Thanks for the info they wanted to charge me 299.00 a month and promised I would be on the first page
There are two types of services and if your not careful you will throw your money away. There are "Placement" services and then there are "submission services" Placement services should cost more and the company will usually provide you with some sort of guarantee on WHERE you will place by using their services.. IF the company guarantee's you a top spot..usually they are going to bill you on a regular basis PLUS it will be a while before you see results, IF, you see results. I've been in the web designing and management business as long as I've been doing medical billing (1996) and these companies really have NO business promising the front spot's.. certainly in the top 100 is doable and more credible. As for "Submission services" this is merely taking your URL and submitting it to ALL the major and incidental search engines out there. Usually it's a blast off using a high end software (or so you hope) and the cost should be MINIMAL. (We charge $29.99 per submission with discount if multiple months are purchased) The problem with submission services is that you have to realize it's just a service that sends your URL to the search engines, there is no guarantee of placement, you take your place in their que for analyzing and placement IF they (Search engines) want you. To know what you are getting for your money you have to look at what is included and exactly what your money is going for. If you are going to do submissions ONLY..be prepared to do this at LEAST (but no more than twice) Once a month for at least a year to 18 months to get your website to the top 100-200, like I said, it's basically a first come first serve and THEN they look at your site to see where to place you. When you pay for placement, they are using a portion of your money to send to the search engines (usually they have company discount's and bulk discounts in place) to give you placement which is the same thing as if you went to Yahoo or Google and paid for a placement, so you will want to do your homework to see if the ONE pricing fits all. Another thing you want to know is that your site is "OK" for submission or placement.. if your website is not SEO friendly they can place you after taking your money and then boot you out later. Some companies will offer to do your meta tags or make your site SEO friendly and some won't even mention it making you fully responsible. You want to make sure your meta tags are up to par, I prefer not to leave it to a third party because they are not going to go through your website as they should. Keywords are not just words you pick and put up in your meta tags, like they used to be, now they have to be a part of your website content. We used to be able to just throw in keywords such as "Medisoft, Lytec, HIPAA, etc, etc but now if you have the keywords in your meta tags they must appear in your website, if not the search engine will exclude you or throw you to the bottom of the pile for re-check .. MAYBE. IMHO.. this/these are services YOU can do yourself. I have MANY website URL's to which I spend twice per month marketing using these various method's. I spend about 8 hours a month but it's well worth it. I'm not saying you shouldn't use third parties, just that you should make sure you are getting your money's worth because this is an easy industry to get ripped off with, especially if you don't have a basic understanding of how the search engine's, robot's, spider's ..etc work. Be careful!