Seo Advice Needed

[pj123]

We are a small Thai manufacturing company and want to improve our dismal website rankings. I have been looking at using Odesk.com to find an SEO contractor. I have been advised that, as we have 12 keywords, we would need someone to work fulltime for 6 months to get a good google ranking. And we would need 40 hours a month to keep it there. Is this right? All our customers are in Thailand so we do not need International search ranking. At the moment the site is English but we may add a Thai version later this year. Just one last word. I have been reading up about the Google Panda upgrade which has made many of the old SEO tricks redundant. I am careful to deal with contractors who understand this. Thanks.

[Darrel]

" I have been advised that, as we have 12 keywords, we would need someone to work fulltime for 6 months to get a good google ranking. And we would need 40 hours a month to keep it there. Is this right?"

What's the betting that someone selling SEO told you that?

What they meant was they will keep you dangling on a string for 6 months, during which time they will do about 2 hours work and spend the rest of the time in a local bar, drinking at your expense. Then afterwards they will charge you for 40 hours work per month, but will actually do about 10 minutes.

[dave111223]

It depends what they mean by "full time".

If they mean: you contract a company to boost your SEO ranks over a 6 month period...OK seems reasonable...

But if they mean: you literally hire someone to work on this 8 hours a day for 6 months...that's crazy IMHO. I would imagine that after a few weeks they'd spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs...

Also the 40 hours a month seem well over the top. Once all the initial SEO work of getting your site properly formatted, doing lots of directory submissions and link exchanging is done most of the "upkeep" work is just checking on backlinks and occasionally adding a few new links; a few hours a week is plenty for that kind of thing.

Edited October 3, 2011 by dave111223

[Crushdepth]

We are a small Thai manufacturing company and want to improve our dismal website rankings. I have been looking at using Odesk.com to find an SEO contractor. I have been advised that, as we have 12 keywords, we would need someone to work fulltime for 6 months to get a good google ranking. And we would need 40 hours a month to keep it there. Is this right?

This is a load of crap, avoid. Unfortunately, a large percentage (most) SEO consultants are snake oil salesmen. This is not rocket science, so:

* Avoid anyone who cannot clearly explain what they will do and why it works (there is no 'secret sauce').

* Avoid anyone who claims they can put you on the first page of the search results, it depends a lot on what business you are competing in and how crowded that space is.

* Avoid anyone who claims to have secret inside knowledge of how Google works, because they are lying to you.

* Avoid like the plague anyone offering a 'backlink builder' programme that involves hiring people in third-world countries to post link spam in public forums.

It's also best to approach a reputable, established firm you select yourself. Avoid any SEO consultant that cold-calls you because that's like going on a free shopping tour in a tuk-tuk.

[dave111223]

* Avoid like the plague anyone offering a 'backlink builder' programme that involves hiring people in third-world countries to post link spam in public forums.

A lot of SEO is about submitting to directories, link exchanges, building links with other sites.

This work is very tedious; why pay someone in the West $30 an hour to do it when you can pay $4 to a guy in India?

Obviously you don't want to pay people just to spam on forums, but don't write off using cheap labor to do tasks like directory submissions.

[nickmanchester2]

Panda update is to do with sites with duplicate content - or what Google deem to be low quality sites - is causing a LOT of problems in the SEO world -jing jing.

1) Make sure your site has unique content - check on copyscape.com

2) On page optimisation next - title tags should contain your keywords - 100 characters max in title tag, ALT tags on graphics should contain keywords you want to rank for, H1 text, keywords in content - make sure each page is optimised correctly - this is fairly simple work and should not take so long.

3) Wait to see what effect these changes have (maybe a couple of weeks for Google to cache the site or less), if not enough for page 1 of Google, then you need to start a link building campaign.

If you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords (2 or 3 million results on Google) then could be costly - the cost of the SEO is going to relate to the competitiveness of the keywords.

Yes SEO companies are mostly bad -

1) please make sure the SEO company you hire shows up in Google rankings for an SEO type term

2) check on Google for said SEO company review

3) ask for references from existing clients

4) ask how long they have been in business

[Alfahane]

I agree to most of the above. Unfortunatelly i dont think any of the anwsers will help you. I'm not saying the anwsers are wrong, rather that they dont help the difficult situation.

