Hi,.



I am new to the forum,and to be honest I am here for help and advice.

I am in the process of launching a e commerce site in The Uk, but hope to later reach the global market.

I am manufacturing a line of designer bean bags, and hope to have the product and the website ready to launch in a few months.

While I have spent the majority of my business capital on materials and stock, I had left over a portion for web design...

The issue I have is that I am now told that even the most expensive website is usless unless it is optomized correctly.

I have a package deal with the company,where buy the design the site,and work on the optomisation for a year,with payments in stages, to ensure quality of work.

However they say one of the most important factors is incoming links...but they have warned me to beaware of link exchange ,three way etc because they say that google is more intrested in quality links.

So here is the question...does anyone have any links they can provide from any sites that are furniture, home or interior design related.

If they do how do I alail of them...I can pay a small amount for quality links that have been reviewed by the web desing and seo company,and would love to enter into a barter scheme...you give me a few top quality links and i give you a top quality euopean designed bean bag...

hope even a few of you are intrested...once i start getting some business I am happy to increase payment .

Many thanks

bubbleberry

A web site isn't any more "useless" without being "optimized" than a car is with only half a tank of gas.

But otherwise they've actually given you good advice. But I'd still be wary. What are you paying them to do over the course of a year, exactly?

Sorry..Its not that they were saying that the site would be usless...they explained that if my site was information based and would be viewed by existing customers,or by organisations who wanted to know more about the product then a web site alone would be good enough.

They said that for an ecommerce site that people were unaware of then seo and page ranking was most important.

They have charged a total of $2000 usd,.It is a company based in india and the payments are made in for quarters, $500 up front,$500 upon completion of site $500 after inital optomisation and when site is submitted to google (they said the next time google updated their data was april?) and $500 in six months time when they expect the site to be ranking within the first 3 pages of google.

It sounds like a good deal..but then I have no real experience in this field...

Thanks for your imput.

bub

Huh. Nobody submits their sites to Google anymore. I don't know if they even have a place for you to do this? Once you have links from other sites, Google ( and Yahoo and MSN ) will just follow those, and discover you on their own.

Google updates their data every second of the day, but I think I know what they mean. If you run the Google Toolbar plugin, the little green bar chart that tells you what your PageRank is, that only gets new data published every few months. But Google crawls about 5 pages of my site every day, adds whatever changes it finds to its database. They're always looking around the web at what's out there, and always changing the way sites rank - always, not only in April. In fact if they already started getting you backlinks you should be able to find yourself with a web search right now.

You want to do well in the searches, and honestly you want to be in the top half of the first page, not somewhere in the first three. But this is determined by what the person searches for, if you have that text on your page, and how many other sites link to yours. I think SEO isn't that incredibly important, because you also have word of mouth, and if you put together a good site, that will carry you pretty far. Also the search engines don't know if someone did SEO or not, they just work.

Hey John, You should think about getting the "Newbie" taken off your username

I don't think I can add much to the above advice, but I would certainly be very cautious about what they are doing.

It sounds like they are going to use SERP rankings and PR (PageRank) for measuring the quality and effectiveness of their work.
This will very likely lead you to disappointing results. It is very simple to get good rankings for many phrases but zero buyers/enquiries and this is what you should be using as a yard stick.

For the price you are paying, I doubt whether they are doing any serious keyword research for your market place.
Bean bags is a moderately competitive area but there will be many lesser competition phrases that would bring qualified traffic fairly quickly even allowing for Googles aging delay.

One important thing is to ensure you have some visitor and page tracking in place so you can see where visitors come from and often more importantly where they leave from.

Oh and don't get conned into buying a domain name with bean bags in it, it will serve no useful purpose. Find a name that is short enough to tell people in a phone conversation and they will remember it 3 hours later.


On a different note:
If you are using your forum username as part of your company name, be prepared for seeing some odd queries in your site tracking logs

However they say one of the most important factors is incoming links...but they have warned me to beaware of link exchange ,three way etc because they say that google is more intrested in quality links.

So here is the question...does anyone have any links they can provide from any sites that are furniture, home or interior design related.

