Forgive me as I am new to all of this.

I’m having a consulting firm help finish up a webstore and start some SEO stuff for it. It obviously is big money. I am wondering about the effectiveness of these sub $10 an hour so called "SEO/SMM experts."

I basically want to focus on organic search results, and not much cpc stuff, as my transactions are low dollar, which doesn’t make cpc very feasible. And I’d like to grow a presence on Facebook. My main concern is I don’t even know what I need to have done, just the results that I seek.

The company I am going to be working with, wants to take the approach of ~10-20 hours of assessment and deploying an initial SEO strategy. Followed by a couple hours a month monitoring and tweaking.

I am wondering if it would be worth outsourcing someone to work SEO on a more "full-time" basis in conjunction to what I will be starting with.

I guess I have more questions that I will need to get answered when this get started in the coming week or so.

I’m basically in what I’d consider very competitive keywords and I’d like to eventually be in the top 10 results.

Any advice?

I’ve always wanted to hire someone on oDesk, had a horrible time trying to find a content writer.. So I kind of hate oDesk, full of hundreds of people who never respond back.. But if you hire a SEO person, I’d make a list of exactly what you want done, etc. Or they can just kind of say they did this or that, and you’ll never know.. I’ll stick to buying small services off forums instead, at least until I find someone worth hiring. Remember most SEO people are garbage, which is why I just pay for the exact services I want.

Also I’d love to take a look, a firm telling you it’s competitive might not be true.. Those guys will charge thousands to barely do much and say it’s hard to rank, etc. Go search for your keyword and post how many results show up in Google.. Also it would help us if you can share the keywords (don’t post it you don’t want to).. Is this a local company or just a personal website? Also how much is the CPC in PPC ads.. Chances are you could rank pretty easy..

19.9million results on the main keyword I want, but there is about a dozen that I want, which are in the 10-20million range, currently topped by a publicly traded company worth $300 million, to average cpc is only in the 1-2 dollar range for the most part. But I only make ~$6 a unit, with about a 20% conversion.

I’m completely online at this time, via amazon, and am having an amazon webstore spruced up. I did the bulk of the work, they are going through and changing the stuff that Amazon won’t let the average joe change, they were referred to me by Amazon.

We haven’t really started anything other then just to sign a basic contract and I have the option to pull the trigger at anytime, only charged for what I authorize.

I haven’t even spoke with the SEO team yet, just the sales people. I’m assuming I’m in a competitive market judging by my research.

I just really wonder what the difference between these people that charge 100 bucks a month for "First page of google," and the people that charge 1000.

These guys are about $3500 for what they say is initial implementation and going back monthly and do maintenance for 6-8 months. They haven’t promised me any results at this point because they want me to have a meeting with their SEO team when they are ready to start, to have those guys discuss the results. But they said what they are offering me is typical for what I am seeking to do.

I’m not seeking to knock out the top guys. But I’d like to eventually get in the top 10.

Currently, with minimal advertising. I am selling around 2000 units a month, and growing rapidly. It’s making me a nice profit. One I’d be happy living on, but I know that I haven’t even make a scrape in a fraction of a percent of the market, so I’d like to continue to grow as much as possible.

I guess, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve got a new brand of cell phone accessories. With Zagg being the #1 spot.

Is that in quotes or just a regular search?

Some people who charge $100 for the first page of Google have the caveat that you don’t get to pick your own keywords, so they rank you on page one for something no one ever searches for.

Pretty much anyone who guarantees you placement is bullshitting you. Not to mention, there would be rather complicated contracts involved. Who determines page 1? Which datacenter? How can you verify it? How long do you need to stay on page 1 in order for it to "count" and get them their monthly payment? What happens if you drop off? Are they holding your links hostage and will raise their price and if you don’t pay it they remove all your links and your site moves off of page one, etc.?

Find out exactly what they are going to do.

Exactly.

Are they actually doing stuff themselves or are they farming you out to the lowest bidder on IM forums?

It blows my mind how many "SEO" guys don’t know the first thing about SEO, they are just good at bullshitting to get clients and then outsource the work to who the fuck knows on IM forums, which is almost always some form of spammy or spun garbage.

Any SEO should be 100% transparent. Some of them try to use technobabble and other bullshit to keep their clients in the dark because they want them to think they have some secret ninja Google hack that no one else knows about. Nonsense

There are no SEO secrets, especially if you are going whitehat.

At best SEO is a game of doing things that are known to work and hoping you’re doing them better than your competitors.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you snakeoil.

Turn your BS detector up to 11 when dealing with SEO guys.

