Enterprise Nation

Hi again Ernest,

The companies I get involved with are as follows:

Net Secrets

Contacts:   Richard, Sandy or Tony Burt

Telephone:   01386 792972

Web:   http://www.netsecrets.co.uk/

CMS Web Solutions

Contact:   Liam Twose

Telephone:   02032 393520

Web:   http://www.cmswebdesignsolutions.co.uk/

Gloucestershire Design

Contact: Peter Haken

Telephone: 0845 508 1869

Web: http://www.gloucestershire-design.co.uk/

All of these guys should be able to help you, and it's always worth having a word with one or two, to get an idea of options, prices, etc.

Regards,

Alan

Ouch!

That's surprising, as the third one (Peter Haken) recently quoted me £750 to completely re design my web site, and SEO it.

I'll have a word tomorrow, see if we can't get something sorted at the right price.

Alan

Hi Ernest,

Net Secrets have been doing this a long time. They were one of the first SEO specialists around, but they are bigger, and, by the looks of it, a lot more expensive than some.

Liam has also just emailed me to say thankyou for the intro, and that he is about to reply to your email, so fingers crossed.

Between them, you should be able to find a match that fits, but, if not, I'll keep trying.

Alan

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the mail, hitherto there hasnt been any luck with the SEO companies.

Finally,i look forward to your assistance as i will want to optimise my website.

Hi there Ernest, I had a quick look at your site. What did you build it in please, and is it possible to have direct access to the code? If it was built in some kind of shopping cart system then they can be difficult to work with. You might be being quoted for a redesign of the site in another cart and not realise it, that could be why it's more than you were expecting. Normally though a shopping cart or CMS will advertise themselves in the meta tags and there's no sign of that. I see you're using Hit Tail and that's really good but you'll need a stream of visitors to give it information to work with.
I do agree with you the site could use optimisation!

BB

My first foray into the forums....

There is a lot you can do with yout site to optimise it. Google has a wealth of tips and advice on how it crawls sites, if you have the time and access to your 'back end' you can make a number of changes that may well help you get better listings. I'm no expert, but here are what I believe 5 top tips for SEO:

- Follow the relevancy down through the page, Google likes it all to be relevant. Use your keywords a few more times in the description of your product.

- Content is King - get as much content as you can up on your site. Do buying guides, info pages, what to look for in etc. Scatter key words into this and use internal links from those keywords back to your products.

- Develop a link building strategy - use hyper text back links for example ...to choose a Down Sleeping Bag you first need to consider...[/i] if you click on the words Down Sleeping Bag this will take you to that page of my website. Getting these links will help Google find your site easier and also Google will relate the words in the hyper text back link to your website. A good example of this is Miserable Failure, when you searched on this no Google it would go to George Bush's biog Whitehouse page. This has since been removed, can't think why, but there are plenty of articles about it. Linking can be done through blogs, social sites, forums article sites and other peoples websites. If you can get a link one way from another site (i.e. you don't have to link to them) and they have a page rank better than you (get this from the Google tool bar)then Google will put a lot of weight on this link and hopefully boost you up their listings. Avoid things links farms!

SEO is a very interesting subject with many forums dedicated to it and many people who are experts in it. I hope you manage to find someone you can work with and will be able to develop your site for you. I trust the above is useful to you, SEO changes all the time in order for the search engines to give the best results to users, but from what I gather the points above are some of the most important.



Cheers



Gareth
www.walkandtravel.com