It seems that you have, as mentioned, already starting to believe some of the b*llshit that have been told to you by a SEO:er. If you are serious about SEO and dont want to be constantly hanging on a string and/or risking to paying a fortune then learn some SEO by yourself. I'm not saying you have to do al the SEO yourself but learn some of it so you understand the basic dynamics.

This way it will be easier for you to recognize bad SEO:ers. Unfortunatelly you can never be 100% sure. The suggestions above regarding a SEO:er to be able to tell you exactly what they suggest doing is in my opinion the best suggestion. But again, if you dont understand the anwsers they might be giving you then you are still in trouble.

Personally I was more or less fooled by a SEO company in the very beginning of 2000. I got curious, learnt and became one of the better SEO:ers in my country. Having experience successes and failures and seen them happen to others my suggestion regarding choosing a SEO company is to choose someone that have been a long time in the business. Also google "[enter seo company name here] black hat", "... sucks", "... rip off" etc. Then you know a little bit about what trouble they have been in before.

Additionally, usually SEO:ers are reluctant from recommending any other company because it's simply so darn hard for us to know.

Still, the best thing you can do is learn about SEO. It's just like buying a second hand car. If you dont know much about cars a seamingly great deal can turn out to be a lemon.

Finally, work time spent have probably little to do with the results. Described simplisticly, if somebody have access to high pagerank sites and can link to your site from them, then it can really be a matter of just a few hours.

Good luck!

[pj123]

Thanks for all the replies. They all have something useful to say. I don't know of any of you are familiar with Odesk but the contractors are rated for each job they do by their employers so you can see whether someone has a good track record. The best reply I have received so far is this from an SEO contractor with a 5 star rating:

"I would be willing to be your seo specialist as I've extensive knowledge on performing such task.Actually, if your site is so new we need to submit it to local directories first and then to world directories. In order to create some noise we should make some bookmarkings to ensure that people can actually have a look at what you are offering, after that we can create some forum accounts and ensure our active participation to create link juices because they still count these days. Blog commenting is also one way to get a good inlinks online most especially if they are related to our niche. When we are established on this maybe we can started to create articles and submit them with some anchor text, (Note: I can write articles but I'm not a writer so if you want it to be an impeccable one and interesting in your taste then hire a very reputable writer, but if for seo purposes to just enhance rankings I can manage that).

....10 hours a week is fine with me as I do not provide tons of links with no value. I maybe listed in our spreadsheet little links compare to others but the quality of mine is outstanding rather than others who would provide you thousands of it in a week but most of them are trash ones. One thing more, I do my research before I put links to those sites as I know that websites have their own needs so better if we link to related and somewhat related. "

[Darrel]

"....10 hours a week is fine with me"

I'm sure it is.

He will probably be selling the same 10 hours to 100 other mugs people.

[Alfahane]

He will probably be selling the same 10 hours to 100 other mugs people.

Unfortunatelly I agree here. Usually the highest rated consultant / companies on oDesk, Elancer etc are more expensive and you dont really get a guarantee if they are good. One more time: High rating not guarantee to be good. I have bought services several times on oDesk etc and I can tell you it's always a gamble. Those that were in fact good I keep close. The problem is as mentioned that you dont know what you get. One time I hired an "expert" which turned out not to even be familiar with the programming language.

Actually I have one tip. This is a service I use myself and I am really, really not promoting myself. I am from Sweden living in Phuket, the following company is in India:

softsolutionsindia .net

I've inserted spaces in the adress so it's not a link. Add www before also.

I use

softsolutionsindia.net /directory_submission/

Th service I recommend is the most expensive one:

"Slow And Delayed Directory Submission", 12 months.

What they do is to submit to 4000 directories spread over 12 months. I reacently I got a fresh report from them with all the submissions they've made for me. They are very transparent, listing all the submissions.

Here's a good example of why knowing SEO is good even if you order. A somewhat steady growth of links in much better than getting huge amount of links in just a couple of weeks or months. This service is good because it's a "set it, forget it". THe company will submit your site to these directories but they cannot guarantee that your site will be accepted. I usually expect 5-15% directories to accept. But it you have a nice site (I have an educational one where everything is for free and with loads of links from Wikipedia) then you can expect much more. But this is just a start, a good start. But as soon as you have ordered this, or other directory submission you should look for other ways to get links. My favourite is ... =) ... to ask links from relevant sites offering maybe some products in return. Sounds crazy? Well, it's effective. But once again, depends on what kind of site.