That’s what I figured.

The sales guy I talked to, straight up told me that they don’t guarantee results because it’s too difficult. Which is what I expected. He also said they mainly focus on white hat stuff, because they don’t want to offer black hat stuff, and then have a customer pissed at them if they get delisted. I supposed to talk to the SEO guys either friday or early next week.

I don’t doubt at all that they are reputable company, I’ve done my research that way. I can’t find any complaints, and there are a bunch of articles from all over, real magazines and such, talking about how fast they are growing, how they are a great company to work for, how the owners are considered to be great up and coming businessmen.

I’m just curious with how the 10-20 hours implementing a SEO plan and a couple hours a month on maintenance will compare to these places that want to charge thousands a month. The more I search for SEO companies, the more suspicious I get of them. It seems that there are many different approaches. However, I guess the guys at the top of the results for SEO probably know what they are doing.

Can anyone give any examples of white hat methods?

As opposed to black hat methods.

Adding unique quality content that is targeted to what the visitors want

Black hat:

Showing different pages to human visitors than to search engine bots (even though YouTube does this Ever seen a search result that shows the video description but then when you click it it takes you to the "are you over 18?" page?).

Automated stuff like blog spam and creating 5978234789 forum profiles with links back to your site.

Using the same color text as the background to "hide" it (this is technically blackhat. It used to work well in the late 90s, now you get penalized for it).

Hiding links.

Gateway pages (pages that optimize for whatever keyword gets searched for, without providing any useful content, with a link to the main site. Originally used by porn sites)

Anything that is designed to exploit part of Google’s algorithm, to trick it into thinking your site is more relevant than it actually is.

etc.

With the exception of some on page mistakes that noobs might make (keyword stuffing, same color text/background, etc.), you actually have to try to do black hat stuff. It’s not like you’re going to accidentally blackhat yourself onto Google’s shitlist. "Oops, I accidentally cloaked my pages and hid the links and I didn’t know that script I was writing would selectively show content to users based on their IP addresses! All I was trying to do was make a homepage for my cat!" It would be like going out to your garage with some part parts and accidentally building an engine.

In other words, black hat people know they are doing black hat stuff (unless someone lied to them and told them it was whitehat ).

I have horrible luck with oDesk, it’s a bunch of indians who do piss poor work.

@Falconer

Yes mate, I’m down with the black hat stuff. It’s the white hat stuff that I wonder about the definition off. Like JesterFX says, good keyword targeted content, but how’s about off site promotion? Backlinks are what primarily count IMO on a site over a year or two old, and (surely?) trying to get links yourself, or for you client, is purely black hat, wouldn’t you say?

*checks his Scrapebox *

hello sir

i have done many sem and seo. waiting on instructions. tank you.
AHTAHPAHTA

20th PERCENTILE SEO BASIC oDESK TEST
$2.50 / HR

the good seo/smm niggas arent on odesk, or on freelancer, looking for these jobs.

you find them they dont find you

its not hard to hit the top 10 in google or any search engine anymore, literally right after you publish content.
look at the nonstop parade of article spun spam sites that plague search engines.
any retard can do it in the spare time with stupid shit like senuke.

especially if you got a script running on your site that scrapes search queries from all the top engines and modifies your keywords on the fly.
shit, top 10 24/7. np

But the TS was talking about white hat stuff.

@falconer,
no such thing in the SEO world.

There is still a difference between "reasonably resembles a natural link progression" and "obviously automated and generated."

You won’t get far with contractors.

You know your product better than anyone you can hire, so take videos, compare to competing products, blog about the cell phone industry…share everything you know. And broadcast it wide on fb, twitter, message boards, cnet, industry influencers.

You’ll get stable, high rankings if you’re patient.

I are anti-spammer and I regularly purge spam from Wikipedia. There are legit references that was like 15th page down in Google search, but became the first or second when I cited them in Wikipedia. It isn’t for the purpose of promoting that reference. It was only to support the claim I was making.

Spammy SEOs reference bullshit links for the purpose of promoting their site. Even thought the site no longer produces backlinking, it still affects SERP.

Another way SEOs can get a name out is to take a shit everywhere in your name. You know, wipe your ass and toss the paper all over the floor along with a business card that shows "my company was here", or write up how awesome that burrito was at some restaurant you’ve never been to and sign your post with the URL or use a URL like user name.

You don’t build your name by giving out exceptional samples at the mall. You get your name by gossip about how you trashed bathrooms in every mall in your area. Not a good thing.

Though they maybe independent contractor the shits they take in your name can have grave damage to your company’s name that is difficult to repair.