FREE SEO? Shall I go ahead?

[varna s]

Hey people!
Need your suggestion! I want to start a new website and I want to select an SEO company before I launch my site as one of friends has her own website and she told me that to get the best results its better to optimize the website before submitting it to any search engine (that jus bounced over my head). Now she is getting the SEO for her website from a company called Vedikas (Indian SEO Company). Initially they gave a FREE SEO pre-optimization report (15 pages pdf file) for FREE and my friend was very happy with the quality of the work. She made all the changes which Vedikas suggested her. Now, after 2 months, on an average her website is getting 1300 unique visitors daily. 9000 - 21000 hits per day. They are charging $425 / month for small business website. IS IT WORTH IT? I guess its worth the money as my friend is very happy with the company! Still, thought of asking you guys!

PLEASE HELP!!
Hey sorry people! I forgot to mention the SEO company's website URL. its http://www.vedikas.com
About the HITS! The SEO company didnt promise any HITS! Its we who checked the website statistics ad found the HITS details.
Yea around 1300 - 1500 unique visitors daily. Is it a good number?

[Oldmansea]

I'm not that smart, but I would say if you have the extra money why not.

[Rick]

I've been running my own websites for about 3 years now. I can't count how many hours I spent studying SEO. In all honesty, I would never recommend paying for it, because I know anyone can do it themselves. It's not that difficult to understand. One misconception is submitting to search engines - it simply isn't necessary. Head over to digital point forums. There are 100s of professional webmasters who are willing to help you with any aspect of running a website. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

[imisidro]

Is it worth it?

IF AND ONLY IF you can recoup that investment every month and earn more han $425/month from your traffic. Otherwise, it could be a huge drain on your pocket

One other thing to remember is that some of these SEO companies will promise to bring you traffic -- at the expense of your site. They use what is called "black hat SEO strategies" that search engines hate -- and if caught your site can be blacklisted. That means your site will not be indexed by the search engines at all as punishment for using these black hat strategies. Examples include doorway pages, keyword stuffing, etc.

And hits are meaningless -- if an SEO company talks about "hits" please run away. They are newbies like you. You are better off going to webmaster forums and search engine forums and learning about SEO yourself.

I checked the website you offered -- and they have ZERO Pagerank. It means they are very new -- and unproven -- or that they don't know SEO if they can't even make their own website get a good pagerank. As such, $425/month is WAY TOO EXPENSIVE for their services.

I suggest you visit the following websites

WebmasterWorld.com http://googlepress.blogspot.com/
Matt Cutts Blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ (Matt is a Google software engineer)
Digitalpoint Yahoo Forums http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=6
SearchEngineWatch's MSN Forums http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/foru...ay.php?f=8


EDIT:
Again hits are MEANINGLESS. Nobody talks of hits. It is irrelevant. A site that has 100 images on a page can have 505 hits (500 images + 5 html page) with 5 visitors while a site with 100 visitors and only an HTML page with no graphics can have 100 visits amnd only 100 hits. Talk about visits, pageviews and unique visitors

[Jay Hamilton-Roth]

Ignore the traffic. How much money is she making from the site? If she's not recouping the $425, then she's losing money.

What I suggest to my clients is before focusing on the SEO, focus on the content of your site itself. Who is your target market? What problem of theirs do you solve? How do you solve it? You don't just want traffic - you want people who desperately want what you're selling. You need a strategic marketing plan. Once that's in place, you can improve your site with SEO because you're be increasing the right type of traffic.

[tinny]

waste of money - it doesn't sound free if they charge you USD425 a month