Posted by Paul Furman on 03/15/07 23:27

Roman wrote:

> I received a marketing call from a guy first showing me my website and
> then some other website and ranking of that other website.
>
> My questions is it worth paying to SEO corporation a $1200 - $3000 setup
> fee and then $150 monthly to get your website search optimized ?
>
> I used the domaintools.com and it seems like my website had higher SEO
> rating and tag relevance than the example site he was showing me. I did
> not pay attention to search engine ranking so far but I have my doubts
> if this is really something I need to contract professionals for.

Just try searching for likely keywords to see how you rank.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=prototype+pcb
I didn't see your site in the first 7 pages of that search so if that's
an important product, yes you should optimise things. I don't know about
a monthly service but you want to have the right structure for your
pages to rank well.

If you can't even find things using this format there is something
seriously wrong:
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=prototype+pcb++site%3adipmicro.com>

One thing I found that really helps is to change the title of the page
to include the actual product or search term, that's what puts things on
the top of google searches.

And I think urls with "?act=" and such tend to be shunned by search
engines. Look at how php.net works, you just type www.php.net/echo and
it finds the documentation for that command, keeping the main subject
'echo' in the url and putting it in the title bar too so it's absolutely
clear that the page is 100 percent relevant. I need to rebuild one of my
sites like this. Google 'search engine friendly url'.

Another thing I did on one of my sites was I noticed the google results
included lots of long redundant lists of our full inventory which
basically produced cluttered irrelevant landing pages for people so I
set <meta name='googlebot' content='noarchive, noindex'> for those pages
then the bots only archive the specific focused destination pages. This
improved our ranking tremendously and made the results spot on relevant.

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