.Can You Recommend a Good SEO Consultant/Firm?
I’m gonna try something new and post a need here instead of emailing it. We do a pretty good job being found in natural search results in related search terms and we’ve achieved a nice page rank for a community site. (MySpace’s page rank is 8 while Dogster and Catster are 7.)
Dogster, Inc. is at a place where we’d like to perform better in natural search and never having needed paid SEO advice before we don’t have an existing professional relationship. Can anyone share a positive experience with a SEO consultant or firm they’ve worked with. Or would anyone like to throw their hat in the ring?
While we’re here it’s clear the general conscensus (with lots of websites to back it up) that keyword laden URLs perform much better than id numbers. However, I’ve been reading Jill Whalen over at the excellent High Rankings for years, and she now recommends against changing URLs and many of her readers agree. Perhaps the lesson is using keywords form the get go vs. migrating ID-oriented URLs to keyword-oriented. Anyone wanna weigh-in on this?
Hi Ted,
You can change URLs and not suffer the wrath of the search engines, as I experienced recently when I changed blog software (blog.bretts.net). My search engine rankings don’t appear to have been affected at all by the move.
However, it can be a daunting task if you have a huge number of Urls that will be changing. If the URLs you need to change are stored in a database and follow a consistent pattern and you can auto-generate the new URLs (e.g. by using a document title) your developers shouldn’t have any problems figuring out how to automatically handle the redirects.
The most important thing is to make sure you use 301 server-side redirects (no 302, meta, or javascript redirects).
Hope that helps!
Best,
Brett
Hi Ted,
Longtime no woof/meow. Hope you and your team are well. I think you are making a wise decision, especially since it seems the ads and sponsor messages have seemingly increased on the sites.
If you’re intending to go outside, it would be wise to know if you expect a 1x job, ongoing relationship, or both - this may influence whether you go with an individual consultant or a firm (e.g. US, offshore in India, etc.).
Personally, I think you’d be better off with an individual consultant if you stay within the US. Also, before you hire someone, make sure you do at least some homework so you can validate the particulars around what you’re getting and can build it what you learn into future web pages/content, etc. Besides online resources like searchenginewatch, blogs and others, a great book that I recommend is ‘Search Engine Marketing Inc.,’ by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt - two former IBMers
Also, SEO combines on the page factors and off the page factors (links/link building, etc.). While you should consider optimizing “on the page” factors first, I know one person who many consider the “expert” of the off-the-page factor called ‘link popularity.’ He is worked on amazon’s first web promotion campaigns (link popularity, etc.) and is affordable. I could easily make an intro if you’re interested.
Let me know if there is anything I can do, introductions or otherwise.
Cheers,
Ian
Hi guys. Have you guys heard of SEMPO? They would be able to recommend the best SEO companies as they are the ones who “watch” our industry of Search Engine Marketing. Do NOT go off of a recommendation without consulting the group first — many companies offer “easy” solutions (blackhat) that get you blacklisted from all search engines. And it’s very shady. SEMPO’s email is: http://www.sempo.org
If you ever want Search Engine Marketing, I am a consultant and freelance manage Adwords and YSM campaigns.
–Becky
the guy at pronetadvertising.com is great. helped mashable.com be a top result for many things. let me know if you want an intro.
-noah