What’s a fair price to pay for SEO?
- By Admin
- Posted On May 26, 2011 At 3:35 pm
- In Category SEO
Just hired a web developed to create my website and want to know what a fair price to pay for SEO is.
Also, he is creating a CMS for it, since it needs to be updated ver frequuently. I heard CMS’s are harder to properly optimize… is this true?
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8 Responses to “What’s a fair price to pay for SEO?”
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What’s a fair price to pay for SEO?
- By Admin
- Posted On At 3:35 pm
- In Category SEO
Just hired a web developed to create my website and want to know what a fair price to pay for SEO is.
Also, he is creating a CMS for it, since it needs to be updated ver frequuently. I heard CMS’s are harder to properly optimize… is this true?
Spread The Word
8 Responses to “What’s a fair price to pay for SEO?”
- raina_vissorasaid this on May 26, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I don’t know what going rates for SEO are, since I’ve never wasted the money on paying someone to do it. If you do a little research, you can do just fine optimizing on your own.
But in terms of CMS optimization, most SEO is done in the layout… which if you’re having a custom-built CMS made, you have full control over.
() | - John Stantonsaid this on May 26, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Make sure that if they’re “developing” a CMS for you make sure that they’re actually building it from scratch and not using a free CMS script and rebranding it as their own. Common CMS systems are Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and Mambo. Otherwise they’re charging you for somone else work.
CMSs are actually easier to optomize since you aren’t hand coding each page. You only need to make page optimizations once and the changes will appear on all your pages. The only disadvantage to a CMS is that it will give you URLs that aren’t search engine friendly if you don’t set up the software correctly. This means you’ll get URLs like:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?article=123§ion=111Ideally what you want (both for aeshtetics and SEO) is something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/articles/article-titleNow as for a price for SEO, I would suggest you don’t pay more than $50. It only takes about an hour of work to fully optimize a new website. Most of the SEO you’ll want to be doing will be after your website has been setup through things like backlinking properly and submitting your website to RSS directories and social bookmarking websites. These things are really simple to do yourself but if you want to hire an expert it shouldn’t be more than $25 every few weeks.
Since SEO is such a new thing right now alot of people out there try to take advantage of the inexperienced and charge upwards of $500 for SEO. Don’t get suckered in.
Edit: Just thought I’d add this in after reading some of the other answers to your question. Everyone seems to be reccomending that you use an open source CMS, while I’d usually reccomend this if you were running a personal website this isn’t always the best solution for a business. There’s a few reasons for this such as:
-Open source CMSs are prone to sql injection and other vulnerability exploits due to the fact that they’re widely used and everyone has access to the source code. This means a hacker could get access to confidential documents you might have or the credit card numbers of all your customers.
-CMS systems such as Joomla or Drupal are “bloated” with extra features and options that you most likely won’t be using. These things will overcomplicate the maintenance of your website and lower the overall speed of your website
-A custom coded CMS will also require less server resources because it will be designed to be efficient right off the bat. There will be less SQL queries and less unncesary code.
Think of it this way: Is it better to have a highly specialzed website that does exactly what you want as efficiently as possible? Or a jack-of-all-trades that can do most of the things you want but not very well?
Maintenance of the code shouldn’t be an issue if you negotiate properly and even then you can always find a coder online that will do it on the cheap. There’s no reason that would make it so that only the original developer could go into the code unless they encrypted it which I highly doubt they would.
Good luck!
() | - JustMesaid this on May 26, 2011 at 5:48 pm
I hope he’s not coding a CMS himself. There’s a lot of benefits of picking a ready-to-use CMS but most importantly a lot of man-hours were spent on developing it and making it robust and secure. A lot of sites are running it in the production environment, so you know it’s been tested in the real world.
Prices for SEO services vary depending on how competitive your niche market is. If there’s not many competitors then not much work needed but if the market is saturated then you may even need a dedicated person to update site with fresh content, look for sources to create inbound links from, etc.
Good luck.() | - Charles Hsaid this on May 26, 2011 at 6:33 pm
First off, If he is developing a CMS for you, you are getting scammed. There are open source CMS systems which you should most likely base your website off of… that is unless you are Amazon or Ebay or something crazy like that which i suspect your website is not to that scale.
Developers develop custom CMS systems for uneducated customers so they can get in your back pocket for the life of your company because nobody else can work on there CMS except them. Therefore, if you have any problems on your site guess who you have to go to?
With that out of the way, a basic on page website audit should be about $500 – $1000+ and then a monthly fee for link building.
Oh yeah and the lady that said she can do SEO herself and it is all done onsite is highly misinformed and has no idea how to rank a site.
() | - Internet Marketing Junkiesaid this on May 26, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Both Justme and Charles gave you excellent advice already. The only reason I am answering is to (hopefully) make sure you do not take the other two answers as any kind of authority.
When it comes to (real) SEO it is true that the rates can vary greatly. The amount of physical labor needed to submit your site to RSS directories and social bookmarking sites every few weeks is probably worth about $50 and $25 every few weeks. And yes you could easily do that yourself. But that is not SEO. Not even close. Not one part of it. Submit your RSS to google webmaster tools and that’s all you will need as far as getting indexed faster but this will not help your rank. Setting up profiles on social bookmarking sites is a good thing however you wont get much benefit unless you are actively participating on those sites.
