[OT?] Web Ranking Services

I'm not sure if this is offtopic for this newsgroup so, if it isn't, I beg
your pardon. If you can suggest a better place to ask, I'd love to hear it.

--

I am currently developing a site for a client and he's been told that there
are services that will ensure your website will rank very on Google if you
pay their fee. I know these services have existed for quite a while but I'm
rather leery of them. I'm very curious to hear of other people's experiences
with them.

First, I'm curious to know if the services you've used actually guaranteed
the results and, if so, what form that guarantee took? For example, did they
guarantee you'd rank in the top 10 in Google or your money back? Or just
that you'd rank somewhere in the first 1000 hits?

Second, did the service deliver the results that they said they would? If
not, did they honour the guarantee or weasel out of it with fine print in
the contract?

Third, do you have any idea how they do what they do? I'm not interested in
going into competition with them. I just don't want my client to pay money
to do something very simple that I could do for him, like creating META
tags. If these services do something more than that, fine, but if it is just
META tags, which I would have done anyway, I wouldn't want my customer to
have to pay these people extra for that.

Lastly, can anyone recommend specific companies that they've worked with on
increasing web rankings that they have been very happy with? I feel sure
there are many such companies and that some are useless and some are great.
I want to stay away from the useless ones and would prefer one that is at
least competent, preferably excellent.

In case it makes a difference, my customer is a local medical provider and
wants to make sure that his site ranks very high when local people search
for providers of his service in our city.
--

Rhino

In article <ft2jer$7b5$1 (AT) news (DOT) datemas.de>,
"rhino" <No.offline.contact.please (AT) anonymous (DOT) com> wrote:

I am currently developing a site for a client and he's been told that there
are services that will ensure your website will rank very on Google if you
pay their fee. I know these services have existed for quite a while but I'm
rather leery of them. I'm very curious to hear of other people's experiences
with them.

Why not just follow the standard Google guidelines for webmasters,
starting http://www.google.com/sitemap.html. They are essentially a
guide to search engine optimisation. Plus they have the advantage that
they actually work really well if you do follow them.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

rhino schreef:

I'm not sure if this is offtopic for this newsgroup so, if it isn't, I beg
your pardon. If you can suggest a better place to ask, I'd love to hear it.

--

I am currently developing a site for a client and he's been told that there
are services that will ensure your website will rank very on Google if you
pay their fee. I know these services have existed for quite a while but I'm
rather leery of them. I'm very curious to hear of other people's experiences
with them.

First, I'm curious to know if the services you've used actually guaranteed
the results and, if so, what form that guarantee took? For example, did they
guarantee you'd rank in the top 10 in Google or your money back? Or just
that you'd rank somewhere in the first 1000 hits?

Second, did the service deliver the results that they said they would? If
not, did they honour the guarantee or weasel out of it with fine print in
the contract?

Third, do you have any idea how they do what they do? I'm not interested in
going into competition with them. I just don't want my client to pay money
to do something very simple that I could do for him, like creating META
tags. If these services do something more than that, fine, but if it is just
META tags, which I would have done anyway, I wouldn't want my customer to
have to pay these people extra for that.

Lastly, can anyone recommend specific companies that they've worked with on
increasing web rankings that they have been very happy with? I feel sure
there are many such companies and that some are useless and some are great.
I want to stay away from the useless ones and would prefer one that is at
least competent, preferably excellent.

In case it makes a difference, my customer is a local medical provider and
wants to make sure that his site ranks very high when local people search
for providers of his service in our city.

I am doing SEO from time to time and I never guarantee ranking results.
Depending on the queries you want to optimize for I can give some
expectations. Especially for words that are used often it is very hard
to rank high with a relatively new site. A good search engine process
covers much more than meta tags. Meta tags are actually not too
important to our biggest SE Google. Some things that can be important:

- incoming links of related highly ranked sites
- accessible content containing a good amount of keywords/keyword phrases.
- user sitemap, (auto updated) google sitemaps.
- easy accessible urls for your visitors and a good internal link structure.

Especially the incoming links (as long as they're not from very bad
sites) can really boost your position in Google results.

--
http://www.archytas.eu/