SEO for my website. Can anyone help?

[SJWoolf]

I have a toy website that has been doing very well for the last year however we recevently dropped off the google ranking and I need help in getting links set-up etc. I manage Adwords myself and I have a great web hosting company and I don't want to go to a big company that will charge me a fortune and want to take control of that side of it.

Does anyone know of a good, friendly SEO company?

I'd do as much as possible myself, to be honest. Lots of keyword-targetted content and inbound links from other sites and directories.

Although I guess Xmas is looming so maybe you're looking for a quick fix (if one exists).

A halfway house is to pay for an audit by an SEO company, then do the fixes yourself. You learn a lot just talking to them.

I would be wary. I have worked for a few SEO companies as an SEO content consultant. IMO some of these companies are rip-off artists who are either completely ineffective or charging you a lot of money for work you can do yourself with a bit of background reading. I actually wouldn't really recommend any of the companies I worked for to a small business.

Have you actually dropped off the Google ranking or just gone down a few places? If you have disappeared completely or radically that is cause for real concern and might be an issue with the set-up of your site - ie something might be blocking Google from reading it properly.

If you just want to build your ranking, as I understand it, inbound links from big, relevant sites is your number 1 tool for increasing ranking, and I think this is more a PR/marketing issue than something an SEO company can do for you (most will just buy links in from big blogs - only a short-term solution.)

So, that's me totally shooting my mouth off.

You can post a link to your site and there are lots of know it all geeks clever people like myself who will advise just to show off?

A link to the site would help.

It isn't all about traffic levels though. If someone visits your website and does not buy, then that's where you need to start your efforts - why didn't they buy, what were they looking for (web analytics will help show you how they found your site, search phrase, ad click, also may show geographic location).

There are a lot of site that show you how to do SEO yourself. It's basically about creating links to your website on other website. I used the list of uk directories from www.paulhoda.co.uk