I agree with charles for his price quotes and a monthly retainer fee for good seo can range from $1500 a month to $20,000 +. It depends on if you are local business trying to rank for keywords that are low competition or a national/global company trying to rank for high competition keywords.
proper SEO consists of :
On page optimization to make sure that search engines will crawl your site correctly and effectively Off page optimization is basically the building of high-quality relevant links to your website
Local search optimization to increase your visibility on sites like yahoo local.This is the broadest view and each of these areas have countless elements that should be addressed by a professional. Doing it yourself is a great choice but keep in mind that if done correctly you will need to devote alot of your time and patience. SEO campaigns run by great internet marketing companies will take about 6 months to see results. It takes this long because thats the best way. You are basically trying to emulate “natural” growth of popularity of your site in the eyes of the search engines. If you were to speed the process up, google will recognize this and bounce you down the list of rankings.
If you own a small business and cant afford to pay a firm to do this for you, I suggest starting with on page optimization and local search optimization and as this will get you the quickest results.
When it comes to a CMS, I agree with justme. You can find them for free and in my opinion they are better due to the massive number of people contributing to their success. I like joomla personally because i am always able to get what I need from it. But when it comes to the on-page optimization of a joomla site things can get tricky if inexperienced. It is common for google to index duplicate content and CMS can hinder site structure which google doesn’t like. Oh yea and the search engine friendly urls can be an issue as well.
I have almost 6 years in this field and one of my biggest pet peeves is when advice is given from someone who has no experience. I really felt the need to completely debunk the first two answers.
() | - Brainsaid this on May 26, 2011 at 7:06 pm
Hi,
If you have good knowledge of SEO,you can do it yourself otherwise you should hire an experiences SEO.Who have done quality work for your website,So don’t do work without knowledge.() | - Q_Qsaid this on May 26, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Typical SEO costs are around $500-1000 per month, although some people choose to spend more (or less depending on their budget). If your budget cannot handle that amount but you have time or perhaps some of your employees have extra time during the work day, I recommend trying out a DIY SEO tool that will make doing SEO yourself easy. It basically shows you where and how to get relevant backlinks to your site, which in time should help boost your keyword rankings. I signed up for this tool (LotusJump) during the Cyber-Monday deal, so I actually got a really good deal on it. Im not sure if its still on sale but it might be worth looking into (I signed up @ http://cybermonday.lotusjump.com)
() | - kelseysaid this on May 26, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Depends on the CMS. WordPress is actually incredibly SEO friendly.
Drupal and Joomla are not quite as SEO efficient, so if you can get him to do wordpress, it’s worth it.
I used to do freelance SEO, and my best advice is that learning SEO yourself is the most affordable/effective combination.
I promote software now.
In all honesty, I started my SEO business by teaching myself SEO with my own sites, and I believe doing it yourself with software is a much more affordable way to invest in long term SEO – plus you educate yourself on what’s actually happening with your SEO.
() |
I don’t know what going rates for SEO are, since I’ve never wasted the money on paying someone to do it. If you do a little research, you can do just fine optimizing on your own.
But in terms of CMS optimization, most SEO is done in the layout… which if you’re having a custom-built CMS made, you have full control over.
Make sure that if they’re “developing” a CMS for you make sure that they’re actually building it from scratch and not using a free CMS script and rebranding it as their own. Common CMS systems are Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and Mambo. Otherwise they’re charging you for somone else work.
CMSs are actually easier to optomize since you aren’t hand coding each page. You only need to make page optimizations once and the changes will appear on all your pages. The only disadvantage to a CMS is that it will give you URLs that aren’t search engine friendly if you don’t set up the software correctly. This means you’ll get URLs like:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?article=123§ion=111
Ideally what you want (both for aeshtetics and SEO) is something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/articles/article-title
Now as for a price for SEO, I would suggest you don’t pay more than $50. It only takes about an hour of work to fully optimize a new website. Most of the SEO you’ll want to be doing will be after your website has been setup through things like backlinking properly and submitting your website to RSS directories and social bookmarking websites. These things are really simple to do yourself but if you want to hire an expert it shouldn’t be more than $25 every few weeks.
Since SEO is such a new thing right now alot of people out there try to take advantage of the inexperienced and charge upwards of $500 for SEO. Don’t get suckered in.
Edit: Just thought I’d add this in after reading some of the other answers to your question. Everyone seems to be reccomending that you use an open source CMS, while I’d usually reccomend this if you were running a personal website this isn’t always the best solution for a business. There’s a few reasons for this such as:
-Open source CMSs are prone to sql injection and other vulnerability exploits due to the fact that they’re widely used and everyone has access to the source code. This means a hacker could get access to confidential documents you might have or the credit card numbers of all your customers.
-CMS systems such as Joomla or Drupal are “bloated” with extra features and options that you most likely won’t be using. These things will overcomplicate the maintenance of your website and lower the overall speed of your website
-A custom coded CMS will also require less server resources because it will be designed to be efficient right off the bat. There will be less SQL queries and less unncesary code.
Think of it this way: Is it better to have a highly specialzed website that does exactly what you want as efficiently as possible? Or a jack-of-all-trades that can do most of the things you want but not very well?
Maintenance of the code shouldn’t be an issue if you negotiate properly and even then you can always find a coder online that will do it on the cheap. There’s no reason that would make it so that only the original developer could go into the code unless they encrypted it which I highly doubt they would.
Good luck!
I hope he’s not coding a CMS himself. There’s a lot of benefits of picking a ready-to-use CMS but most importantly a lot of man-hours were spent on developing it and making it robust and secure. A lot of sites are running it in the production environment, so you know it’s been tested in the real world.
Prices for SEO services vary depending on how competitive your niche market is. If there’s not many competitors then not much work needed but if the market is saturated then you may even need a dedicated person to update site with fresh content, look for sources to create inbound links from, etc.
Good luck.
First off, If he is developing a CMS for you, you are getting scammed. There are open source CMS systems which you should most likely base your website off of… that is unless you are Amazon or Ebay or something crazy like that which i suspect your website is not to that scale.
Developers develop custom CMS systems for uneducated customers so they can get in your back pocket for the life of your company because nobody else can work on there CMS except them. Therefore, if you have any problems on your site guess who you have to go to?
With that out of the way, a basic on page website audit should be about $500 – $1000+ and then a monthly fee for link building.
Oh yeah and the lady that said she can do SEO herself and it is all done onsite is highly misinformed and has no idea how to rank a site.
Both Justme and Charles gave you excellent advice already. The only reason I am answering is to (hopefully) make sure you do not take the other two answers as any kind of authority.
When it comes to (real) SEO it is true that the rates can vary greatly. The amount of physical labor needed to submit your site to RSS directories and social bookmarking sites every few weeks is probably worth about $50 and $25 every few weeks. And yes you could easily do that yourself. But that is not SEO. Not even close. Not one part of it. Submit your RSS to google webmaster tools and that’s all you will need as far as getting indexed faster but this will not help your rank. Setting up profiles on social bookmarking sites is a good thing however you wont get much benefit unless you are actively participating on those sites.
I agree with charles for his price quotes and a monthly retainer fee for good seo can range from $1500 a month to $20,000 +. It depends on if you are local business trying to rank for keywords that are low competition or a national/global company trying to rank for high competition keywords.
proper SEO consists of :
On page optimization to make sure that search engines will crawl your site correctly and effectively Off page optimization is basically the building of high-quality relevant links to your website
Local search optimization to increase your visibility on sites like yahoo local.
This is the broadest view and each of these areas have countless elements that should be addressed by a professional. Doing it yourself is a great choice but keep in mind that if done correctly you will need to devote alot of your time and patience. SEO campaigns run by great internet marketing companies will take about 6 months to see results. It takes this long because thats the best way. You are basically trying to emulate “natural” growth of popularity of your site in the eyes of the search engines. If you were to speed the process up, google will recognize this and bounce you down the list of rankings.
If you own a small business and cant afford to pay a firm to do this for you, I suggest starting with on page optimization and local search optimization and as this will get you the quickest results.
When it comes to a CMS, I agree with justme. You can find them for free and in my opinion they are better due to the massive number of people contributing to their success. I like joomla personally because i am always able to get what I need from it. But when it comes to the on-page optimization of a joomla site things can get tricky if inexperienced. It is common for google to index duplicate content and CMS can hinder site structure which google doesn’t like. Oh yea and the search engine friendly urls can be an issue as well.
I have almost 6 years in this field and one of my biggest pet peeves is when advice is given from someone who has no experience. I really felt the need to completely debunk the first two answers.
Hi,
If you have good knowledge of SEO,you can do it yourself otherwise you should hire an experiences SEO.Who have done quality work for your website,So don’t do work without knowledge.
Typical SEO costs are around $500-1000 per month, although some people choose to spend more (or less depending on their budget). If your budget cannot handle that amount but you have time or perhaps some of your employees have extra time during the work day, I recommend trying out a DIY SEO tool that will make doing SEO yourself easy. It basically shows you where and how to get relevant backlinks to your site, which in time should help boost your keyword rankings. I signed up for this tool (LotusJump) during the Cyber-Monday deal, so I actually got a really good deal on it. Im not sure if its still on sale but it might be worth looking into (I signed up @ http://cybermonday.lotusjump.com)
Depends on the CMS. WordPress is actually incredibly SEO friendly.
Drupal and Joomla are not quite as SEO efficient, so if you can get him to do wordpress, it’s worth it.
I used to do freelance SEO, and my best advice is that learning SEO yourself is the most affordable/effective combination.
I promote software now.
In all honesty, I started my SEO business by teaching myself SEO with my own sites, and I believe doing it yourself with software is a much more affordable way to invest in long term SEO – plus you educate yourself on what’s actually happening with your SEO.
http://thesimpleseo.com/seo-software-tools/
http://thesimpleseo.com/