Google #1 rank 24/7

cormie

I got a call off a lady from a crowd in the uk "prem ium sol uti ons. co. uk/" (take away spaces:)). She got my number from the Golden Pages and was trying to sell me the #1 spot on google when somebody would type in a keyword relevant to my business, but it would have to have Dublin in it too to guarantee #1. Set up fee of €400 and monthly cost of €180 and she said she'd "throw in" another keyword for "free" :rolleyes:

I said I'd do some research and call her back if I decide to go ahead with it. I got a call this morning asking had I thought about it, I just told her I said I'd contact her if I'm interested and wasn't ready to make a decision. So I'm just coming here to get the lowdown brown and get the scoop betty boop from anyone who's used/heard of them before and how is it working out for you?

Any feedback appreciated

notnem

What this company is talking about is Adwords (www.google.com/adwords) and you could be number 1 for your chosen keywords within an hour of setting up an account if you wanted.

What this company is doing is selling you something you can do for yourself with no setup charges. You basically bid on the terms you want and you can control the cost yourself. If you set up your own account you can control it yourself, edit it and start / stop / pause it as you want. If you go with a company like this you are fencing yourself into a couple of terms. There are PPC specialists out there that can make a lot of money out of Adwords but this company is a service I would be running a mile from. This company is offering to rank you for a term, not increase your conversions etc.

Basically, don't go near this company, and if you want to buy advertising on these terms, do it yourself. Let me know if you have any questions. Natural SEO is more my area of expertise, but I'll try and help out.

cormie

Thanks for the input, I've actually been using adwords myself for a good while now and have a pretty good conversion rating on my keywords, I do have daily limits set though and I do have region limits also. They offer #1 24/7 for anyone who searches for "term dublin" on google.ie, I don't know how much that would cost if I set it up myself and to be #1 on every search could be good. I've got a pretty good natural/organic rank as it is but I'd really need to be sure that whatever 2 keywords I would choose would have enough searches done to make it worthwhile so I'd have to monitor my google activity for a while before I even consider signing up. I think with them, it will work out at 2560 a year, for just two keywords, that's quite alot, but it might be interesting to hear from other people experiences if they've used them.

She also said that because my site would be coming up all the time, that it would increase my organic rank for other searches..

notnem

Hey Cormie,

Maybe you could let me know your site and what terms you are thinking of. I don't want to be telling you stuff you already know about adwords.

Being no 1 on Google.ie 24/7 is all well and good if people are searching for that term. One of the websites I worked with went with something like this and it was a waste of money. I don't think he got a single booking and it cost a lot, probably something similar to what we are talking about here. Getting changes made to the Ad took ages and getting figures from them to clicks etc was a waste of time.

A lot of people suspect that PPC increase organic rankings, but I'm not convinced. From Google's perspective, it would make the Search Engine very easy to game, and if you organic rankings kept going up you would be spending less on PPC. It would make more sense for Google if it worked the other way.

What are these terms and how hard are they to rank for? Natural listings would give you 24/7 rankings. If you give me specifics I'd be able to give you better advice. I know you want other people's views on this and mine are pretty clear

cormie

Thanks again for the input It's the VanTasks.ie website in my sig

Adwords is brilliant, I'm just having a look at it now, and "Term Dublin" has been clicked 47 times compared to "term" without Dublin having 128 clicks. And actually, just looking at the costs of the clicks, it's lower than their "set up fee" unfortunately, I've been advertising on and off so couldn't tell you the hours/click ratio. My 3 main keywords are "Term 1", "Term 2" and "Term 1 Dublin". The CTR for 1 and 2 are over 10%, which is pretty good I think since I read before that anything between 1 and 5% was deemed really good. "Term 1 Dublin" actually gives a 25% ctr, but again, not as many searches and the cost doesn't add up to what they want to charge me at all.

That's true indeed about natural listings giving me 24/7 and I see what you're saying about why they wouldn't want my natural listing to get better. It's interesting but I think I'll give it a miss for now.

notnem

Hey,

I like the site but I'm still not sure what keywords you are targeting. I understand what you offer, but if you could give me keyword info I think I could actually help.

I work on van rental sites so I might have to be careful about conflicts. If you type van rental Ireland, van rental Dublin or van rental Cork into Google, I did the SEO on the sites in 1st place. If there is no conflict I'll help you out with advice.

