Professional SEO needed - Site review or Advice?

Hello everybody and sorry for posting this thread in the Google Optimization section but i wanted to post it in the "site review" section but everytime i click on the "post new thread" button it says i dont have the permission to post here which is odd because i can post in this section. Hmm, i guess something is wrong with my activation, maybe a Mod can help me? (MODS: please feel free to move this thread to site reviews if you feel its appropriate);

Ok, where do i start? I have a website (actually multiple sites) that I want to rank well in Google and i spent a lot of time, money and energy on learning SEO.
I will try to make this as short and to the point as possible! Here is what i learnt and i would highly appreciate any advice or comments if im wrong with some of my opinions.

I learnt that there are two different forms of optimization to focus on:
1.) on-page optimization
2.) off-page optimization

1.) Now with the on-page optimization what i did was the following:
a. wrote unique and (hopefully) valuable content with a keyword density of 2-5%
b. put my keywords in the title and all metatags (title, description, keywords,...)
c. used my keywords in H1, H2, H3 Headlines in variations...
d. tried to have a good internal linking structure
e. used keywords for ALT tags
f. a keyword related domain and keywords in subdomains
g. had my keywords on top left of content and at the end of my sites content

2.) Off-page optimization is all about links i learned.
what i did to generate links was:
a. directory submissions
b. article submissions (that works quite well i believe)
c. social network submissions (i didnt figure it out honestly)
d. a few forum postings
e. reciprical linkbuilding (i just started that and its too early to say anything as my links have not been cached yet i assume)

I tried that all links had the relevant keyword anchor text and the best links that i got were probably links from articles that i have distributed because those articles were on my niche and had my keywords in their title so i received a good chunk of relevant backlinks and also some bloggers put my article on their blogs giving my another valuable backlink from a relevant site.
Im also currently doing recirpical linkbuilding with highly relevant pages and i have quite a lot of faith in that because of the high relevancy!

HERE IS THE PROBLEM NOW:
I dont have time for all this and although I like SEO and i think for a newby i educated myself quite ok. So what i did was I looked for professional SEO companies out there to outsorce my SEO. I went on google and typed in the search bar: "SEO", "Search engine optimization", "Search engine promotion", ...
I contacted about 30 SEO firms, looked at their background, experience and their proposals. At the end i chose the company that made most sense to me and was within my budget (they were not the cheapest but one of the cheaper ones).
I paided them an upfront fee of 60% and they started working on my site. The 40% is supposed to be paid when my keywords appear on the first page of google!
The deal was that they get my site to the first page of google in 3-6 months for some quite competitive and some not so competitive keywords.

Here is my website: www.fx - forextrading dot com
some of the keywords i want to target and were agreed are:
forex trading
stock trading
online trading
managed forex account (not so competitive, i had that on the first page of google before they started the SEO process, it then dropped to the 7th page and slowly worked itself up to page 2-3)
option trading
make a fortune option trading (not competitive)
forex trading system
future trading
etc...

Its now 5 months after I made the downpayment and I rank nowhere near the top. I DO understand that my keywords are competitive (at least most of them) but thats exactly why i went to "professionals"! Im also patient, because i wouldnt complain if my site would rank on page 15 (not listing, i mean page 15 so listing number 150+) for some terms but im not even in the top 100 pages.
If I look at my site, to me its logical why i dont rank anywhere because the onsite optimisation is done terrible in my opinion (they put keywords in the title that are not even on that same page, sometimes 6-8 keywords in the title, etc.) and also the linkbuilding is way too little (they uploaded about 150 links to about 25 unique but unrelevant sites)!

How i can keep watching all that?
1.) i paid them a nice downpayment
2.) they have great references; they rank phenomenal for their own terms (Seo, etc.) at least in the google.co.uk and also for some of their clients where i checked results; apart from that, its not a one-man show. im speaking to 3 guys there. all of them are very nice guys but that doesnt really help me if they cant rank my site. they are also listed well on topseos.com

HERE IS WHAT I WOULD NEED (i would really appreciate it):
1.) please tell me your honest opinion about my newby SEO knowledge from the few things i posted earlier;
2.) please have a look at my site and tell me what you think;
3.) maybe you can recommed me an affordable SEO firm that will get the results they say

I would really appreciate all your comments. Thanks so much!
God bless!

You suckered yourself into believing that what you want and what you are willing to pay for are the same thing.

...Had you hired the cheapass company to do cheapass phrases - you would have seen results...

Tell me... how much revenue per month do you think these terms produce?

forex trading [thousands]
stock trading [thousands]
online trading [thousands]

...how much "once" were you willing to spend?




$5K?




Your recip activity before you spend a firm is an indication that you are not willing to risk what it costs to capture what you want.

So you are stuck with this:

1. keyword analysis for long tail terms [terms that only produce 1 or 2 clicks a month, a week, to a day]

2. get links for these or hire a link developer and get them to do "only those'... not that competitive stuff - you can't afford those.

