Paying for search engine placement

[Navy_Mom]

Are search engine placements such as addme.com worth the money? I have my site listed at most search engines and even with my site getting an average of 470,000 plus hits a month my site still not listed very high on search engines. I don’t have much money to spend on advertising and trying to do my homework before sending money.

Thank you for your time
Kimberly

P.S. Yes, I read all the articles on meta tags etc but finding two article that say the same thing is nearly impossible. I feel like no matter what I do another article comes along saying I am wrong.

[JohnScott]

On all major issues, the SEO community is agreed on what is effective in promoting your site.

470,000 plus hits a month

A "hit" is a file request. Hits have absolutely nothing to do with traffic.

If you're going to be a full time webmaster or website administrator, I'd recommend learning proper SEO and marketing. You could pay somebody (I usually charge $1000 to $3000) but you wouldn't get the education. Here are a couple tips:

Let's discuss page titles. Do you know how important page titles are? Very important. You know those meta tags you may have spent so much time researching? Well the search engines don't really care about those. The search engines put more weight on the page titles. A few basic principles when creating page titles:

1. Keywords In Page Titles Should Appear On The Page.
Choose your keywords. Make sure that the same keywords you put in your page titles appear on the page. This should be common sense.

2. Keywords In Moderation.
I once hired an SEO professional. For $3,000 he conjured up abusive page titles and promptly got us banned from a major search engine. Would you like to see an example of his work? Well, I'll show you anyway:
www.mass-storage-device.com Note the PageRank of ZERO.
Page Titles:
mass storage device,network attached storage,raid 0,ait tape,backup software,backup tape,data storage,disk array,dlt tape,dlt tape drive,drive enclosure,failover,fiber channel,fibre channel,fibre channel adapter,fibre channel controller, mass storage device,hard drive enclosure,high availability,jbod,kingston memory,legato networker,boost systems

Well now, how dumb do we think the search engines are? Did he honestly think he could put that many keywords in the page titles and not trip a spam filter? Do not load your page titles like this. It is spam. You know it; I know it; and the search engines know it. That's a very expensive PR0.

3. Include A Hook
Look at these page titles:
mass storage device,network attached storage,raid 0,ait tape,backup software,backup tape,data storage,disk array,dlt tape,dlt tape drive,drive enclosure,failover,fiber channel,fibre channel,fibre channel adapter,fibre channel controller, mass storage device,hard drive enclosure,high availability,jbod,kingston memory,legato networker,boost systems

Even if these page titles did get you in the SERPs, it would not appeal to the consumer. It's a mass of keywords; not a description, not a call to action. These page titles contain no hook, something to set it apart from the rest.
Some common, appealing hooks are "discount", "30% Off" (Or 40% or 50% or whatever). Even if it's not a merchant site, there are ways to appeal to the consumer.
Concrete-Home.com serves a very small ICF industry. To appeal to the ICF professional and make it clear to the ICF professional that this site is not just another ICF home page, we chose the page title "Concrete Home - The Ultimate ICF Directory". This serves the purpose of including the two key phrases we want, "concrete home" & "ICF", and the hook word "ultimate". A hook is anything that sets your site apart from the rest in the SERPs.

In summary:
1. Keywords In Page Titles Should Appear On The Page.
2. Keywords In Moderation.
3. Include A Hook


And:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) starts before you start designing the site. Many sites are doomed to failure from the start just by bad design, i.e. search engine un-friendly design. One of our sites is Just-Contractors.com. It's a quite simple layout, without a lot of graphic enhancement. I came across a really nice contractor directory that had superb graphics. But none of the buttons were text; all nav buttons were animated gif images. Worse yet, all the content was either flash of animated gif. SE's need to see text content to know what the site is all about. The client paid $20,000 for web design in that case; he gave it a go, suffered from no-visitors syndrome, and gave it up.
Whenever you're designing a website, be sure Google can cache the content. Google can cache a lot; but they don't like too much dynamic content or frames. Speaking of dynamic content, this phpBB is considered dynamic. It does not change; but it is set up using MySQL, so the script, working with the database managed by MySQL, is putting the pages together in response to your clicking on a link. The opposite of dynamic content is static content. A static page never changes. A static document is simply any web page that is saved to disk and passed back to a requesting browser without changes.
The problem with dynamic content is that it is generated as the result of a user request. One dynamic page on Concrete-Home.com would be:
http://www.just-contractors.com/search.php?searchby=City/State&city=Seattle&state=WA&criteria=Seattle
Now, Google would never find or cache this page on it's own because to genetate this page I had to type "Seattle" in the City or Zipcode field, and choose WA in the State field, choose "Search By City/State", and then click on "Find". It is my user imput that generated that page.
But Google does have a cache of:
http://www.just-contractors.com/search.php?searchby=State&state=WA
Why? Because at one time a web page somewhere contained that precise link (it was in the ODP, in a regional cat)
Why is it important that Google is able to cache your web pages? Because each page should have a different focus, and this allows you to target more keywords and add traffic.
An example:
Search for "Siding Contractors" on Google and the URL http://www.just-contractors.com/search.php?searchby=Category&cat=19 is the #2 listing. With this URL we targeted " siding contractors " and the singular form, " siding contractor ".
Each page of your site should target a specific set of keywords, whether it's dynamic or static. You can help SE's cache the different pages by providing static links to the dynamic pages somewhere on your site.

