[Thatsmyshirt.com]

Anyone ever invest a significant amount in paying someone who thinks they can get you to the top of the search engines for t-shirts? Im considering doing it and wanted to see if anyone had any luck or no luck with this or had any ideas or referrals. Thanks

 

[Kate]

I'm going through the Building your business with google for dummies book and they say that's a rip off.

 

[Adam]

Rodney's been there at no1 before, so you are in good company

Do what Kate is doing first. Read up on the subject and apply what you have learnt to your site.

There isn't an accurate bible as things change. Books may be out of date as soon as they are published... design a website with search engines in mind. Keep it simple, don't spam and build your content. Read places like webmasterworld for help.

I can offer you free seo advice if you like?

First things you need dynamic titles for each page on your site. At the moment they are all the same. Your breadcrumbs are good, make the titles match them. That would be a good start.

 

[Rodney]

Anyone ever invest a significant amount in paying someone who thinks they can get you to the top of the search engines for t-shirts? Im considering doing it and wanted to see if anyone had any luck or no luck with this or had any ideas or referrals. Thanks

Any company promising you that you can be at the top of the search engines for a particular keyword is either:

1. Lying...or promising misleading things (like the money you pay them goes for Pay Per Click listings) or
2. Doing something shady with your site that may work for a month or so but will most likely get you banned from the search engines in the long run...or
3. is spamming you. Did contact them, or did they solicit you out of nowhere

The best thing to do is as others have suggested. Read up on the subject in forums and articles.

In the case of Google, some of the best information can be found in the Google section for Webmasters . They even have a section about "should I pay for search engine optimization"

Building a good, legitimate prescense in the search engines takes research, time, planning and patience. Beware the company that promises success overnight.

 

[Thatsmyshirt.com]

Thanks. This company was recommended and is also a monthly service so they continue to work on your site and claim the nothing they do is illegal but who knows. They are not guaranteeing the top listing but have said that they almost always are able to get in top two pages of the engines. Its a little costly at like $700 upfront and $150 a month however. I did get a few recommendations just didnt know whether to try it or not. I had someone design my site and all i really know how to do is add products to the cart program and make minor html changes so im considering outside help

 

[Elleth Faewen]

Read through the information from google posted above. If you are looking at spending that kind of money, you're better off getting your site listed in Yahoo's directory for $299 annual. This has an impact on your search enging ranking. Also, make sure your domain name is paid for more than one year, ideally five years or more.

 

[clarkhaddock]

I read the SEO for dummies and it helped alot. We are making the changes to our site now and have alreay done a few things. As for paying a SEO I would not. Read the book, do what it say and pay for Yahoo directory and work on getting good quality links.

 

[amyskittycats]

Why pay at all. I've seen this site listed for couple years now with tons of good key words on her front page near the bottom. Do searches on google and yahoo and this page comes up very very easily on the main search results page almost everytime! I think all the talk about being banned is nonsense and this is a perfect example proving such. I know of a few others that do this and they never get banned either. Pretty sneaky way of doing it, but hey it really really works and it doesn't cost a penny.

 

[Rodney]

Why pay at all. I've seen this site listed for couple years now with tons of good key words on her front page near the bottom. Do searches on google and yahoo and this page comes up very very easily on the main search results page almost everytime! I think all the talk about being banned is nonsense and this is a perfect example proving such. I know of a few others that do this and they never get banned either. Pretty sneaky way of doing it, but hey it really really works and it doesn't cost a penny.

Just because a site hasn't been caught yet, doesn't mean that it won't get caught in the future for its shady tactics.

You definitely don't want to go stuffing the bottom of your webpage with repeated keywords, it's just a bad idea all around.

People do get banned for doing this type of thing. I've seen plenty of cases of it.

 

[Twinge]

Plus, it simply looks lame to many potential customers.

 

[bjmason32]

SEO will help, but you HAVE to do a ton of research to find the right firm. Most are crap....and any company guaranteeing top ten placement is fraudulent. Really the only reason to hire an SEO company, is if you do not have the time to optimize your site on your own. Changing HTML tags, submitting your site to hordes of search engines, asking content appropriate websites for backlinks.....it’s all pretty simple but TREMENDOUSLY time consuming.

We are using an SEO company right now for that reason and that reason alone. I spent a solid week researching and found a company who was willing to implement a 6 month optimization campaign (not including adwords management) for 3K - I'm pretty happy with the results so far as we are a brand new website and we're already seeing a few hundred visitors a day.