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| Yes | 49% | 84 votes | Total: 170 votes | |
| No | 51% | 86 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesSEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of improving where your website ranks on Google and the other major search engines for searches relating to your site. For example, if you had a website that deals in selling football merchandise, you would hope to appear highly in the search results for the search term, 'football merchandise,' as this is likely to direct a high number of people, who are looking to make purchases of related items, to your website. The further down the rankings you appear, the fewer of those searchers will ever make it to your website.
So the reasons for embarking upon an SEO campaign are clear to see. But why use SEO consultants rather than going it alone?
Well, it's like anything else in terms of marketing really. You want the best qualified people in that particular area to take it on for you. With SEO, this is particularly important as poor SEO techniques can actually result in your being penalised by Google, thus having the exact opposite effect of that intended. And because the search engine algorithms are continually changing and being developed, using a reliable SEO company who are knowledgeable in the area and up to date, is essential. This is more important if the market you are targeting is particularly competitive.
A successful SEO campaign that can see you make the top results for search terms relating to your products and services, will undoubtedly see an increase in your sales. When you weigh up the potential financial benefits of this against the financial costs of hiring reputable consultants, it's evident that such an investment is worthwhile.
Although the costs can mean it is often tempting to try doing it yourself, unless you are trained in doing so, you run the risk of doing more damage than good. This is particularly apt where SEO is concerned, for the simple fact that the processes are constantly changing. Much of the information and apparent 'tips' you can find online is out of date or even pure nonsense!
And when you come to search for a company to do your SEO for you, a great means of checking the quality of their service is to see how they themselves rank for their most likely key words. Let's suppose you were searching for a company in Manchester, typing in 'SEO Manchester' and checking out the high ranking websites on Google will give you a good indication of which companies are actually good at what they do. Who wants to recruit SEO consultants who aren't able to get their own website into the top ten?
Learn more about this author, Stacey Cavanagh.
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No
As a search engine "expert" and website design guy and at the risk of taking food out of my family's mouth, I am going to state for the record that unless the SEO expert has a wide range of link brokers, then providing someone thousands of dollars to get listed for a keyword is not worth the money. Here is why:
1. The on page optimization factors are so easy that literally anyone can do it and do it quickly. While a lot of SEO experts would have you believe otherwise, onpage optimization is nothing more than clearly defining exactly where google or any other search engine should categorize your website. Nothing more and nothing less. For a regular webmaster, this means to do the small things, like understanding how tags such as title tags will help define what the page is about and providing enough supporting semantic terms for the search engines to make suppositions about your content.
2. The off page optimization currently equates to finding backlinks that "support" or "vouch" that your site is truly about what you claim it is about. This is the part where most webmaster's stumble because getting the proper backlinks from the relevant niche with the relevant anchor text can be tough. It is tough...but not impossible. And given the fact that most SEO experts charge not only a one time fee but also a monthly fee, the money could be used to sway other websites into giving the backlinks for you.
Frankly, the only reason why I would think that someone would need an SEO expert would be if they were outsourcing multiple projects and didn't want to take the time to do the menial tasks of link building and building pages that are contextually correct.
So, in summation, you have heard it from someone who actually makes money as an SEO expert....SEO consultants, in most cases are not worth the money they charge. SEO is not Voodoo science and search engine optimization is a learned skill that literally anyone can learn if they take the time. Onpage optimization is only a means for the search engines to categorize your site. In essence, you are simply telling the search engines what your page is about. There are plenty of "free tools" available for the webmaster to help them see things as the search engine sees. There are plenty of tools that will allow them to compare the competition within their niche and market. The only "hard" part of SEO is the off page optimization and this isn't because it is hard but because it is time consuming.
SEO Consultants are NOT worth the money. But you didn't hear it from me.
Learn more about this author, Leo Dimilo.
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