Joomla Website & figures

cubix

We are a small company and have a 6-8 page basic Joomla template website (down at the moment as supposedly hacked)

Looking to get it tweaked to make it SEO friendly and organically climb the holly grail that is google rankings and stay there. I am looking over some quotes that came in which have varying degrees of jargon which I am still getting my head around. Is a Figure of €4.5-6k a year reasonable for ongoing tweaking, I see one quote mention a 9 month term, why not 12 month.

rankingelite

Getting quoted €4.5-6k a year on seo is absolutely ridiculous, seo companies in Ireland are terribly over-priced for the quality of services they offer.. Whats your website?

akagaby

Give me a shout, I may be able to help you with your Joomla site and SEO. I work with Joomla since it was invented and can give you a real price for SEO once I see what niche you competing in.

brian_ire

Without knowing your industry, your ATV, and doing an analysis of your website and your current rankings (plus a review of any SEO work done previously, if any) it is near impossible for anyone on here to advise what an appropriate fee would be.

Statements like:

Getting quoted €4.5-6k a year on seo is absolutely ridiculous, seo companies in Ireland are terribly over-priced for the quality of services they offer

really don't help at all. Again without knowing your company, €375-€500 a month may be overpriced or it may be extremely under priced. You have to ask yourself how much resources a company will actually put into your account for €375 a month? If you only need minimal work than that might be fine, but if you're trying to out rank some massive competitors then €375 might be laughable, its all relative!

SEO is a long term investment hence why most companies request a 12 month commitment, this is usually to do with the time frame it takes to start getting decent results. From the client's perspective this can be quite frustrating as you're pumping money into something, and unlike other forms of advertising where you can see something tangible, link print or radio, with SEO you're often just sitting around waiting. So why the 9 months, perhaps this is a compromise as from my experience a lot of clients will try push to get a 6 month contract rather than 12 months.

Hope that helps,
Brian

blue4ever

Jasus, 6K for a six page site! Is the tiger back in the room!

As well, the mantra of 'content is king' will kind of catch you out there. its thin to say the least and perhaps that's something you should look at.

Again, as stated by the OP, without any knowledge of your business/market etc its impossible to say what you need.

If you pm me i'll have a look at the site - the 'hacking side' - i have a few sites under Joomla and experience of them being hacked!:eek: [no charge btw!]

C

tricky D

OP Priority number 1 is to clean up your site and get it off the blacklist via a malware review.
Take a look at something like http://www.unmaskparasites.com/malware-warning-guide/ and other similar sites for assistance.

Next priority is to get a reputable SEO service provider. This is no mean feat as the industry is full almost to the brim with those who talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. They are everywhere including these parts. You'll need to do research and learn up on some SEO yourself so that you can make a good choice of provider. Have a look at resources like the Moz SEO guide and search for sites to get read up on how to choose a good SEOer. There's also plenty of threads on this forum. Make sure your sources are up to date as what was ok last year might not be this year, so Google-watching is key. Also beware of viewing SEO as something tagged onto a web presence, imo it's integral to much of the design/development process. Also be wary of operations like Business Pro Designs and the likes [ http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056147685 ], they'll just harass you for CC payments and will usually deliver nothing.

hth/gl

cubix

Appreciate the input and fully understand there is no one fits all when it comes to this stuff. The figures above are quite broad and the upper figure there was talk of redoing the site. IF I can pull the content of the quote I will stick it up and it may make more sense

We are not looking at a short term fix as a good solid/useable website along with good organic rankings will be a huge asset and now that the right person doing the right job needs to get paid and will most likely involve someone tweaking as we go on a regular basis

The business would be property maintenance dealing with anything from Roof leaks to plumbing to boilers to electrical problems for both the residential and commercial so is quite ranged.

The whole hacking thing was a nightmare, spoof emails being sent out and blacklisting followed. In the end we went from a shared sever onto a VPS server at a greatly increased cost and we not really utilizing it but simply running the email for the moment.

rankingelite

I think you should consider switching from joomla to wordpress as wordpress is alot more seo friendly and easier to rank. I had a joomla site last year that got hacked by the 'No Name Cyber Team'..

The property management niche would be fairly easy to rank for. The first page of Google is full of EMD's, websites with PR0 and poor backlink profiles with over optimized anchor text..

cubix

We may well change over to wordpress if it is a better base to work from and pull the existing content & photos if possible.

blue4ever

If you have a 6-8 page site then you shouldn't have that many extensions in you CMS (i'd suggest), which can be a great place to start looking for your hack. Kill any extensions that you don't need and check out the ones you do for known vulnerabilities (you find lists on the net).
Kill off any disused templates as well. Update any if necessary

Make sure you have the most up to date version of Joomla, if you dont - update it immediately.

Look at your own system as well and you might have had your FTP hacked. Use a decent FTP client (some store your passwords in an unprotected text file easily accessed). Think about changing the password.

Have a gander at your .htaccess file to make sure that there isn't anything suspect in there.

Look at your directory permissions and make sure that they are up to their proper strengths - esp the image folder. If your changing the permissions make sure you do that recursively so that the folders underneath are changed as well.

yoyo

If you have a Joomla website SH404Sef is a very good extension for improving SEO. It costs a few quid but it's worth it. It allows you to redirect 404 pages and to bulk edit meta descriptions and add social seo tags to pages automatically.
With regards to joomla security, use SecurityCheck Firewall to block various exploit routes and also check for vulnerable addons (free). Admin Tools will let you fix directory permissions if these are set incorrectly as well as other security tweaks (free).
Lastly keep your CMS and addons up to date is crucial. Joomla 1.5 is end of life so make sure your on 2.5 or 3.
Wordpress may be more suitable for simple sites, but Joomla is a decent CMS as well. Like wordpress or others, you need to keep them up to date to remain secure. Use Joomlas inbuilt FTP layer if you get permissions issues uploading files, see here.

Nick