Gentlemen. please. Let's have some decorum. I have not posted on here since I got involved in another website row a long time ago. Maybe it's time to chip in? Although I'm still in the cleaning business (just), the bulk of my work is online (mostly in the US).
The thing here is that both sides are right in a way.
A/ Mark @ DP.
I don't know Mark but I admire his Joomla stuff.
1/ Mark has always said that his sites have basic on page SEO. He makes no pretension about advanced offsite promotion. As he says, for low competition keywords (which most carpet cleaning ones are), that is usually enough. You will probably get ranked using maybe twenty percent of on page optimisation techniques.
2/ I personally think Mark is barking mad to charge as little as £ 199. No wonder there is a waiting list (I would not get involved for less than £ 500, especially if there is keyword research to be done)
OK, it may be an Artisteer or free template on Wordpress or Joomla but there is still a lot of work to be done. Anyway, what's wrong with a template?
The fact is that some people do not want the hassle. They would rather get on with what they are good at. For example i can take a video file say .avi or .mov, convert it to flv, wrap it in a player and embed it on a page in a few minutes. Other people could do it themselves but would rather have me do it for them.
B/ Green Services (Adam?).
You are doing a really good job of offsite promotion (you or outsourcers?) for your site.
I agree with what you are saying about coding. I hate "drag'n'drop / absolute positioning but most systems work that way nowadays. I much prefer clean CSS layouts and can probably do a "comp 'n slice design quicker than using a template. It's much easier to control the relevant tags such as Titles, H1etc , as you say.
Now, however, there are other factors at work. Search engines absolutely love wordpress (not just wordpress.com but hosted blogs). In the US I am seeing lots of (highly on-page optimised) Wordpress sites that are ranking on the first page for terms with at least 3,000 searches per month. These sites have little or no backlinks and are outranking older static sites with loads of backlinks. Whatever it is the search engines like it.
I can see a point where I don't use my Expression Web 2 and just use Wordpress. Funnily enough, Tre Allen was doing this a long time ago and got pasted on here.
C/ Ranking times.
Mitch, I'm not sure about there is any hard and fast rule here. My record for going to no 1 in US Google (from 200,000 other pages) is SIXTEEN minutes! In contrast, something I am working on now has taken eight weeks of promotion to limp onto page five. As Green servs. said earlier, your ranking is more dependant on the competition.
Look, I'm as guilty as anyone of trading insults here in the past. Why don't we cut it out and as Derek suggests, have a constructive discussion for the benefit of others?
Garry