...and as your ranks grow on these easy to obtain terms your revenue does as well and that's when you hire a performance leader... at $30K+

Congratulations, 1 year old today.

Have 2 backlink candles on your cake

Spag

Yea, happy birthday to you too!

Did you realise you have a typo on your homepage? "What ist Forex Trading?"

The site has canonical issues.. your site resolves on the domain with and without the www, and also with or without the index.htm, so that needs sorting with 301 redirects ASAP.

Your main issue I think is with backlinks, you only 229, I suspect that your competitors will have many many many more, and they are beating you probably on that score alone.

Have you got an action log that covers everything your SEO's have done for you?

hello, thanks for your reply!
thanks for the hint on the typo!
im not really a coder so i will speak to him on how i can change that with the 301 redirects, thanks a lot for the advice! Regarding the actions log, the seo firm did some on-page seo which i dont really agree with and right now their continuous excuse is that the links will have to be cached by google. they put up about 150 links but sometimes up to 8 links per domain so its rather 20-25 unique links which are not really relevant but carry the right anchor text. if you check for the backlinks for the internal site "managed forex account", "forex scalping" and "forex profiting", thats where i did the work and i rank on the first page of google most of the time. those internal pages have a lot more backlinks also. managed forex account has around 1800 backlinks in yahoo.
No, i dont have an action log but i have emails to them and from them, but mostly we discussed everything on the phone. the company actually has a good reputation (i at least couldnt find anything negative about them) and i think/hope they wouldnt want unsatisfied clients out there...

If I am not wrong, You had outsourced your project to some QualityLinkBuilding.COM India..

Actually, I manage a reputed forex domain as well, and some one from the same company contacted me to solicit links and business and gave referrence of your domain to watch out.. Not sure what you got back from them..

I am sure, most of the keywords might have started to rank in google.com(indian datacenter) did u check? I dont really know what they did.. i am just trying to figure out ..

just my 2 cents:

I ran a quick site command:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4HPAB_enIN273IN273&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fx-forextrading.com%2F

And its just 17 pages that show up in google's index.. Well then my friend, Competing for such huge keywords do require you to have nice , genuine and unique content.
But ofcourse, Content has no limits.. it just lets your website to take off smoothly...Add more content rich pages to the website for your users

I did take a look at the domain age:

Results for fx-forextrading.com :
Domain Created on:
June 04 2007

Domain age (approximately):
1 Years, 0 Months, 27 days.

Ummm One year since its inception, I wouldnt press the panic button, There is a lot more you can add to the website and let it grow slowly and gradually..

Yahoo shows:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AieCqxntj_FIRiomA1udB.jbl8kF?p=http %3A%2F%2Fwww.fx-forextrading.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s

1700+ backlinks.. good enuff figure however, there are not many as relevant they should be.. most of those are from real estate websites..Directory links, and blogroll links and some are nofollow

On looking deeper into the backlinks, I just had a look at the anchor texts:

Invest in FX Forex Trading
Forex FX Trading Account with 10% monthly return
Investment in Forex FX Trading
Forex FX Trading Managed Accounts

I dont know what makes you to join the Forex, FX together? Either focus the word Forex or FX.. and use combinations seperately to make sure that anchors do make sense..

A hell lot of irrelevant links, take a look:

http://www.lanzarotebeachvillas.com/links.htm
http://www.mfs-fire-extinguishers.co.uk/links.htm
http://www.worldofmortgages.co.uk/link_page.php
http://www.spanish-property-gallery.co.uk/sitemap/links.htm
http://www.mymoz.info/rss.php?c=260
http://www.linkre.info/popular-links89.html

Those just a sample.. I can put forward 100's of those..

I can spot out many more.. And since you wrote you did reciprocals as well, Well seems like trouble can arise out with such links..

Reciprocal links that are not industry related or not relevant to your theme may hurt you..

Remove all those.. Focus on one way links from either forex related website or a nearly category cud be finance or so.. but atleast not real estate ..lol

Titles of each page are messed up... They are done keeping in mind the keywords and not what the page is all about..

Check this: (from google)

Stock Investing | Forex Trading System | Forex Broker | Future ...If you don't currently have any experience with online Forex trading but would like to get involed in this type of online stock trading, we can help.
www.fx-forextrading.com/free_online_forex_trading_course.htm

Free online forex trading course page has a title : Stock investing, Forex Broker, blah blah blah but nothing about trading course..This dilutes the page relevance and thus low click throughs or perhaps lower ranks too.

If I were you (I am using it although, already) I would have installed a Blog on the domain and would have kept on adding content relevant to my industry..

I would run a links building campaign that would focus on links, keyword rich anchor text links, Long tails, and ofcourse relevant backlinks and since MSN did some changes to its algo recently, I would use Initial keyword title starters for certain pages to rank..

Do some social Bookmarking for traffic, Article submissions alone are not much of a use..

Doing all that would mean: Adding super cool content o the website and hence gaining links, which is good..