SEO – feedback?

[JoshWhite]

** I rewrote this to hopefully make some more sense sense I first wrote it at 2am on my ipad lol **

Hi all. What I was hoping to do was get a little feedback from people who are more knowledgable about this stuff than I am.

During a prospective client meeting, she had talked about some of the other bids from developers she had been seeking out to build the website. What she didn’t understand, and quite frankly I don’t fully understand it either, was that most proposals included this monthly SEO “upkeep and submission” stuff in it. It was quite vague, and mentioned things like “200 to 500 submissions per month manually”.

Everything that I know about SEO tells me that this is a waste of time and money, especially for a very small business like a dentist’s office that’s considered hyper local.

Obviously showing up out there in the web and creating links back to your site from other credible websites will give you a better page rank, but from what I understood it’s far better to develop a really well informed and natural sounding content provides a high level of detail. Putting all the “SEO tricks” aside, that’s what Google is really looking for.

I just also noticed any of these monthly charges (which seemed pretty high for what I thought they were getting – up to $1000 a month) came from larger companies rather than smaller companies.

I thought that the best avenue for them was to use local online resources along with a well thought out Google Places profile and possibly adwords or Google Boost would be the best way to go. And that way they aren’t blindly signing a contract for a minimum of 6 months of hundreds per month without knowing exactly what they are getting back for it.

So that’s the basic situation – sorry for the novel :P But I was hoping someone with a really good working knowledge of SEO could tell me what exactly are all these “submissions” each month. It it just someone going around, trolling places and typing in links? Can that possibly ever be worth it? Or is that really a valuable service and I’m really not the one “in the know”?

[mshort1985]

I’m sure someone here will correct me if i’m wrong, but from what i know of SEO unless the links are on good sites that actually have something to do with the site they are linking too it”s not going to do anything for them. I’ve heard a lot of the companies that offer that kind of services are not worth it.

like i said someone here may correct me.

[jamygolden]

Directories as back-links used to help a lot with rankings but Googles algorithm changes has changed how that works. As far as I know it’s considered old-school and doesn’t do much any more.

I’ve submitted sites to directories before and I haven’t seen any noticeable differences in rankings. There are some directories which are worth being listed in, such as Dmoz, but I would say 95% of them are a waste of time and probably just makes the person submitting feel like they’re doing something worthwhile.

Note: I don’t know much about SEO, this is just what I’ve picked up, so I could be wrong about everything :p

[TheDoc]

If the bids are coming from larger companies, chances are they are charging a “peace of mind” fee, and really might only spend an hour or so a month checking on the site.

A larger client (with more disposable income) might find some comfort in the idea that somebody is constantly watching over their website.

[Voltron]

It’s always worth reading Matt Cutts’ blog, as he’s involved in SEO at Google and tends to talk about these kind of things. End of the matter is, high quality content, legitimate linking and clean code are never going to backfire where link farms and other underhanded methods will all eventually be caught out.

I’d love to see what people get for their $1000/pcm. I bet it’s worth precisely sod all!

[OniLinkCR]

Mate just write content that is of quality. You have a lot to say. Say it. People will eventually notice and link naturally to you, talk about you, etc.

[Author]

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