I keep getting calls from companies saying “come with us for 199/month and we can get you on the first page of Google-yahoo-Bing”. No contract, month to month.
Is it worth it? Are there ways to go about it myself? I am not at all familiar with how to get my website seen.
Thanks,
Matthew
[MENTION=1912]Matthew[/MENTION]
Scam alert!.. Dont do it…
If I dont get 3 of these phone calls every day it means I turned my phone off. DONT FALL FOR IT!
They will keep calling, so have fun with it.
[INDENT]Next time- do [B]exactly this[/B]…[/INDENT]
[INDENT=2]- Ask what their company name is
Ok, so thank you Chris L and Chris C and J from the D…It’s a scam. Got it. Nice to have support to back up my intuition about
things I know little to nothing about.
Next question: Now that I have a website (built by a friend and hosted via Customer Factor) what do I do with it?
How do I go about getting it seen? Do you guys do it yourselves? Any good threads on WCR to look at?
Thanks,
Matthew
Please don’t take a look at these kinds of mails are these mails are considered to be spams. Do you get the mails in your inbox or spam box? Make sure your account has spam filter settings.
Well I am not but I would like to suggest you to ask them about their action plan. It seems might be they are doing paid posting which is not good.
Don’t fall for it. Even if they actually do any work, most of the times its automatic spam that will end up hurting your website ranking. And it is not possible to guarantee a position on the first page unless you get that promise directly from Bing or Yahoo 
First red flag is yahoo is powered by bing so there basicly one in the same IMO,2nd most first page on google is google places…hint hint 
I hate these companies, they make true website optimization companies look bad so no one trusts them.
Quality content is the name of the game now. The way it always should have been. Google will rank you pretty much based on how informative, interesting, and content-rich your site is. START BLOGGING. Use the search bar for ideas on how to make your site more visible with blogging.
Something that will also help is building separate pages targeted to specific market areas and services. For instance, build a page that describes exactly why your company is the one to take care of “gutter cleaning in Brattleboro, VT”. Then build one for Wilmington, and so on. But be careful not to duplicate content, or make the pages too similar, as that will really hurt your ranking. And be careful that all of those pages don’t clutter your website’s homepage. That’s just tacky. Use carefully placed internal links, and a site-map, instead.
Start a google places page and optimize that. Places results often appear before any “organic” results.
And youtube is owned by google. Consider making some engaging videos with well chosen keywords. Embed them in your site- google likes to see that, too.
read the very latest articles you can find on SEO, and apply what you learn. Update your site regularly. Before you know it, you’ll dominate the search results for your area.
This is dead on, sadly it comes with a ton of $ spent or tons of hours in front of the keyboard. I stuck a few hundred hours into my website this past winter and probably have 100 or so individual pages currently, heck I just got done going back to one of my “this town” window cleaning pages and added a ton of new content, took me about an hour. If you do the hard work the search engines will reward you with thousands of $ in leads each year, my first year and I would guess it is around $15,000-20,000 in leads in the first 2.5 months of the year.
Another thing to remember is you can’t just do all the hard work and sit back and expect to stay at the top of search results. I had another business in another industry that was flat out the #1 ranking site for 25 searches related to that industry for 4-5 years that I owned it, every search was on the first page and most were #1 or #2. I sold that site 16 months ago to a friend and still do the updates. Well after the initial blast of updates converting the site over to him I didn’t touch it except for 2-3 quick updates last year. Today I did an annual check on search results as I do for all my pages to make sure they are not slipping and that site has dropped from an average ranking of 3.2 for those 25 searches to 13.8 in the past 16 months, only 5 of the 25 searches are still on page #1. Now this is a highly competitive nationwide industry much more so than we compete for window cleaning, but it proves a very good point that you MUST continue to add good rich content on your website or else you will be discounted by the engines and start to slip. Now my buddy got an email that he will not like when he reads since I recently got his other site up to #1 or #2 in those same 25 searches in the past year…he IMHO will need to spend 20-40 hours per year updating and adding content to those sites to get the ranking back for the one site that slipped and to maintain the present top ranking site. He is lucky since I only charge $20/hour for content writing so worse case it will cost him $800/year to keep two sites performing very high.
No matter what websites are a great way to advertise your business and can bring in tens of thousands in leads per year, but there is a cost tied to it and it is either your time or your $ and it is a bad decision to do neither…remember either you are on the 1st page of google or you ain’t going to have anyone find your site when they search.
