Seeking advice...

[kathryn2008]

Hello, I just registered and would have read many of the posts and think they are very informative. I have a websites and wondering if anyone could help me out in increasing sales (by better SEO, obviously). Any advice is greatly appreciated. Any recommendations on getting guaranteed placement companies that WORK and are not spammers is also appreciated.
Thanks,

[fisicx]

kathryn.

All SEO will do is improve your search engines visibility, it will not necessarily increase sales (or more specifically your ROI). If you are not converting already then bringing in new visitors won't change the situation.

Investigate first where visitors enter the site, how long they stay, where they go and most importantly where they exit.

Fix the site to keep them for longer and improve your conversion rate - aim for 2%. At the same time, carry out all the basic SEO activities: page titles, headers, descriptions, anchor text, alt attributes etc.

And there are no guaranteed placement companies - anyone who claims to get you the #1 slot on google is lying.

[kennedy]

Stay away from Guaranteed placement companies, no one can guarantee you top placement in any search engine unless they use pay per click which you can do yourself. Anyone who guarantee you placement is lying and so not worth doing business with. My advice is to take a look at [websites offering online services] for a few methods available for achieving prominent placement on the search engines, such as Organic Search Engine Optimization and Sponsored First Page Placement.

[shaunudal]

Agree with you guys, No one can gives you guaranteed for top placement, Yaa they can do SEO on your website and try hard to get ranking on SERPS. But here is also one condition you need to wait longer or spend extra money for paid linking.

Regards
Shaun

[CanzDesign]

I disagree with you guys, getting top placement is extremely easy, on an existing website it can often be obtained within a few days, the trick however is keeping it there.

Almost any SEO thats worth their salt can optimise a webpage, and google will notice the change and reward the work done, however 3 weeks later you will have slipped back, not usually as bad as you were, but your website will slip.

Or the other thing big companies or sleazy ones do is optimise your website for some long winded keyphrases, ones that people aren't really going to look for. Or optimise them for your business name or worse still your website name.... this one cracks me up, if someone knows your website name, and knows you offer the service or sell the product they want, they would simply type your url into the broswer, they wouldn't generally do a search for it.

Yet over and over, I have had clients say, oh my site shows up #1 for my domain name... big deal, you need it to show up highly for whatever you are selling.

Have a lovely Christmas
Lynny

[MrCat]

Some very good points were raised. SEO does get you the right visibility and keeping on top of it would require a lot of work.

It does draw in a lot of visitors - but getting conversion is another thing. Make sure you rank well on keywords that relate well for your site especially on what you are selling on it.

I would also suggest you promote it in different ways to reach your market directly. PPC, classifieds, investing on targeted backlinks, banners, etc. could get you more targeted traffic to your site.

Best of luck!

[www.infoebookstore.co.uk]

Originally Posted by CanzDesign

I disagree with you guys, getting top placement is extremely easy, on an existing website it can often be obtained within a few days, the trick however is keeping it there.

I agree with this 100%.

In my experience a good URL will get you a top spot very quickly, but if it doesn't have a lot of good targeted links from high PR sites, it will not stay there long. There are also problems with the likes of wikipedia and google local getting in the way of organic serps.

IT can really be hit and miss. My advice would be to try and get traffic from the links rather than hoping links will bring higher SERPS.

Good luck