SEO Services - Good or Bad?

Question

What is everyone's opinion of SEO companies and is there a true honest service that can help?

Is it a waste of money and time?

Are they really able to influence your ranking in a search?

Answer 1

Yes, they are worth it, however, it really depends on the company. Go with a personal recommendation of a company that can prove results.

In reality, everything an SEO company can do, you can too. But then again, most web developers barely know how to build sites that are cross browser compliant...

Answer 2

The ones who do in fact make web sites suck less, and apply some common sense to the problem, will make improvements in the search ranking if the site is badly done to start with. Things like meta data, semantical document structure, descriptive urls, and whole heap of other factors can affect your rankings significantly.

The ones who want to subscribe you to massive link farms, cloaked gateway pages, and other black hat type techniques are not worth it, and can hurt your rankings in the end.
Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, is probably is. There are some good ones, and also a lot selling snake oil.

Answer 3

It depends a lot on your company, too, not just the SEO company:

• If you are selling a prepackaged product (physical or virtual), then good SEO may be important.
• If you offer a very specialized service, then good SEO is likely to be important.
• If you're one of the millions of freelance software developers in the world, or any other type of similarly large and largely undifferentiated service offering, then it's really not going to matter because, in a field that large, you won't be getting business from search results regardless or whether you burn money on SEO or not.

Answer 4

Half of SEO is really just effective design. Use semantic layout, keep your terminology consistent (develop "keywords" for customers/viewers to latch onto), keep the overall structure simple and easy to navigate. Any SEO company that pushes that will do good things for your site. This is also a good learning experience for any web developer to go through.

The other half of SEO is the dark side... link farms or other devices that fool search engines. When you're gaming a search engine without improving the average user's experience, you know it's time to pull the plug on the SEO hat-tricks.

Answer 5

SEO that optimize webpage is fine but in fact more and more professional webpage already use these good practice because in 2008 programmer are more concerned about it when they develop web page (something that wasn't true 5 years+ ago). So for this point, it's pretty useless if you have a good team of front end programmer.

SEO that try to promise you to have more visibility on search engine are a real joke. They have trick every new months that work for few times than they got by passed by someone else trick, etc. I think it's a waste of money and if you have a real worth website that your website will be at the top. Instead of wasting money to trick the game, what about having a website that truly liked and will be naturally be on the top.

Answer 6

If you will hire any white hat SEO Services you will be in benefit otherwise your site may get harm.