non SE optimized HTML?

Hey all - I was wondering if you could do me a quick favour. An SEO consultant has looked over my web site and wants to charge me $1500 to improve the HTML to make it more SE friendly. What does that mean, seeing as how I have gone through W3C validator, and made sure to put all scripts and CSS in external files? The web site is axleventures. Thanks in advance.

Not sure what they plan on doing, unless they plan on taking you away from a TABLE based layout to CSS for positioning?

Considering you rank #11 on google for "business plan consulting" I'd say you're on the right track by yourself.

I'd concentrate on getting some inbound links to your site. I count about 17 or so on Google.

What keyword/phrases are you targeting? "business plan" by itself is a rather crowded term. I'd focus on "business plan consulting" and/or "business plan consultant" (the latter is more popular according to Overture).

Hey - thanks for your reply. The home page is targeted for business plan consulting and business plan development (as well as startup funding for which I have #3 and 4 positions). I wasn't sure what they could possibly do to the code itself, as I was pretty sure it was already nice and friendly. Maybe they just wanted my money ;-)

thanks.

you look pretty good from the code point of view, and other than using CSS-P to clean it even more, I'd say they were just looking for your money. I mean it reall does not take that much money to create a CSS-P for this layout.. and use a second script for old netscape...

You are targeting the right keywords, and as the previous poster said, get some more incoming links... but other than that, in time you will be doing better, not that you do all that bad now!

good job here!

zen

Do you mean pages or domains? I see right now 104 incoming links to our home page.

Also, how much more would being in CSS-P really help things? I am trying to balance that with the fact that not all browsers can handle CSS1+

Pages... I'm not counting your internal links (which will show up on a "link:www.xyz.com" query on Google).



The short answer is: It depends. ;) Using CSS for positioning should allow you to decrease the markup::content ratio of your pages, and place Hx tags and content "higher" in the document tree. The sooner your key phrases appear in your pages, the more relevant they will appear to a crawler.

It's hard to give an exact figure of how this will help, or even an honest estimate. I can relate a personal experience though: I recently inherited a new site that used a horrible, non-compliant, TABLE based layout. I converted *just* the homepage to use clean HTML and CSS for positioning. I'd guess I changed the content to match the keyword density you appear to have on your homepage, and I added H1 and H2 tags. I also trimmed the TITLE tag to increase the keyword density.

For our primary target phrase we moved from #51 to #30 on Google (very competitive phrase ;(). For two secondary phrases we moved from > 100 to #11 and #13. For another two secondary phrases we moved from nowhere to #3.

BTW, I serve a non-CSS page up to browsers that can't handle it (old versions of IE and Netscape).

If you're considering using CSS for positioning check out WthRemix; it was a competition to redesign the W3C homepage using purely CSS for layout while still degrading gracefully for older browsers. Also take a peek at the positioning tutorials/examples at Blue Robot and glish.com.

Good luck!