SEO is vexing me....

It is something we are looking at and are aware of.

Most of our work comes from referrals, but we are also aware that we could potentially be missing out on new business by being on page 1 or 2 of the results. We currently spend about £120 pm on SEO, but the more I read about it, the more the story changes - google changing their ways of ranking sites for example... SEO companies seem to pray on paranoia - I've recently updated our website which has removed some of the tags the SEO company had added, apparently we are spiralling down google's rankings and we need to spend a load of wedge to get back to where we were. I don't believe them!

Well the simple question is does your investment in SEO pay for it's self in new business driven by the website?

I work in IT but don't claim to know anything about SEO however i would be inclined to spend the £120 /month on other marketing like a referral incentive.

£120 a month seems a lot to me, what does your website/SEO company do for this? Does your £120 not guarantee you in the top 5 searches results?

What does your company do?

A friend/business contact of mine owns a website design company:

http://www.iostudios.co.uk/

If you want a second opinion pop them a call and ask for Tom. I have no idea what they charge but i trust Tom 100%.

Dan

Have a look at SEOmoz, you can get a month free, normally USD$99 pcm or somesuch.

rosstheboss":lu1mu5h9 said:

Most of our work comes from referrals, but we are also aware that we could potentially be missing out on new business by being on page 1 or 2 of the results. We currently spend about £120 pm on SEO, but the more I read about it, the more the story changes - google changing their ways of ranking sites for example... SEO companies seem to pray on paranoia - I've recently updated our website which has removed some of the tags the SEO company had added, apparently we are spiralling down google's rankings and we need to spend a load of wedge to get back to where we were. I don't believe them!

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I believe your scepticism to be well-founded. My take on it is this: Google spends vast quantities of money and employs extremely clever people to make its algorithms better able to identify useful, original content. There is no point attempting to game Google with the latest SEO tag/keyword/link farm/crystal healing faddery. Trying too hard in that direction makes it worse -- Google is very good at identifying whatever the current gimmick is and penalising the use of it. Sites with valuable stuff on will get found. Make sure everything is in words (no text-as-images), make sure the words actually describe what you do, make sure that keywords that relate to your business are included but not excessively so.

Show us the site, you'll probably get lots of suggestions then. Some of them might even be useful

Interesting take Mike and I'd be inclined mostly to agree. At the end of the day the only people who *really* know what's what are google.

That said some SEO stuff would seem to be worthwhile. Things like ensuring you do not have duplicate content or page titles, have canonical URLs if appropriate and so on. Spent a fair bit of time on this here recently, will let you know if it works out...

Assume it's for the roofgarden site?

I agree that you need to get SEO right but does it really need that much maintenance / updating?!

John":30531yan said:

That said some SEO stuff would seem to be worthwhile. Things like ensuring you do not have duplicate content or page titles, have canonical URLs if appropriate and so on. Spent a fair bit of time on this here recently, will let you know if it works out...

Click to expand...

I file all that kind of thing under "common sense", but yes

Someone I know asked about how to make her website come up in searches. The entire homepage was one massive JPG :facepalm:

(I Googled "green roof sussex", are any of those results the OP?)

Thanks for the replies guys.

Yes, it is the roof garden site - www.evergreenroofgardens.co.uk

In conversation more and more people have mentioned to me about how easy SEO can be to do yourself with a bit of know how and nous, I was wondering if that was just talk or not. Seems not!