hi, i've started working for a small tech company (catalysis, engineering, R&D services) and to my horror, i've discovered it's almost impossible to find us on a search engine unless you know our company name. I suspect that a consultant got the website up and running a few years ago and nobody has really fed and watered it since. Compared to the crowd that hangs out here i'm an IT newb but i'm suspicious of hiring a SEO company (especially one that cold calls us!) since i'm not qualified to distinguish quality from snake oil. Can anyone recommend a quality service provider or should we just focus on making the best quality site we can, try and get our customers to link to our homepage and make sure we're indexed? Any help appreciated.
Do the research and do it yourself. It's not rocket science, and most SEO services seem to be snake oil salesmen to me. Even the honest ones don't have that many tricks to teach you. If they were to sit down with you for an afternoon, that would probably be enough to tell you most of what you need to know.
thanks david. ideally this would be the end result, i was just wondering if there was a way to purchase the experience quickly while on the learning curve without getting ripped off.
You could pay for a day/afternoon. The people out to rip you off will be looking for long term contracts, to milk you, whereas someone on the level ought to be happy to try and impart as much knowledge as possible in a short time frame.
This is a good article that should give you the basics of SEO: