Optimization companies? (Full Version)

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DaveX -> Optimization companies? (10/19/2008 22:15:24)

I was working with a guy about half a year ago who has a site that had been built years ago (he apparently doesn't remember by who) and had somewhat degraded (broken links, funky navigation, etc.). He was referred by a friend who does all of his computer hardware work. He's a hands-off guy who just wants it done. At first, he wanted me to add a couple of links which I did. After poking around more I suggested a full redesign as this was built mid 90s or so and looked it plus with all of the functional stuff not working it seemed appropriate. He agreed and I started getting ready to start when he contacted me letting me know that he had been contacted by a search engine optimization company. He was totally sold on it and it was only going to cost (I believe) $3000. Well, I told him that, if he was going to do it, he may want to wait until after I built a new site. Then I thought, for that price, I wonder if he's getting a new site altogether. I asked him to find out and it sounded like he was going to get a new redesign. I told him it was cool with me if wanted to go that route as I was busy enough at the time and he was a good guy and all. He went with the optimization route.
Flash forward to last week. I get an email from him asking to add a link. Not hearing from him for awhile I go to check out the new site. It's virtually identical. Maybe they changed page titles. Maybe they rearranged some text. They definitely didn't redesign the look. Maybe he didn't understand what a redesign meant. He says they rewrote a ton of stuff and that he rewrote a bunch as well. I looked at the code and there isn't anything other than content that appears to have changed. Should there be any sort of optimization-specific code if it's being handled by a company like that? I thought I would maybe find some sort of tracking-type stuff.
Also, upon further review, the link he wanted me to add appeared to be coming from a wedding photographer's website (which would be appropriate) but the site they were going to put my guy's link on was some sort of link exchange.
At any rate, it appears he was taken advantage of but I'm not sure how to tell for sure. It looks like any changes they made would have been common sense ones that I would have made just building a new site. At the very least it would have been nice to have rebuilt his site so that it looked and worked a bit better.
Anyone have experience with these sort of places?



DebSpecs -> RE: Optimization companies? (10/20/2008 16:35:11)

First of all, you sound so sweet to be concerned about your client. If this customer can see how trustworthy you are, I bet a truly beneficial relationship between the both of you can be established.

From my experience, optomization can mean many, many things. And it doesn't always go hand in hand with design.

This company changed the title tags, as well as content on the page. These are some of the most crucial steps in optomizing a site. Whether it was worth $3000 or not, I don't know. Did they pore over various keyword options when creating content? Run them through keyword tools to carefully calculate a competitive advantage? Who knows. But they did help his site.

One thing is for certain~ Now that he spent all this $ to assure his website can be searched out, he should invest a bit more in you so he can seal the deal. What a waste it would be if he couldn't CONVERT all those people he just invested to ATTRACT.

I hope you can convince him of this. Sounds like you're trying to watch his back.

I was once referred to an "optomization specialist". He had me look at the source code of our website. It said "suckertree" in places in the script. He tried to tell me this meant my webmaster secretly thought i was a sucker!

"suckertree" is a javascript snippet to make websites adapt to various browsers. He was just telling me that so i'd not only pay him to optomize our site, but drop my webmaster and pay him to re-design our whole site.

So, in my experience, it's imperative to have a decently designed and well optomized site, and these can be two different things.

I think you should be this guys full time webmaster. You can screen other companies & link exchanges for him, as well as re design and update his site.

good luck!



Tailslide -> RE: Optimization companies? (10/21/2008 3:04:04)

Although there certainly are some legit optimisation companies out there - there are an awful lot of cowboys.

Probably in this case the deed is done and there's not much that can be rescued from the situation.

I would highly recommend that anyone in a similar position gets a detailed explanation of what the company intends to do and what they say they will achieve (and by when).

There are too many rip-off merchants and black-hat bandits out there these days. I've had clients so beguiled by these people that they've signed up to expensive annual contracts to achieve number one in Google... when they're already number one from our organic optimisation techniques (cue stunned silence from the client who hadn't actually bothered checking where he was in the results!).

I have come across good ones - they generally specialise in tweaking the text of the site itself rather than the markup which can be a good thing if the client isn't a great copywriter and you don't specialise in that angle. If they're not interested in having their techniques scrutinised I wouldn't touch them.



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