Would you .. or have you...paid for SEO services.

I have a mate who works for an SEO company in London, and they employ quite a few people, so being the cheeky git I am, I asked him to take a look at my forum and give me some tips on improving the SEO.

To be fair I didn't give him admin rights, or access to the actual workings of the forum.

This is the conversation we had :


Chat conversation start
14 April 22:06
Tom .. can you help me improve the SEO on my forum... James reckons you're an expert on it !
14 April 23:16

Probably - I can take a quick look at the weekend if you like?
Yes please
19 April 15:25

what's the site address?
19 April 17:22
www.manutdlounge.com
19 April 18:29
Just had a quick look at it - the main thing at the moment is that it's an extremely weak domain, by which I mean that because so few and such small sites have linked to it externally it is difficult for Google to establish any trust signals (I can only see links from modelrailforum.com, theadminzone.com, footballtransfertavern.com and soccersweep.com).* The other thing that could strengthen your domain in Google's eyes is people searching for your site then clicking through to it, but both of these factors basically rely on you having built reputation outside of SEO first.

The other major thing you could look at is your <title> & <h1> tag copy. If we split search into branded (i.e. people looking for your site in particular) and unbranded (e.g. people looking for an unspecified man utd forum), your title tag copy (e.g. "Man Utd Lounge" on the homepage) doesn't work well for either. This is because your site is too weak to compete with major news articles mentioning both manchester united and the word "lounge", and because it doesn't contain any keywords that might expose it to less competitive search terms (e.g. Unofficial Man Utd Community Forum) - though you might struggle to rank for even the latter with your current domain strength.

Lastly you might want to look at creating a sitemap at some point, but that's a low effort, low impact job.

Also, FYI, I notice you've been making use of meta keywords tags - the prevailing opinion is that these don't do anything anymore.


And that was it, now I know he was doing it as a favour, but he hasn't really told me anything I don't know already.

What would expect from an SEO company if you were to employ one, they are hardly likely to build backlinks for you, or write informed reliable copy, so just what do they actually do !?

 

I read this on TAZ before, pretty interesting because I've built my own websites and know a bit about SEO using H1, H2, H3 and Title tags, among other things like using alt and title together in links, also putting image width and height in IMG tags, etc. I've had one website I built get 100% SEO score in the end changing things over time like that researching SEO quite a lot at time.

What that guy tells you is pretty standard SEO stuff really. He says don't bother using Meta Keywords because Google ignores it now, but what about other search engines your site might benefit from by still having it there. Not only google visits your site, your site won't catch any harm having it in there still for other search engines.

Trust signal with a domain. Last I checked mainly comes with the AGE of domain (how long it's been on web in use). Google won't give much weight to a domain that is 1 year old, relativity new site. Compared to a site that has been around 5 years using same domain. Sites come and go all the time, so one that has been around 5 years or more using same domain will be given better ranking weight by Google, as it sees that site as more likely to stick around online when linking back to it with search results.

 

Yes. we've paid for SEO services once and the consequences were really sad. the thing is that we have hired a company that was working on our SEO and the were not following the latest implmentations of Google. When Google has released their new algorythm our website was banned. So my suggetsion is when hiring a SEO company make sure that they really know what they are doing. Otherwise, you will not only waste your money but will destroy the reputation of your site at the same time.

 

You would definitely get more information if you had paid for the service, but you should be careful which company you're going to hire. It would be good to look into their portfolio, but it would be even better if you find out about them through recommendations and word of mouth.