May I suggest you guys continue your spat in private? It's not helpful.

OP, if there are 10 allintitle competitors, good onpage will get you there under almost all circumstances. If there are 10,000,000m allintitle competitors, the most perfect on page SEO won't get you even close to the front page in almost all circumstances and you will need back links.

Jeez, this is so basic.

As for how to find a good SEO firm? Google "SEO company". Whoever is top is good.

Now get your wallet out.

Bingo

That's exactly what I thought you said here:

Anyhow, you're wrong. It will rank if G knows about it via the site submission tool or otherwise, albeit probably not well unless the site is amazing.

Okay, now that we're talking about competitive KWs...

I have some sites and pages that rank top 10 on G for some highly competitive keywords, one of which has ranked #1 for like a year now, and they have very few backlinks and those backlinks that do exist are of extremely poor quality (eg from sites with low [pagerank). I'm here to tell you that backlinks are not always king. It probably doesn't hurt that these sites have google analytics running on them, and G knows my sites are very "sticky" and that websurfers like them a lot. Content is extremely important. That, plus G is getting sick of spammy linkfarm greyhat SEO as are many millions of websurfing eyeballs.

Google is pretty smart; they know better then to just rely 99% on backlinks with keyword-rich anchor text.

Perhaps your experience with G has been soured because you over-optimized the sites and G thinks they are spammy? ("Spam" in this context means greyhat and blackhat KW spamming, not the viagra stuff you get in your email.)

That's a basic and fair approach, but OP needs to find an SEO who excels at optimizing for his own particular niche. A company who's good at optimizing for "SEO" keywords isn't necessarily also going to be best at optimizing for "san francisco blue widgets" or whatever KWs OP is going after. Which is why I said OP needs to start with KW analysis. It's classic Business 101 that you need to know who your prospective customers are before you can market effectively to them.

So OP ........... what is your market, anyways?

Well, it is helpful if OP is deciding whether or not to trust an SEO firm who says backlinks are king, because OP needs to know if this is true or not and many such firms do like to focus mostly on link-building (perhaps because it is labor intensive and generates big invoices).

OK...I've heard enough...gracefully standing aside.

So, OP main target keyword gets about 700,000 searches per month.

#1 site in the rankings has 205,000 links to that domain. #2 site is the TwoPlusTwo of the area. #3 is an article that has 2000 mostly organic links. The 9th and 10 slots even have 20000 links, some of which are high quality PR-passing links and on the same topic, some of which are links from non-important pages. OP's site has literally zero outside links as of this moment.

Contra what JasonInDallas sugests, OP will never rank on this keyword without backlinks. Google already knows that his page is about his keyword, but there are thousands of sites on that keyword, all of which have more links.

Let's back up for a second, using Google as the example: Google has about 200 inputs for its rankings algorithm, ranging from site speed to title tags to how often the site is updated. If you go back and read the original academic papers that Brin and Page started the company on, you would know that Google was started with the idea that links were the best way to measure the importance of a page. Most people aside from Jason understand this pretty well. Onpage optimization largely tells Google what your site is about, which may be enough in noncompetitive keywords where you are not competing against important sites. Links tell Google how important your site/page is, which is key in choosing the top 10 sites if there are 20000 sites about a competitive keyword (eg, 'rakeback'). Obviously Google is smart enough to figure out what are good links and what are bad links. If you get 5000 links but they are all from the same server and all show up at the same time, chances are Google is smart enough to discount those heavily. Likewise, Google gets alot of feedback info these days from its toolbar and other things, which it incorporates into its rankings. If people visit your site and spend alot of time there, that will improve your site -- this is what Jason talks about as 'content,' and he's right that it's a positive thing.

Here's what I told OP in a PM originally: "the smart thing for you to do is to optimize your site for a niche in that field. so you need to find a keyword where you can rank in the top 3 (might even be "XXXXXXXXX" to get you some business (fyi, that keyword combo only gets XXXX monthly searches) while you continue trying to build links to your site for the long-term [targeting of the main keyword]." This is a basic and incomplete suggestion that he needs to do keyword research.

OP should also think about writing articles on his subject, putting them on his site, and then marketing them to people who might link. It seems weird to give away secrets, but this is essentially what SEO firms do -- they give away their secrets in exchange for people linking to them so that they do better in rankings.

Finally, I think it's important to figure out what SEO firms will do for you at what price. Some firms will charge you some ridiculous fee just to change some words on your site and tell you that you should find people to link to you. Others will do some searching for keyword niches but not really understand your business (as Jason alluded to above, which he is correct about). Even a keyword niche that gets you alot of traffic is useless if you can't monetize that traffic into customers. Others will do all the work of finding links for you, but they may just go for quantity so that they can show you thousands and thousands of backlinks and fool you into thinking that they've done a great job but haven't really helped you much.

In my opinion -- this is what I used to offer -- for competitive keywords like OP's, the best solution is to find someone who will take a small upfront fee and then will do all the work to get you into the top 10, and client only pays when that goal is achieved. Of course, client needs to know (or trust) that only white-hat methods are being used. Obviously there should also be other milestones along the way, like payments when you rank in the niche keywords.


