Do you think SEO is a con?

[Brian Turner]

Exactly.

But even then, my forums are changing - from just forum sites, to portals. Need to improve user experience for advertising purposes, in case the bottom falls out of SEO.

[monaghan]

I have a mostly undeveloped Joomla site targeted at our local town, would this be the sort of thing you'd suggest developing and putting a forum in place on then?

Do you get better "value" from a general geographical site or is it better to find a niche subject?

[Brian Turner]

I honestly wouldn't know - I've tended around generic verticals I can convert for clients, especially via links. Not played with local much at all, though if you can position yourself as a major local authority on the web, I'm sure that's got to be useful (& profitable!).

[marksson]

Brian
I would appreciate an honest opinion of how much improvement I would gain in terms of SEO that I would gain by paying for it?
Short, medium & long term.
If possible also take a guesstimate of how many hours I would have paid for to get where my site is to date. http://www.source4me.co.uk/
Because I would put money on the fact that whilst I've enjoyed the process thus far, the amount of time that I've spent on it would be prohibitively expensive to pay someone else to do.
Having said that, if I have a problem with a vehicle I pay someone else to do it as it is not cost effective for me to take the time out of work to do it.
Answering one of my own questions.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

Originally Posted by monaghan

I have a mostly undeveloped Joomla site targeted at our local town, would this be the sort of thing you'd suggest developing and putting a forum in place on then?

Forums are a real drain on time, if you are able to manage it then it can be very sucessful.

James.

[Brian Turner]

Originally Posted by marksson

Brian
I would appreciate an honest opinion of how much improvement I would gain in terms of SEO that I would gain by paying for it?

In your position I would consider SEO as part of an overall marketing strategy, which has the ultimate aim of not simply increasing traffic, but also increasing conversions.

That means redeveloping the site to be more attractive, focus more on call to action, and better convert existing traffic as it is, and then look to SEO as a solution for increasing traffic and therefore conversions.

2c.

[SageMother]

One of the reason SEO gets a bad rap is that the traffic might be of lower quality than strict niche marketing. I am sure this depends on the type of business site and how large the company is.

[mbm]

To have good hair-style, need to find good hairdresser.
To have good SE's results, do your homework and find reliable SEO company. Not all are equally good and not all are equally honest, just like everything else in the world. If one needs web site and good position, then some basic understanding on how the things work is required.

Is SEO a con?
Of course. But it needs to be, just because of the lack of mechanism and stable criterion to rate the importance and the value of the web sites. And there never will be such absolute honest rule, just because the different people have different needs and what is valuable for one is with no value for the other. SEO could help for instance a good new site with useful product to be easy found in internet among the many years old useless sites, but it could do also the opposite too.
May be the customers' experience with SEO company shall simply reflect the customers' own preparation to his/her presence in internet.

[LazySEO]

I think a distinction should be made between SEO and link building services. SEO itself isn't a scam, it's building a website in a manner that will allow it to be found by the SEs.

Proper use of tags, keyword density, internal linking, etc. seem to me to be more like standards that should be followed by all webmasters when they make a new page. What's the point of putting all that effort into making a page if it has no chance of ever being ranked for its keywords?

Off-page SEO is trickier and this is where I see "scam" services doing things like selling bulk links across their network, submitting to link farms, mass spam blog posting, etc. This is not to say that there aren't legitimate SEO companies that get legiitmate links, but it's hard to weed them out amongst all the garbage out there.

[aquariancore]

Frankly, I am hearing from surfers how seo is screwing up their searches. You can actually go through many listings before finding real infomation pertaining to the search.