[kmj]

(Keywords x Time) / Budget = Rating

[kmj]

duplicate

Edited October 4, 2011 by kmj

[Alfahane]

(Keywords x Time) / Budget = Rating

I humblely dont agree. Please explain more.

Why? Because links from high PR / relevant sites makes all the difference.

Also, focusing on a limited amount of keywords is very retrogressive. Why not long tail?

[Crushdepth]

"....10 hours a week is fine with me"

I'm sure it is.

He will probably be selling the same 10 hours to 100 other mugs people.

Yep and the actual work will be outsourced to untrained third world amateurs hoping to make a couple of bucks per day by posting crap everywhere.

Honestly OP do not pay these slimebags. Check the quote below - this guy is recommending link spamming forus. If you want to piss off your potential customers and destroy the reputation of your business, go right ahead.

Have you considered paying for conventional advertising space on high profile sites relevant to your business instead? A much better use of your money IMHO.

after that we can create some forum accounts and ensure our active participation to create link juices because they still count these days. Blog commenting is also one way to get a good inlinks online most especially if they are related to our niche. When we are established on this maybe we can started to create articles and submit them with some anchor text, (Note: I can write articles but I'm not a writer so if you want it to be an impeccable one and interesting in your taste then hire a very reputable writer, but if for seo purposes to just enhance rankings I can manage that).

Edited October 4, 2011 by Crushdepth

[AyG]

I don't know who your customers are, but do wonder whether you're getting your business priorities right.

"small Thai manufacturing company"

"All our customers are in Thailand"

"the site is English"

For what proportion of your potential customers is English their native tongue?

And if you optimise for 12 keywords, will those words be in English or Thai?

Just a suggestion, but why don't you post the website address so that people can have a quick look and see if there's anything obvious that's causing the current low ranking. (For example, there are plenty of sites out there build in Flash which can't be indexed, and so are virtually invisible to the search engines. Use of Javascript for links is also a common problem.)

[kmj]

(Keywords x Time) / Budget = Rating

I humblely dont agree. Please explain more.

Why? Because links from high PR / relevant sites makes all the difference.

Also, focusing on a limited amount of keywords is very retrogressive. Why not long tail?

Simple your keywords X the amount of time&effort you want to spend to promote them yourself

divided by how much money you want to spend on SEO whether you employe an SEO team

so if you have unlimited budget just do adwords and guarantee number 1 position

This is not my equation, but the baseline one given by Matt Cutts of Google at SMX ( Search Marketing Expo ) last year.

Edited October 4, 2011 by kmj

[Tatsujin]

Without looking into the site/company in more detail it's hard to know exactly what to suggest, but one thing is always true when it comes to SEO:

CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT

By this I mean, unique, relevant, keyword-rich, natural content (without overdoing keywords).

You might also focus on the long tail keywords rather than keywords that are too competitive. This is often the easiest way to get great results. As an example . . . don't focus on the single keyword "visa", focus on "visa in bangkok", "visa in thailand" etc etc etc.

Have fun!

[dave111223]

Also try running your site through the W3C validator:

http://validator.w3.org/

Although making your site W3C compliant is not the be all and end all (there are plenty of good sites that have some W3C errors), it think it's useful as it may point some simple mistakes (missing alt tags, invalid tags etc..)

[klikster]

I mostly agree with what has been said here, and would add;

NEVER contract with a freelancer who has a "Team". Someone else above touched on it >> subcontracted.

Someone else mentioned Keywords vs "long tail phrases". Long tail phrases are easier to rank for than single keywords. Some experts say that is where the money is.

Your money might be better spent by getting good unique and original content written.

Also suggest you spend a lot of quality time on webmasterworld . com

[klikster]

so if you have unlimited budget just do adwords and guarantee number 1 position

Somehow, I doubt that.

[Tatsujin]

so if you have unlimited budget just do adwords and guarantee number 1 position

Somehow, I doubt that.

Adwords has nothing to do with your 'organic' search engine results. Completely separate.

[Alfahane]

Someone else mentioned Keywords vs "long tail phrases". Long tail phrases are easier to rank for than single keywords. Some experts say that is where the money is.

... For me that's absolutelly where the money is. However, you need a lot of content, good content.

[bkkjames]

Glad to see the word content being used as a priority in the world of the quick and the cheap.

People want good content not recycled garbage and are becoming more savy in terms of their searching-more specific.

