looking for SEO Professional info.

We are in the midst of opening our web site, www. livehorsepicks.com. We have checked out our competitors and none come even remotely close to the product we are offering. Because of that, we would like to look at any and all prospects. A Web Designer informed us of the 7 cent pay-per-click campaign to get started. (one of many options, I'm sure)

Not sure this is the best place to be probing for professionals? This is the google forum.

First, Hexed is right. The SEO Professionals forum would be a better spot for this post. Also, based on the information you provided, i would suggest you learn a bit more about SEO and PPC before you start hiring professionals you found on a forum.

Keep in mind, some of the best SEOs in the world frequent this forum. As do many pee brains who have a hard time optimizing for words they make up. The best way to tell the difference is to spend some time reading and learning yourself. But as with all professional services, if you don't know much about what you are looking for, you'll do better to get a recommendation from someone you trust.

As for PPC at $.07 per click, I doubt your web designer knows what s/he is talking about when it comes to search egnine marketing. A penny per click can be overpaying and $5 per click can be a bargain. It all depends on the quality of the traffic and the value of the sale. I suggest you first figure out what cost per acquistion you can afford, what your conversion rate is and what factor affect both before you start down the PPC road.

Good Luck.

let me guess - you want to be #1

Free Advice:
1 - 301 redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
2 - Higher a good graphic designer for an asthetically stimulating site.
3 - Get rid of the frames ... borderless non scrolling frames....
4 - Clean up the code and make sure its 3.0 Browser friendly.
5 - Individual page names, unique/accurate meta tags for each.
6 - Add unique content.. lots of it thats nowehere else.
7 - Add backlinks with anchor text you want ... at least 40 pr4 to start.
8 - Wait 45-90 days and if you arent where you want to be repeat #6 - #7

Not trying to be harsh but that sites is not remotely optimized for a pleasant user experience let alone the search engines. There is no content there aside from the service your selling. The layout and frames make a person dizzy. You need a bit of work there to even rank in the top 20 pages.

Moved to SEO professionals. I would recommend reading up on SEO by going through SEOChat's beginners' guide.

everything you said makes sense, but....

1 - 301 redirect domain.com to www.domain.com

Since you listed this as #1 and I'm not doing it, can you explain what this means? and how does one go about doing it???

This is a safety mechnism for your site and being indexed under www.domainname.com and domainname.com, Google will see this as two different urls. This becomes important with backlinks (if someone links to you without the www) and also on internal links. Internally if you link to an absolute url of http://domainname.com/blahblah.htm and the rest of the links are relative ex: sitemap.html then google will index and spider it as:

http://www.domainname.com/index.html
http://www.domainname.com/news.html
--------------------------->http://domainname.com/sitemap.html
------------------------------------->http://domainname.com/sitemap.html .
------------------------------------->http://domainname.com/index.html
------------------------------------->http://domainname.com/aboutus.html
------------------------------------->http://domainname.com/links.html

This can have a few different effects and none of which re good. You can dilute pagerank ... or possibly get penalized for duplicate content. I listed it as #1 becuase it is the fastest and easiest thing to correct and can prevent you from inadvertantly making a mistake that can take a bit of time to recover from.

The most reliable way to do a 301 is on a linux server to use mod_rewrite and a .htaccess file with the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www.dominname.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.domainname.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

This will redirect 301 all requests that come to the server and save the trailing request to a www.domainname.com

ex/ user requests http://domainname.com/index.html?foofoo the server redirects to http://www.domainname.com/index.html?foofoo

If your on microsoft based hosting then look into isapi-rewrite which is freeware available that does the samething but your hosting service would have to install it.

google or msn or yahoo search "301 redirect faq" or "301 redirect guides" etc for more info.