Legitimate SEO Firm

[darklord700]

Buddy of mine wanted to promote his website and am looking for a legitimate SEO company. He got numeros phone calls from companies in far flung countries promising to put his site on the first page of google for thousands of dollars. He would like to avoid those. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Rathji]

We use these guys and have had good results. Been consistently #1 for almost 2 years now.

http://www.ulistic.com/

[Regular_John]

He brands himself as more of a copywriter, but Joel Klettke (Business Casual Copywriting) was the first SEO I met that I didn't want to punch in the face. That is to say he's the opposite of slimy, very ethical/driven SEO/Writer guy.

[darklord700]

Thanks Rathji and Jaydorn.

BTW, what does these SEO companies/guys do that you couldn't do yourself?

[Regular_John]

Originally Posted by darklord700

Thanks Rathji and Jaydorn.

BTW, what does these SEO companies/guys do that you couldn't do yourself?

Well in short, keep up on the latest Google agorithm news and adjust their strategy/approach accordingly.

There's sort of two parts to SEO:
- Baseline, best practice stuff, that any web developer worth their salt should be doing. Proper header/paragraph tags, well formatted HTML, title tags, description tags, alt tags, etc.
- The speciality "content driven" techniques which ensure you're content and terms used are appropriate to the search results. Writing proper descriptions/copy for all pages/titles and ensuring the content being presented is relevant to the search terms being used.

The second one is really what you pay a specific SEO company for, ensuring your content/terms are up to spec, and the techniques being implemented are appropriate and up to date with the latest search engine algorithms. A good SEO company generally knows what works, what doesn't work, and what will get you penalized by the search engines.

Sorta comes down the plumber who bills a full hour for a 5 minute fix. You're not paying $130 to turn one nut, you're paying him to know what nut to turn.

[OldDutch]

I can personally vouch for Content Heavy. I know the owner personally, went to school, and worked (web dev) with him. He's very bright, and very good in this field. He has done work on some pretty high end sights, so I would very much trust him with your work.

http://www.contentheavy.com/calgary-...rvices/seo.asp

[SeeGeeWhy]

I know Joel Klettke but haven't worked with him - very nice guy.

Calin Yablonski of inbound interactive is very good for small business owners. http://www.inboundinteractive.ca/

Here's a neat slideshare they did on SEO auditing and his blog is great.

I've worked with ForwardLevel as well, ask for Amish.
http://www.forwardlevel.com/

The guys at socialish.net have an interesting approach as well, but more focused on social presence than traditional SEO. http://socialish.net/

[troutman]

How can they promise to put you on the first page, when every competitor is also being promised the same thing? We can't all be on the first page.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by troutman

How can they promise to put you on the first page, when every competitor is also being promised the same thing? We can't all be on the first page.

They can't. All they can really do ido is what jaydorn mentioned - make sure all your tags are proper, key search terms are included, etc.

The algorithms are super secret and are constantly changing. Reputable SEO people will follow the trends they notice and offer ways to to improve your ranking based on what they are observing, but if they promise to move you to the top result they are being dishonest.

And if a dishonest CEO goes to far it can negatively affect your results - Google can (and does) delist sites they believe are gaming the system.

http://www.rickwhittington.com/blog/...ebsite-banned/

[Regular_John]

Originally Posted by troutman

How can they promise to put you on the first page, when every competitor is also being promised the same thing? We can't all be on the first page.

They shadier companies (think offshore) can "promise" this because they use black hat techniques, which may well work on the short term. Say, just long enough to get paid. But ultimately result in a business being black balled from Google.

No reputable SEO company will guarantee you the front page, they will promise you increased exposure & traffic. And provide reports to back up their promises, but they will not promise you front page. If any SEO company does promise you front page you should immediately run in the opposite direction.

[Russic]

Further to what jaydorn is saying, it's important to note that the goal should always be better clicks, and not necessarily more clicks. If 1000 people are visiting your site per month but only 20 of them are your target audience, you'd be in a better position if you had 100 visits per month with 75 of them being your target. A lot of people pay a ton of money only to see their clicks go down and they get upset, when in fact they're sales are increasing.

Also important to keep in mind these things don't generally happen overnight. Go in with the expectation that it'll take a fair amount of time to see results. There's quite a bit of exploratory work to be done, and the work can extend beyond what you'd expect. Google rewards sites that it deems valuable, so increasing your exposure could involve rewriting web copy, optimizing your site to load better on mobile, or optimizing it to load faster.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

Calin Yablonski of inbound interactive is very good for small business owners. http://www.inboundinteractive.ca/

Here's a neat slideshare they did on SEO auditing and his blog is great.

Calin did 2 of our websites at my old job and is an amazing guy to work with. Never used him for SEO though.