Bottom line, I like the site but don't know what keywords you are looking at.

bocha

you could put some keywords in your title tag as a start, should get you some more traffic

cormie

notnem wrote: »

Hey,

I like the site but I'm still not sure what keywords you are targeting. I understand what you offer, but if you could give me keyword info I think I could actually help.

I work on van rental sites so I might have to be careful about conflicts. If you type van rental Ireland, van rental Dublin or van rental Cork into Google, I did the SEO on the sites in 1st place. If there is no conflict I'll help you out with advice.

Bottom line, I like the site but don't know what keywords you are looking at.

Thanks again for the info. I'd prefer not to mention what keywords are good for me as the more people who use them, the more expensive it'll get for me and you never know who's reading these things :cool:

Did you do mean the organic 1st place, or the adwords 1st place when I type the keywords you mentioned into google? What this lady explained to me is that her boss came up with a "brilliant idea" where he'd pay google loads of money if they let him sell 1st place positions to his clients, so they always can get you first place no matter what. So she was basically saying, if I wanted to choose van rental Ireland, van rental Dublin or van rental Cork, I would then be 1st place and it would knock you off even after all the SEO you worked into it.

There may indeed be some slight conflict and it's very coincidental that you deal with van services too We offer a totally different product, but I suppose our customers have it made up whether they want a Van and Driver, or to rent a van, before they go searching so not too big a conflict there

bocha wrote: »

you could put some keywords in your title tag as a start, should get you some more traffic

Title tag of each web-page you mean? Do you mean in the actual page title where you see "boards.ie - reply to topic" above, or in the meta tag thingy?



Also, does anyone know how to set up Google to NOT show your ads if certain keywords are entered, I don't want my site coming up if somebody uses the word "jobs" or "vacancies" etc in their search as I'm not recruiting and it's costing me money for people who don't need my services.


Thanks again for the feedback everyone!

notnem

cormie wrote: »

What this lady explained to me is that her boss came up with a "brilliant idea" where he'd pay google loads of money if they let him sell 1st place positions to his clients, so they always can get you first place no matter what. So she was basically saying, if I wanted to choose van rental Ireland, van rental Dublin or van rental Cork, I would then be 1st place and it would knock you off even after all the SEO you worked into it.

I'm sorry Cormie, but you are being fed a load of lies. She cannot sell you a 1st place organic ranking. This is looking more and more like a scam IMHO. Their site is misleading because they make it look like they can give you organic rankings, but THEY CAN'T. You might as well burn the money.

What will happen is you'll pay this company, they'll buy some Adwords for very specific low cost terms which you could buy yourself, but they'll charge you through the nose. You'll get very little traffic, but you are into a 1 year deal.

Think about it from Google's perspective, Google wants people to trust the results they give and to keep using their search engine (and hopefully click on ads). If they could sell the organic rankings people would lose trust and the best site may not rank first.

I can (as I'm sure most of the people here can) put you in touch with an SEO that could help you. When I'm back in the office tomorrow I'll run some reports. You have 301 canonical issues that need to be looked at anyway.

cormie

Sorry, I didn't mean they were trying to sell me organic rankings, she was saying first place in the sponsored links, 24/7. I wasn't sure if you meant organic or sponsored when I search for the terms you said resulted in the sites you worked on being 1st place? If you mean organic, that's great

What do you mean by 301 canonical issues?

Do you know if it's possible to have my ads NOT show up if somebody types the word "jobs" in with the search or something similar at all?

notnem

Hi Cormie,

By 301 I mean if you go to http://vantasks.ie and http://www.vantasks.ie you will see your site. Google treats these as two versions of the same site, but in your case it has chosen to use the www.vantasks.ie version. The problem is if somebody links to http://vantasks.com you don't get the value for that link. If you set up a 301 redirect you would redirect everything from http://vantasks.ie to www.vantasks.ie.

For example, the links in this post to the http:// version are useless to you for ranking purposes. If you had a 301 redirect set up the value would be redirect at the domain you want.

I am not a PPC click expert (natural listings is where I work), but as far as I know you can exclude ads with certain words in it such as job.

To give you some more general info, you don't have your meta tags set up properly. Your code reads:
<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
I think for the money you are talking about there with this company you'd be able to get natural listings through a SEO.

cormie

Wow, never knew about all that. My organic rank is actually surprisingly good considering I've only had the site about 2 years now. I mean if you type in piano transport, I'm the 2nd Irish site listed and if you type click "pages from Ireland" I'm the 2nd site altogether Also 4th for "ikea deliveries" and good for a few other things too.

