO not only is an art, but also takes a little voo doo

voo doo is probabllly the key however there are the key things they look for like site age and back link relevance. also how the back link is set up. if the link is in a paragraph it gives you a higher ranking. I just started using a SEO company casue their techniques were very different than any of the other SEO companies and they have been on the top of google for about 5 years for many of their key terms, one of which had almost 2 million results. most experienced web design companies probably have theri own types of voo doo too, so i would check with them too. I really dont believe in pay per click but that is my choice it does work to drive trafic but the ROI is so much lower so it doesnt make business sense.

SEO is very difficult. In my opinion, is that optimization of the content which convinces the user to click and to reach my website.



I hate SEO, too, but it's that thing that you don't get rid of if you are afraid of it. So, I have to learn the SEO techniques and to optimize my content in order not to pay Google to make my site popular, or to pay a guy (which can easily trick me).

Just read about this topic and you decide if SEO is a waste of time. If SEO is a waste of time, maybe marketing isn't . Start learning and "wasting" your time in marketing.

I agree marketing in other forms is more a waste of money than anything else.. my site has only been up for 4 months and i am already getting some of my keywords placed in top pages on google and many of them on yahoo and others. I obviously paid for it with my web design company peakstudios.com but it is still less than i would have paid for pay per click , radio, newspaper TV etc.. I actually got quotes all over and found they were actaully priced well it only cost me 6,000 with them and i had quotes over 100,000 from other guys to do the same thing I think shopping around may be the best option when looking for the company to use casue i can see how it would be more benificial to try marketing in other media if i had gone with the more expensive plans that did the same thing.

I don't think SEO is a crock at all.

In the short time that my website and forum has been up and running, I found my site on the first page via a Google search 9/10 times. Mind you this has been through the duration of my site's lifespan. Thanks to Thorian's help, I've now got my MetaTag section RTG. I needed the kick in the ass he gave me to get that set. Once you are past that point, I think that if you have the option to enable or disable bots, spiders, etc, just let them go through your site. Some search engines allow you to actually register your site with them and they begin crawling it immediately. If after that point you aren't receiving any views of it's hard to find your site in a search then your actual content is garbage IMHO. Everything else is already set so at that point that's the only thing I think it could be.