

What Have Been Your Experiences With SEOs? - socalsamba
http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/a-buyers-guide-to-seo/

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pxlpshr
In my experience you should handle SEO yourself. Most of these guys are a joke
(but not all). There are a couple of alternative strategies SEO's use like hot
beds, link farms and other white-hat / black-hat techniques... however, most
of this stuff is on Google's checklist to weed out over time as there
jeopardize the integrity of AdSense too. And quite frankly, if you have to
stoop this low you shouldn't be in business.

One of the most important things is getting linked-to by respected sites (ie:
TechCrunch) and amongst the web (PR releases but do these sparingly). It's in
this dimension that page rank within search results are determined these days,
a natural filter to all the crap! This is key reason why spam bots dump
responses filled with links on blogs and popular sites like Digg/etc...
Bastards!!

However, it's still in good form and highly recommended to continue using
UNIQUE meta tags, page titles, alt descriptors, etc...

And, there are valid white-hat techniques to consider, especially if your site
is entirely flash/flex or graphic-heavy in nature. An example of this is
delivering GoogleBot an alternative page that your visitors do not see which
describes the site's content by way of traditional markup. Mismanaging this
can quickly put you in the blackhat bucket.

Sitemaps are also important and I don't see enough sites trending to spider's
preferred structure: sitemap.xml. Drupal users are in luck as there is a
plugin to handle dynamic generation of the sitemap to spec, and submits it to
Yahoo/Google/Live spiders each time your content changes. But if you don't use
Drupal, just google "sitemap.xml" and you'll find out all you need to know.

Speaking of Drupal, search engines absorb it like a sponge; it's soo well
built for SEO. <3 :P

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inovica
I second the "do it yourself" process. You'll learn a lot from it and nobody
but you truly understands your business like you do. It's not rocket science,
but it can be hard work getting the inbound links. The first priority is
definitely to work on making sure that your pages are friendly, that your
title tag, alt tags and text in the pages is relevant. Good content, put
together well always helps

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rob
Not my site, but I came across a pretty big "SEO checklist" page a couple of
days ago that I bookmarked. I'm not sure how accurate the information is, but
it's worth a look if you're interested (and can get by the ugly design):

[http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-
fact...](http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm)

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rms
That's a good list... whether it is the absolute truth or not, it consists of
good practices.

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rms
SEO:

run a search on Yahoo.com for site:your competitor's sites, or people who rank
highly for the keywords you want to rank highly for. Look at the inbound links
coming to these sites. Figure out why the site that links to your competitor
should also link to you, and then tell that to the site owner.

The biggest grey hat SEO technique right now is "articles." You write or have
written articles about some topic relevant to your site. You upload these
articles to article directories, with the terms that the article must include
certain links back to your site. People trying to get content on their site
repost your article, and you get links to your site.

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xerxes12
Here are a few more good tips from Google

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291)

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merrick33
Just like their are varying degrees of skilled programmers, their are SEOs
across the spectrum of skills and experience.

It's not hard to learn the fundamentals of SEO yourself. Incorporating the
best practices from the start is what is challenging for most, and dedicating
the time to doing it right.

Head over to SEOmoz read the Beginners Guide to SEO and once you got that
down, they have many more articles to guide you.

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humanlever
I think one of the best things you can do if you're committing to major SEM is
put out an RFP. The responses can not only save you money but give you some
valuable insight into the company's workings and strategy which can be just as
valuable as any cost savings.

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dshah
You need an SEO with the best SEO pixie dust.

See this YouTube video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aGTKcg0QHs>

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volida
there are always secrets nobody will share