Do you do the SEO yourself? What would be the cost in setting up a 301 redirect thingy and sorting out the meta tags? Although the meta tags should be something my developer could do as there is a box to put them into on the page. I don't have meta tags on all pages yet, I DO have them on this page as far as I know: http://www.vantasks.ie/index.php?page=34 are they still not set up properly on that?

Thanks again for the info, never knew about them errors, could really help and I'd definitely be more interested getting natural sorted than spending 2,560 on 2 keywords

notnem

Hi Cormie,

The meta tags are not set up on that page either. The meta description allows you to tell the Search Engines what you want to appear in your listing. For example, your listing reads:

"piano transport, piano movers, piano exchange, piano moves, man with a van. Piano Moves. With our special equipment designed specifically for moving Pianos"

People are looking for specific info, not a bunch of keywords. The person ranking 1st there has:

"Our Renault Master van has Glide-Rite® air suspension which helps provide a smooth ride for your piano whilst in transport."

What would you click on if you wanted to move a piano?

**As a side note, at times Google will decide to show a sentence from your home page rather than the meta description, but a good Meta description will be used 99% of the time.

cormie

My developer has already sorted out the meta tags and 301 for me which is great

So are the problems you were seeing gone now notnem?

What will happen now with Google I wonder? How long will it be until Google realises all the links I have that weren't 301'd properly and changes the info they display for the meta tags too?

notnem

cormie wrote: »

My developer has already sorted out the meta tags and 301 for me which is great

The 301 issue has been fixed, but I'm not seeing the meta tags sorted on all pages. Google will pick up the changes soon enough.

cormie

that's great about the 301, has the meta been fixed on the piano page or some pages at least? I don't have all the pages tagged yet, maybe that's why?

notnem

Yup, thats why.

cormie

Brilliant So what do you suggest I do next? Just tag every page I suppose and then just wait for Google to rescan my site and hope for the best?

bocha

cormie wrote: »

Title tag of each web-page you mean? Do you mean in the actual page title where you see "boards.ie - reply to topic" above, or in the meta tag thingy?

yeah the "boards.ie - reply to topic" in the blue bar, very important as far as google's converned. make each page have a focused and unique title.

RedCardinal

cormie wrote: »

I got a call off a lady from a crowd in the uk "prem ium sol uti ons. co. uk/" (take away spaces:)). She got my number from the Golden Pages and was trying to sell me the #1 spot on google when somebody would type in a keyword relevant to my business, but it would have to have Dublin in it too to guarantee #1. Set up fee of €400 and monthly cost of €180 and she said she'd "throw in" another keyword for "free" :rolleyes:

Likely a boiler room operation. Latest one sells Google local listings for a monthly fee. Of course we dont yet have google local here in Ireland.

Any company who cold calls trying to sell SEO is almost certainly a scam of some kind.

ivory66

Hi,
I wanted to find out whether the name you choose for your web business is a key factor in driving traffic to your page whether you are using adwords or seo. Pls advice. learning a lot from this page. thanks guys (or gals) for your infos.

gypsy777

cormie wrote: »

Wow, never knew about all that. My organic rank is actually surprisingly good considering I've only had the site about 2 years now. I mean if you type in piano transport, I'm the 2nd Irish site listed and if you type click "pages from Ireland" I'm the 2nd site altogether Also 4th for "ikea deliveries" and good for a few other things too.

piano transport gets an avg. 12 searches a month and ikea deliveries get an avg. 46 searches a month so its not a lot to get excited about.

You probably want to focus your SEO efforts on terms like 'man with a van', 'dublin removals' and 'ireland removals' which get around 390, 260 and 320 avg searches a month respectively. (numbers sourced from google keyword tool which isnt going to be 100% accurate but you get the idea.)

It shouldnt really be that hard to rank for those terms. Might try myself just for the craic.;)

cormie

Thanks for the advice. Where can I see that google keyword tool? Interesting...

I've been making some changes anyway so hopefully I'll start to move up the ranks

gypsy777

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

remember to set it to the country of Ireland when researching keywords...next to country click edit and scroll down till you find it

cormie

That's handy, thanks a lot

KoRn101

To get your listings higher in the search (main search results)
Its all about SEO..

This is when lets say you want to get this forum into the high ranks.

You search good for relative words. Like type in irish chat.

The first two web sites that come up are then the target market you want to get links to your website on.

You approach this top listed site ask them can you advertise or do an exchange links etc..