So, in summary, in designing your site:
1. Use text over gif images for your buttons.
2. Use as much text as possible for your content, over flash or image-embedded text that the SE's cannot read.
3. Provide static links to dynamically generated pages.

[Navy_Mom]

Thanks for the reply. I should have said views or what ever the new term is now. Back when I started doing web page hits meant the number of people who came to your site. I keep forgetting someone changed all that.

Kimberly

[Christian_SEO]

Good reply to the original question, but I noticed one thing that was missing... and that is doing scored keyword research before anything else.

Scored keyword research is where you find out what people are really using to search with and then optimise your site with those keyword phrases.

The way you do this research is either with a paid service called WordTracker.com or a free program from www.GoodKeywords.com. Most professional SEOs use WordTracker, but our company uses Good Keywords and we get very good results.

Once you research the keywords, you can then edit the copy of the site to include them. Not too many, but enough to be optimized without hurting the way the site reads.

Then you should also edit your page title and description keeping in mind that the keyword phrases will show you listing to a searcher, but what the title and description SAY will get them to click and visit your site!

Despite what some people have said on these forums, there are still search engines that use the keywords and description tags, but not all. It may not help much, but it will not hurt to include them.

Thanks,
Christian

[creative666]

In a search engine conferenece in Boston, all search engine reps said that their spiders do not read the meta-keyword tag due to spammers in the past. The only rep who said they do read and give weight to it was Inktomi.

Conference info (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1991.htm?highlight=ses+boston)

Thread relating to meta-keywords nto being used (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/9976.htm)

[Christian_SEO]

I think that is true up to a point. There has been abuse, and so it's intheir interest to tell everyone they don't use it anymore, but they have to be somewhat secretive or mis-leading about what works and what doesn't, otherwise everyone will abuse what they can.

We still use the meta keywords on every project and here is why. Even if many of the larger systems do not use it, there are still many smaller systems that do. We submit to over a hundred search engines and directories for every project.

While many of these small systems bring little or no traffic, they never will if they don't have good content.

By taking the time to submit to them, we help them to have better content and therefore more to offer any visitors they may get.

I can still remember when the most powerful search engine out there was AltaVista and it was years before Google came into existance. Google was this cute little search engine out of California that some college students had put together... odd, but cute, and seemed like it had potential...

So we still use the keywords tag and will as long as it is still used by places we submit to. But we certainly do not spend huge amounts of time on putting it together.

Thanks,
Christian

[leoo24]

lol, how long could you spend on churning out 20 or so keywords :P

[Christian_SEO]

Hey Leoo,

Well, we use phrases and not really just keywords. We have a large list to work with after we do the keyword reseach, so we spend about 30 minutes I'd say to select just the ones for the meta keyword tag.

We spend between 2-4 hours on keyword research for every project we do. When we are done we have a spreadsheet with about 400-800 scored keyword phrases with which to optimize the site.

From this list, we pick a good cross-section of phrases to use in the keyword tag. Most sources agree that you should not use more than 1,000 characters for the keywords tag, so we shoot for 800-900 characters total. We use commas to seperate phrases, so we have to leave for for those, or at least we do.

The list gets used in the optimization as much as possible, so optimizing a 10 page site including the research can take 6-8 hours easy.

[leoo24]

lol, i said how long would it take to throw in 20 or so keywords referring to the keywords meta tag, not the keyword research, that's is a forgone conclusion that you will be doing that for your entire site anyway!

[Christian_SEO]

Sorry, I misunderstood your question...