Dolphin Promotions frequently come across clients that have been spending money on automated solutions from other SEO providers or who have paid out good money to a company to teach them about SEO. Now the question is are these services really worthwhile and if so why would you want to hire an SEO?
I personally think anyone is capable of doing SEO on their site and achieving positive results from it, while I do not think an average user would be able to achieve the level of results as many of the professionals they should be able to improve the rankings for their sites. It generally requires a user to sit down, do some research into SEO, be reasonably confident with computers and be willing to spend as much time as they can afford on it. Therefore companies offering to train a user for a fee are perfectly reasonable, however I feel that most of these companies have very little experience in the form of teaching and therefore I would suggest it is a wiser idea to read forums or read an SEO guide. Guides such as SEO Book are generally regarded as an excellent source of information for a beginner at SEO and the $79 to buy it would probably be a better investment than paying a company to train you. While this is a good start to learning it is important to constantly keep updated with the latest trends within SEO, one of the major trends at the moment used to help boost rankings and traffic is Social Media Optimisation. SMO is basically where users use blogs and articles to help generate links and traffic from websites such as Digg/Reddit/Netscape etc (though this is a simplistic view) and these techniques are not likely to be discussed in older SEO books.
The second self SEO technique we come across is companies offering systems to help control the promotion of your site, or even automation of the SEO. Sometimes these companies will charge a one off fee; others will charge a monthly fee. Unless the system used is something along the lines of a blog and the user is being charged a one off fee then I would be quite wary of the system.
If the system sold to use is some form of Auto SEO tool I would advise a user to stay well clear, software that automatically generates you links, auto generates content or even does some form of auto submission can quite likely get a website banned from Google.
If the system allows a user to add content to their own site (CMS,Blog etc) then the user should only pay once for this, or for it to be included in part of the development of the website. There is no reoccurring cost for a company to allow a user to add content to their own site once a system like this has been put into place.
If you wish to carry out SEO by yourself it is also very important to realise that building up links to your site is vital, these links ideally should be one way and relevant to your site and can be one of the hardest areas of SEO to work on.
All client enquires Dolphin promotions receive we research into how much the client will benefit from out SEO services. We have frequently turned down sites if we feel our techniques may not help(specifically adult sites) and we also provide as much advice as possible for any enquiry we receive.
Some of the techniques we will typically carry out for clients are:
- Fundamental Home Page Changes
- Page Additions leading into product areas.
- Expansion of text throughout the product range.
- Optimisation of tags throughout all pages within site.
- Optimisation of ALT Tags(Image Descriptions).
- Optimisation of page titles
- Monthly updates of content within your site to focus on revised keywords.
- Writing articles based on your industry that will either be used to develop the content of your site or submitted to article directories to improve the number of back links to your site.
- Link exchange with relevant websites within your industry.
- One way link building with anchor text based on your chosen keywords.
- Directory submissions.
- Social Media Optimisation, involving submitting articles and images from the site to popular Social Media sites, baiting people into naturally linking to you (Link Baiting)
- Installation of a Blog, and content generation within the Blog (if required)
- Reports on the work carried out and the performance of the keywords are carried out every 2 months.
We also spend a large ammount of time each month reading blogs, forums and SEO websites in order to ensure we are always up to date with the latest SEO techniques.