Then when google crawls, your site will be listed higher as it has a link in a long standing site higher rated!

The more sites you do this with the higher your page rank is which in turns means google will crawl your site more ofter, thus listing more pages in google..

Genius isnt it!

cormee

I've been working on the web (SEO, SEM, Design etc. etc.) for over 10 years now and I can tell you this - one very simple rule, if someone offers you top place in Google (organic searches) guaranteed turn around and walk away, if they are promising they can actually do this within x amount of time they are probably using black-hat techniques, these will get you banned from the Google index altogether.

Next time they phone you ask them why they have a Google Page Rank of 0.

Your money would be a lot better of spent on Google Adwords and getting your site optimised for search engines, I've just had a quick look at your site (it's 5.30 Friday so I'm in a hurry!) and I'd recommend the following:

Page title - Change it to something more relevant to what people are searching for, say something like 'van rental Ireland, van and driver hire, deliveries and collections Ireland - Vantasks.ie'

Description - Almost the same as above, relevant search keywords/phrases used in a short paragraph however this time in a more 'readable' form for humans - ie. 'We offer van and driver rental throughout Ireland and a delivery and collection service throughout Dublin and Ireland'

Meta Keywords - don't worry about these, the only major search engine that still uses keywords is Yahoo, Yahoo will only account for about 2% of your traffic.

Your site is laid out using tableless CSS design, this is good for SEO.

Your homepage is the most valuable real-estate on your site, make sure the content is optomised, get your keywords in there but don't overdo it.

Change your 'Welcome to VanTasks.ie' to something a little more relevant to people's search phrases, your designer has used a H1 tag on all the headings which is good, however the sub-headings are currently "span class="style_1" they should be H2 tags instead.

Look into getting someone to do some Mod_Rewrite on your URLs- mod_rewrite will rewrite your urls like http://www.vantasks.ie/index.php?page=11 to something a little more Google friendly like http://www.vantasks.ie/Packing-Moving-Hints-Tips-Advice.html


OK, I'm leaving now! If you walk away from this thread heeding one piece of advice, let it be this; Do not give these people a penny. As I said above they have a Google Page Rank of 0 and their own site optomisation is absolutely awful.

Ask them to provide you with a few examples of keywords/phrases they rank highly in, any phrase they give over 3 words is a long-tail search and doesn't prove SEO skills.

cormee

ivory66 wrote: »

Hi,
I wanted to find out whether the name you choose for your web business is a key factor in driving traffic to your page whether you are using adwords or seo. Pls advice. learning a lot from this page. thanks guys (or gals) for your infos.

Your business name is not so important (as Google can't differentiate between that and any other text on your site) however the domain name you choose is extremely important - if you have a company that sells dog leashes in Ireland get the domain dogleashes.ie, it's not the most glamorous of domain names but from an SEO pov it's invaluable. Your customers within Ireland will be searching for the phrase 'dog leashes' so Google sees Dog Leashes and .ie in your domain name and says 'hey this site is Irish and sells dog leashes', server location is also important, try get hosting on servers that are located within your target market, if your site is for the Irish market get space on a server in Ireland, some Irish hosting companies' servers are outside Ireland - so make sure you ask.

cormie

I didn't know what was going on when I saw the last poster was called "cormee". Thought it was somebody trying to impersonate me :pac:

Thanks a lot for the info, I've replied to your points in bold below

cormee wrote: »

I've been working on the web (SEO, SEM, Design etc. etc.) for over 10 years now and I can tell you this - one very simple rule, if someone offers you top place in Google (organic searches) guaranteed turn around and walk away, if they are promising they can actually do this within x amount of time they are probably using black-hat techniques, these will get you banned from the Google index altogether.

Next time they phone you ask them why they have a Google Page Rank of 0.

Your money would be a lot better of spent on Google Adwords and getting your site optimised for search engines, I've just had a quick look at your site (it's 5.30 Friday so I'm in a hurry!) and I'd recommend the following:

Just to note, they were offering #1 rank on the paid listings, not organic. They said they have a deal with Google where they basically paid them a lot of money to get the number one spot which they would then sell on to people like me.