I hope this is useful to OP and others interested in the subject. It's a pretty brief summary, so there's lots of areas that I glossed over and perhaps I wasn't perfectly concise with my words at all times, but I think it is a reasonable help for the beginner. Feel free to criticize and add, although if you're going to distort my words and take them out of context...well, that's 2p2 in a nutshell, I guess.

It's a pretty safe assumption that a company that has ranked a site well for a highly competitive kw like "SEO" is sufficiently skilled enough to rank for a niche kw/kp with little competition.

Agreed, but don't you think they'll also charge you a pretty hefty premium for it?

Where did OP say what his market or KWs are?

Honest question: are you saying that an SEO company who can optimize best for keyword such as "SEO company" is by default also going to be best at optimizing for all other niches/KWs like "discount blue widgets" or such?

This entire thread is tilting the hell out of me.

SEO is about looking at what the top 10 are doing for your keyword.

Do it better.... it's not a hard process. Just time consuming.

Links aren't correlated to rankings - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-scien...g-correlations

Here's a search for Poker Videos. Site #5 has a whopping 21 links from 3 domains, beating out sites like CardRunners with 16,000 links from 206 domains.


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I doubt you'll EVER find a search phrase where the top 10 results correlate exactly with the number of backlinks - it's always all over the place. Even in your example you said the #9 and #10 sites have more backlinks than the #3 site.

If he can get rakeback.com he won't need many backlinks. Cool post bro.

What program do you use to display those site stats? Pretty cool.

"Links aren't correlated to rankings
Site #5 has a whopping 21 links from 3 domains, beating out sites like CardRunners with 16,000 links from 206 domains."

Links are certainly not the only factor. However they are a major factor. I don't know if anyone was arguing that the rule is: most backlinks win the search engines no matter what. Obviously there are a ton of variables.

I believe he is using the seomoz toolbar:

http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

Is listing your site with free online directories worthwhile?

BradleyT,

That link you posted from SEOMOZ has almost nothing to do with the correlation between links and rankings. That page says there's no correlation between Page Rank and rankings.

Watch the slideshow posted at the bottom of this page , which is given by one of the principals of SEOMOZ.Note: none of the text on that post is relevant to this discussion, only the slideshow. Pay particular attention to slides 6, 7, 8. He says that in a survey of best practices from 20 or so hotshot SEO's and using their own correlation data that ~75% of ranking comes from trust/authority of root domain(25%), link popularity of a specific page(22%), and anchor text of external links(20%). "Takeaway: Links, as they pertain to both the domain and individual page, are VASTLY SUPERIOR to the page's content."

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-best-...rrelation-data
One major reason why that site(pokervideos.com) is ranked so highly is because it has the exact match keyword in the domain. Fwiw, its ranked like 7-8 on my page.

They 'should' charge based on the amount of work/time required to do the job.
Though having said that they will likely have a minimum charge per job.

WTF are you talking about? Look at the graphic titled Commonly Used Metrics and the supporting paragraph text.
That sure sounds like links to me!

I don't know if people think I'm anti-links or what. **** no, give me a million links and I'll be the next billionaire. I've done this **** for a living for the past 3 years and have been practicing it for nearly 10 years. I'm just trying to point out things like you can't say, "Well the #1 spot has 200 links, #2 has 98 links, so if I get 150 links I'll be the new #2" because THERE IS NO CORRELATION BETWEEN LINK COUNTS AND RANKINGS.

Link to video/webinar by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz explicitly saying that links, "both quantity and quality", are the most important factors and make up 67% of the rankings. 25%- Trust and authority of host domain= quantity AND quality of LINKS to root domain. 22%- LINK popularity of a specific page. 20%- Anchor text of external LINKS.

You can go to the 5min mark of the vid and the links section takes up about 3 min.

http://*******/b82qR2

this is clearly wrong, and I think you'll admit it when you think about it. there is very obviously some correlation; that's what Google's algorithm was originally based on.

As I indicated in my post though, all links are not created equal and the algorithm has 200 signals, so the logical conclusion is that the correlation is far from 100%.

Ranking is positively correlated with link count and the quality of said links.
Not link count alone.

You are correct! I left out a critical word in my posts - prediction. What I meant is you cannot use raw # of backlinks as an accurate predictor of rankings.

it down there is just one important rule to remember - relevance.

Search engine optimisation is often divided into two parts - on page and off page. On page SEO is things that you can change and manipulate on your website, and off page SEO is things you can do the same to away from your website. I don't think that either is more important than the other but both are necessary to start creeping up the rankings.
Julia123
LBC
Let's look at on page SEO first. For me, this is the 'bread and butter' part of SEO. This is where relevance is at its most important. Imagine looking at a website of a company you had never heard of before, but only being able to see the text that appears on it. You can replicate this. Google 'Google view website' and go to the first results. You can enter your companies website here and it will show you how Google views your website.
Regards,