My business has been up and running very succesfully, for the last year. Business has really picked up. Right now all of my clients are coming directly through non-search-engine referrals. I have worked hard at PPC advertising, submitting articles, and other ways of bringing in traffic. I'm getting about 200 unique hits per day, which isn't much, but they are all so highly targeted that I'm selling on 57% of them. Usually trial products, but still gaining a customer base non-the-less.
As you can see, I'm running a website traffic business, and have worked hard to develop our systems, and partnerships with our webmaster database, and most of our sales come from advertising using our own methods.
My question is, my keywords in google are so competitive, and for that reason, I haven't had much success in the search engine world. To be honest, I haven't really worked on SEO that much, but I think its time for me to start. I have exchanged links with quite a few sites related to mine, as I know that exchanging links with people that aren't relevant, are really ineffective, as are getting onto "link farms."
Besides exchanging links, and manually submitting to search engines, what other steps should I do to get my foot in the door? I've considered buying some search engine placements, and into the yahoo directory. Is it worth it if my keywords are so competitive?
Just wondering if you have added any Inktomi inclusions ( or whatever they are now ) as they seem to help a lot but of course only for MSN, Yahoo and Overture. As far as Google goes you should try to work around the normal keyphrases that everyone uses. For SEO sites most people keep there keywords to things like,
search engine marketing
seo
search engine optimisation
web marketing
etc
A good way around that is to try to get the more niche keywords that people dont optimise for, you could use the keyword tool at Overture to find these. Once you have them use them in your link exchange titles etc and maybe include one or two of the generic words.
Other than that just make sure you submit to every search engine and directory you can, do the usual optimisation stuff and hope for the best.
As far as paid advertising goes PPC is and probably always will be for getting clients fast. Other things I have tried is adding Hosting accounts and things like that to EBay. Auction sites are good places to check as well as sometimes they get spidered quite well, obviously because of that you get a free link and more exposure.
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If you're talking about a serious online business, with a serious PPC budget, then you should really look at hiring a serious SEO. If you really are in a competitive field then messing with your pages is not guaranteed to bring any real results - and you probably wouldn't have time to do the serious link-building required yourself as it can be pretty time consuming.
ncsuk - Yeah, I've pretty much taken care of that. I have submitted to all major search engines, but I should try and submit to more of the smaller ones, if for no other reason than for the link.
I, Brian - I'm definetly interested in finding someone to handle SEO for me, although I would like to start small, and make sure that I can generate a ROI. This is my full time business, and I'm doing quite well, however, it's still growing, and don't want to drop a few $$, and then lose it, because that could be detrimental. I've seen the post recommending a few SEO's, and will look into them in more detail.
John, read all your articles, and learned a lot. Thanks for that.
I'd be interested in learning the ropes of adding SEO services to my business, but obviously I would need more practice. I'll probably hire someone in the near future to take care of this aspect of the business for a while, until I can learn what I need to.
Would anyone be willing to have me be an "apprentice" of some kind? I would just be interested in the steps you take when someone buys SEO services, just to feed my own knowledge for information.
I know these are some highly guarded secrets, but I have to ask anyhow. I'm the kind of guy who likes to learn as much as he can, so he can be more informative, and helpful to his clients. Can anyone give me some tips, or starting places?
Asking questions on public forums is a great way to learn your way around basic SEO issues. However, you are not likely to discover any real secrets of the business that way.
I give advice on SEO to people here and on other forums, and even run www.seo-lab.com to inform of SEO issues to a wider readership - but you will never see myself spontaneously give out the various secrets I've learned and developed myself. Same with pretty much all SEOs.
You need to use creative thinking to discover new methods and ways of doing things. I've certainly discovered a few new tricks, and put a new spin on old tricks. In a commerical SEO environment, this is pretty much required.
But, ultimately, SEO requires experience - of trying different SEO techniques and practices, and seeing how they affect rankings on targeted pages. No matter what level of SEO you intend to learn, you cannot learn any of it without trying it out yourself.
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