Page title - Change it to something more relevant to what people are searching for, say something like 'van rental Ireland, van and driver hire, deliveries and collections Ireland - Vantasks.ie'

I've spent hours and hours coming up with the best page titles for each page, do you not think they are good? they are within the 69 characters that is recommended before the ... comes in, as are the page descriptions, so the searcher sees everything in the title, described as concisely as possible and contain very relevant words to searches I reckon

Description - Almost the same as above, relevant search keywords/phrases used in a short paragraph however this time in a more 'readable' form for humans - ie. 'We offer van and driver rental throughout Ireland and a delivery and collection service throughout Dublin and Ireland'

I've kept this within the readable characters before the ... and basically use the description with targeted words to try and convince the customer to click it, in readable english. Google hasn't propagated the updates fully yet, but you can see some if you search, or just go to view source of each page I think.

Meta Keywords - don't worry about these, the only major search engine that still uses keywords is Yahoo, Yahoo will only account for about 2% of your traffic.

I've got them there anyway just incase

Your site is laid out using tableless CSS design, this is good for SEO.

Not sure what you mean there, I've a few tables on it, just with clear borders, there's a table at the bottom of the homepage which is keeping the distance between each image/link

Your homepage is the most valuable real-estate on your site, make sure the content is optomised, get your keywords in there but don't overdo it.

Change your 'Welcome to VanTasks.ie' to something a little more relevant to people's search phrases, your designer has used a H1 tag on all the headings which is good, however the sub-headings are currently "span class="style_1" they should be H2 tags instead.

Was working on that today, the rest of the pages are ok. Is a 2nd heading all that important? I've got a H1 on each page so far but some pages don't even have anywhere to put a H2. What do you reckon about the welcome page? I don't want to stuff too many keywords there and I'd prefer to keep it a more pleasing reading experience on the home page and attract keywords through headings on the relevant sub pages..

Look into getting someone to do some Mod_Rewrite on your URLs- mod_rewrite will rewrite your urls like http://www.vantasks.ie/index.php?page=11 to something a little more Google friendly like http://www.vantasks.ie/Packing-Moving-Hints-Tips-Advice.html

It's on the to do list when I get the budget

zAbbo

cormie wrote: »

Just to note, they were offering #1 rank on the paid listings, not organic. They said they have a deal with Google where they basically paid them a lot of money to get the number one spot which they would then sell on to people like me.

Run a mile, there is no such agreement or deal. Snake Oil Salesmen.

Also, try not to get hung up with all the tweaks and tips you see on SEO, do the basics and get good quality organic incoming links - this will be the biggest factor in increasing your ranking.

cormee

Just to note, they were offering #1 rank on the paid listings, not organic. They said they have a deal with Google where they basically paid them a lot of money to get the number one spot which they would then sell on to people like me.

Whoops, I just get into a lather of anger when I hear about charlatans like these.

I've spent hours and hours coming up with the best page titles for each page, do you not think they are good? they are within the 69 characters that is recommended before the ... comes in, as are the page descriptions, so the searcher sees everything in the title, described as concisely as possible and contain very relevant words to searches I reckon

No they're fine, your homepage title is not the best though, just forget about humans reading them and consider your page title to be primarily for the benefit of search engines. The present title will only be of benefit if people search for "Ireland's Prestige Enterprise Man With a Van & Driver Hire" or combinations of words within that title but personally if I was searching for a van and driver they wouldn't be my search terms. I'd be looking for phrases like 'van rental Ireland', 'van and driver hire', 'deliveries and collections Ireland' etc (ok you have "Van & Driver Hire")

Not sure what you mean there, I've a few tables on it, just with clear borders, there's a table at the bottom of the homepage which is keeping the distance between each image/link

Tables are fine for laying out data but shouldn't be used to structure page designs, your pages are structured using CSS not tables.

Was working on that today, the rest of the pages are ok. Is a 2nd heading all that important? I've got a H1 on each page so far but some pages don't even have anywhere to put a H2. What do you reckon about the welcome page? I don't want to stuff too many keywords there and I'd prefer to keep it a more pleasing reading experience on the home page and attract keywords through headings on the relevant sub pages..

They're important from the point of view they help Google to understand the hierarchy and relevance of the content on your site, <h2> tells Google it's a subheading <span class="style_1"> tells Google very little.

Regarding your homepage <h1> you could use it a lot better; "VanTasks.ie, Home of Ireland's Leading 'Man With a Van' Service" doesn't contain many relevant keywords, again think of phrases people will use when searching and try incorporate them.

It's on the to do list when I get the budget

Your site is a brochure site so you could get your urls rewritten for about €30 on elance.com. It's worth the investment! Just make sure you have 301 redirects set up at the same time too.