Stats are wonderful things-especially great a looking at past behaviour.

Example, a crash of an airline will result in XXX increase in traffic/ searches which looks good when only looking at stats-what they don't tell you however is future behaviour.

In the end it's a balance but if it were me, err on the side of producing interesting content over mass replication of crap reposted on 1000 different places.

If I see 'best hotel bangkok' all over the place and the fact remains its a shithole with a budget for seo, people will not stay there regardless.

On our fb page for example, we don't run any vote for me type bs competitions begging people to like us as we are aiming for people who actually want our updates, and not to be hidden from view the minute the competition is over.

[MarleyMarl]

With my registered Thai company we do many things web & IT related, with one of our sites is we do SEO Thailand (see what i did there). We're also a Google AdWords certified partner company. We only take one client per industry and we have clients from the most competitive industries here (cosmetic surgery & hotel bangkok). Here is my advice.

The way Google's algorithm works is quite logical, but it is smart and is always being updated. Site A has better, more relevant content than Site B, Site A also has more relevant incoming links for said content than Site B, hence Site A ranks higher than Site B.

Be wary of any online SEO companies from India as the often build poor quality incoming links and use somewhat blackhat SEO (for more information i could link you to a blog post, pm me). Also without the proper knowledge, hiring someone local to scale the web to build links back without any database to work from and no one with experience monitoring the work, it will not bring the right authority back into your website. Some of the advice mentioned above is quite good, have unique content that is well written and helpful to the reader makes a big difference.

From my research of the work from local Thai SEO companies they usually do a two things,

• 1. No SEO at all and just pay-per-click advertising. This has happened many times when i've gone to a meeting and the company said they had been doing SEO for a year but there is no evidence of any links being build back.
• 2. Build authority back to your website by getting links to your website from their database of sites (they usually own) and then when the contract ends and you do not continue, they will remove all the links from their database of sites. One of my clients, their Thai site has 1000's of links from all these .info websites, which are just default wordpress blogs setup by this Thai SEO company, which is really useless since these 1000 websites have no authority themselves.

Ask your potential SEO companies or freelancers for a keyword report for the phrase and exact match, this will let you know how many searches per month those keywords are getting. For english keywords in Thailand, in most industries it is not too hard to get them ranking high as english is not the native language here and local SEO is pathetic. Find out what they're going to be doing and ask for detailed work reports.

[phuketrichard]

I am an affiliate manager and have been for over 12 years and have done seo work;

place a bid on Elance

and also spend sometime here

My link

Search

Search

I would say u need someone to;

set up a reciprocal linking program,

optimize for ur keywords.

check and edit/rewrite all meta tags/descriptions and such for EACH page on ur site

once that is all done 10 hours/month

and hire a Thai to do forums/blog submissions and

good luck

Only thing that is 100% guaranteed for good rank which takes time is CONTENT

Edited October 9, 2011 by phuketrichard

[klikster]

The way Google's algorithm works is quite logical, but it is smart and is always being updated. Site A has better, more relevant content than Site B, Site A also has more relevant incoming links for said content than Site B, hence Site A ranks higher than Site B.

Pardon if I have misunderstood, but --

If you are claiming to know how Google's algorithm works --

[phuketrichard]

Send me $1,000 /month and i will set u up a site and Guarantee u will have first rank for the search Phrase

"i know how to get to make a cow shit!!

[sfokevin]

Send me $1,000 /month and i will set u up a site and Guarantee u will have first rank for the search Phrase

"i know how to get to make a cow shit!!

$1,000 a month!... Sounds like you cow is sick...

[bangkockney]

If you've got a decent budget, keep it in-house.

1. A strategy that has stood the test of time is to create your own galaxy of sites that provide highly relevant links. Obviously, this is long term.

2. Content surrounding links to your site is becoming more and more important.

3. Don't underestimate the power of internal linking!

4. Meta data keyword stuffing carries much less relevancy than before.

5. Strongly consider aggressive competitive strategies where you pinch links that point to your competitors.

6. Get off shared hosting and buy a dedicated IP, if applicable.

7. Server location can give a modest boost in corresponding country SERPs

8. Content is king

9. If you produce good content, natural links will follow

10. Did I mention the importance of content

[davejonesbkk]

Seems there are quite a few knowledgeable SEO'ers on thaivisa!

Im curious to know what everyone's experiences here have been with getting ranked for keywords in thai language on google.co.th though?