Hi Kirk,

Firstly, sorry to hear you have encountered difficulties.  But for $150 I must say you got more than your monies worth . . . I guess exchange rates make doing that sort of conversion far more cost effective on the sub-continent . . . as I would doubt you would find a US based consultant to do the same job for that amount of money.

But regardless lets talk about SEO . . .

There are any number of organisations in the market place right now offering - for a fee - to get you better rankings . . . and some do achieve results.

Right now for example, your website has no actual functional keywords set on its home page apart from the defaults for DNN
   --  name="KEYWORDS" content=",DotNetNuke,DNN" 

So a SEO - will come along and suggest to you words that you should include in your keyword list . . . and charge you a fee.
They will then do the same for every page on your site - also checking and ensuring that your Page Titles and Page Descriptions and <h?> and emphasis tags, and the content and context of each page are structurally consistent.

After this has all been completed - they tell google and bing to reindex your site using the sites - sitemap - and over the course of a couple of weeks to months your sites ranking will gradually improve.

A good SEO will then seek to ensure that your site is LISTED with all the common and even not so common search and index sites on the internet - to ensure a best spread --- and because they know that certain sites like alexia and 

Then they will look at ways to increase your sites presence on the internet thru back links from other web sites - getting your site listed on certain backlink indexes like http://www.ipl.org or http://www.dmoz.org/ for example can greatly raise your own sites page ranking over a period of time - note though this can be months.

BUT - in the current market place - the thing to understand is that while all these steps will assist you in getting better traction on search engines - they are actually only the start of what you need to do to achieve page one rankings.

The reason being that Seach Engine Optimisation and SEO  has sadly become the arena of shame artists and con-men = with too many groups working out ways to TRICK the search engines.

As a result over the past couple of years - the real fact of life is that SEO will most likely not - on its own - achieve the results people expect.

So lets be really frank and look at GOOGLE - who is the undoubted king of search.

All of the steps above will go some way to improving your ranking on GOOGLE - BUT - in reality google is in search for the income in generates for them - so all sites tend to reach a point where SEO alone fails to increase your page ranking any further.

Welcome then to the world of SEM - the place where the real page ranking processes occur -  SEM stands for search engine marketing.

What most people fail to understand is that the sites who are on the first page of most searches actively pay to be there - and can be paying surprisingly large amounts of money - per day - to ensure that ranking.

GOOGLE as the king earns all of its real income - the money to fund all its other endeavors  -  android, youtube, mapping - thru selling advertising space to people that ensures they are on the front page - on a - the more you are willing to BID or PAY the higher your chances of first page ranking become.

So this brings us back to your web site - google is actively searching your site - it has a recent cache copy from 2 april - but your site does need some internal optimization for its indexing processes to be improved - and you are not listing in any of the important search areas like "criminal defense lawyer Massachusetts" - or on places like google's map directories.

Im happy to talk to you further about this off channel if you are interested - wtatters@live.com.au

Cheers

Wes Tatters
wtatters@live.com.au

 I found him advertising his services as "PSD to Skin conversion" among other things on Snowcovered.com....he had a lot of positive feedback, did a good job on the site conversion from static HTML to a DotNetNuke skin (or at least I thought he did a good job) so I asked around and it seemed like he had a good reputation.  Turns out he's basically a rip-off artist.  

Hi Kirk,

SEO and SEM are interesting paths to walk down for the first time.  We have been involved in this area for about 6 years and are still willing to admit that its impossible to know it all - since the whole ball park continues to change on a weekly basis.

Only as recently as last month the internet with awash with talk of google changing the methodology behind its page rank calculations - basically as a means to stop some of the more rampant pagerank rorts that continue to trick some pages much further up page lists than the rightly ever should be.

BUT to be honest - if you client really does want to spend money to by traffic then - forget SEO and jump straight to SEM - google add words DOES generate traffic - though not always the right sort of traffic - but for example i did a search for criminal lawyers in massachusetts - and up across the top of the google search popped an adwords link to a criminal lawyer in my home town brisbane australia - because google knows where i live.

And those adword ads over time improve your page ranking as well.

Westa