(Thought I'd make this a seperate bit)
Forget about the "relevancy" rubbish of links, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things whether you get a link from a page about furniture, or a page about gardening. Get links from and give links to sites and pages that YOU consider worth linking to and from.
BUT IBLs are NOT the most important factor for SEO. The anchor text of the link is the useful bit about a link and even that is not the most important.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Hey John, You should think about getting the "Newbie" taken off your username

Funny you'd say that - I was just starting to feel like maybe I'm beginning to get a handle on things, and wondering when I get to graduate to the next level.

I think you graduated, dude.

bubbleberry: I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same way, but it doesn't seem to me like the company in question has given you solid advice as much as they've parroted advice that they've picked up from others that sounds good, with no real regard to whether or not it is current or correct.

The reasons I feel that way are:

1) They're charging you a fee after they submit to Google. IF you really want to submit to Google, you can do it yourself in about 2 minutes.

Wanna see? Here's the link.

Buuuuut...as was pointed out earlier, it's a complete waste of time. Search engines visit a page, and then the pages it links to (unless told otherwise), and all of the pages those pages link to (unless told otherwise), and so on and so on. In other words, it traverses the links to add new pages.

So...what does this mean? In order to ensure you get indexed, you need at least one link from a page that a search engine has already crawled (or is about to.) A quick and easy example is a hyperlink in a forum such as webmaster-talk.com . If you put your site's URL there, it will get crawled and indexed...eventually. Get yourself a few semi-decent backlinks (forums don't really count that way because it's too easy to get them) and you'll get indexed more quickly.

2) The Google datacenters are updated all the time (I say databases because Google has multiple datacenters across multiple regions such as Canada, the UK, and the US, and as such there is some variance in terms of order and quantity of results). Pages get added, deleted, and modified constantly.

So if you "submit", you shouldn't have to wait until April for an "update". I'm wondering if the company in question is referring to the marginally useful PageRank being updated.

3) They're charging you as much for SEO as they're charging you to complete the site. If they build the site properly in the first place, it would be a lot easier to optimize as a lot of optimization is done on the pages themselves (unique title tags, proper copy, code that doesn't get in the way of a crawler, etc.)

4) $500 for "ranking in the first 3 pages of Google." Under what terms? And what good will they do? I could get this thread ranked under the term "bubbleberry-flavoured ketchup UK" (give that about 24-48 hours and you might well see it.) But who's going to look for that?

5) You're hiring a design firm from India. At the risk of sounding racist when I don't intend to, a lot of the design firms from the mid-to-far-East don't have a clue how to write proper copy. If you want a classic example, check out webpromotioner.com . I'm not saying all Indian firms are like this, but a very large percentage are.

I'm not sure if you're engaged in email, telephone, or chat communication with this firm (it could possibly be a hybrid of the aforementioned as well), but you would be well-advised to thoroughly review any written material that you have been provided with.

6) The feeling I get that you haven't researched competitors, particularly within your own country. Dealing locally does have its advantages, even if price isn't always one of them.

Don't get me wrong...the advice GENERALLY isn't bad. Being wary of link exchanges and three-way exchanges and things of that nature is generally a good idea. As Hirst pointed out, link to sites that make sense to link to and only those, and seek the same types of links. But there's a fishy that doesn't smell quite right here.

to extend on point 5 from Adam;

The copywriting (of which there seems to be no mention) needs to be done by a native speaker of the target audiences language. It's not a racist or bigoted remark, simply a fact. A good example is the HSBC TV ads (a sample for non-UKers http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=14901 ).
I certainly could not hope to write copy that would adequately convey my meaning and help convert sales in another language or culture. So while having copy written by outsourcing can make it cheaper it could also be a false economy.

I would suspect that this company is simply a "link building" optimiser, rather than taking a holistic approach to optimising.

Originally Posted by Adam

4) $500 for "ranking in the first 3 pages of Google." Under what terms? And what good will they do? I could get this thread ranked under the term "bubbleberry-flavoured ketchup UK" (give that about 24-48 hours and you might well see it.) But who's going to look for that?

According to the google alert I setup, It took until 00:30 March 5th to hit the SERPs

crawled on 22 Feb 2007 13:38:31 GMT

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...red+ketchup+UK

How do you set up these alerts...?

http://www.google.com/alerts