i thought i would share this with the DP crowd We redesigned our site about a month ago and I decided to try to figure out how to get it better SE listings. We had adwords on for some time and other than spending $300 a month, I don’t think we were getting a lot out of it, but that’s likely my fault, for not spending enough time on it. I figure we could hire somebody, but anybody that knew the stuff well would be too high-priced or working for themselves, and I was always curious with this stuff anyway So I started reading some popular mainstream boards and think I got a basic idea for how SE works, other than the ideas I had from being on the internet 12 hours a day for 10 years so I started reading about techniques/articles/myseoblog.net, etc and a lot of things really got simplified in my head and I was able to structure a plan. It seemed that basically you have to act like, and mimic, that you’re a reliable, established business to get better listings than competitors, nothing tricky. Google is a big fraud system whose job is to show relevant links to their users. Now I know companies normally keep this info in their vest, but I figure showing the first month wont hurt, as we will change/adapt in the future and there are not a whole lot of companies doing what we do anyhow Ok, first thing I needed was a list of keywords/keyphrases that I thought people/businesses would type in when looking for our product. So I had to do some keyword research, basically by coming up with words and phrases like “check issuing, check cutting, affiliate paymentâ€, etc. and I came up with around 25 words or so that I thought people would use looking for our product. Now, our site was basically just thrown up, not much thought went into the SEO initially, just what we thought sounded right, so I knew this had to be changed. I basically rewrote much of the site text to incorporate most of the words in my list, some several times. Then added the top 8 or so phrases to the metatags. I made sure the company categories we were hoping to get like affiliate networks, web programs, etc existed on the site. At that point we began a routine of reading/posting on a slew of boards, now let me tell you its amazing how different each board is as far as information/personality and its amazing how much you can learn. So we basically just posted with a short message in the sig with a few of our keywords in there, with a logo when the board allowed it. When we came across a blog, we would comment with a link to our site. We submitted to DMOZ about a month ago. Good luck with that. I tried to get our link on resource sites, but unfortunately, they wanted links back and I didn’t want to have anything but maybe links out to biz partners and clients on our site, didn’t want it covered with links. I posted about our service on craigslist. We have relationships with some affiliate network/program software companies and we got a list of a few more and are trying to get our links on their sites and vice versa. We sent a press release individually to about 6 industry news sites as well as placing it on digg. I did many searches for various keywords on google and when id find somebody talking about needed the service we would provide, on a board or such, I would get in there and try to drop a link to us (yea, I know with old threads, that’s sneaky). But those boards would have a high PR for certain words and I figured what the hell. I would also look for places that talked about our basic product and tried to make an interesting comment with a link. We bought a link on yahoo directory and a link on business.com directory. Results for the past 30 days Got on the first page of google for not very competitive words : remote check printing and delivery check issuing webmaster payment check issuing services and got a higher listing on a few others referral stats http://www.webmasterchecks.com/keywords.pdf keyword stats http://www.webmasterchecks.com/referral stats.pdf
Thanks for sharing. It's rare that people go this much into details with their SEO experience. I'm a bit suprised that you have had this much success with a strategy largely based around commenting and forum posting, but congratulations on a very fine first month of SEO work. Keep up the good work.
me too but i think changing the site around to insert the needed keywords helped a lot thanks for the comment
I didnt see anything about using a sitemap, its a very good and easy tool to use. I created a script that would dynamically run once a day that would build the sitemap itself. Of course all my data is stored in a database. But get a xml sitemap created and submit it to google and yahoo. It really does help!
Thats great, I ahve been doing the same for many keywords the past few months and some of them are really turning over for us. One onsite implematation you can add is a shop by design/service link on most of your pages this is the page on our site http://www.hotbuckles.com/by-design.php and you can find that box in the bottom of every category as well. This will add many pages to your site with different keywords.
so you have a page that lists a selection of what you sell (ie blade, ed hardy, etc) and you have a link to that page on every page on your site. sorry if this is a stupid question, but how does that add pages with different keywords? are you saying it adds a page with a list all of your products that SE see?
Actually very simple. Each page represents a new page results (with meta tags for that search) and not to actual pages on my site, so it adds additional pages and acts as extra user friendly navigation.
really detailed post. i followed a very similar strategy for my latest site roll out but only implemented just half of what you did. seemed to work perfectly and by the book on how things should work. and it's a continual process and you can just sit on your laurels or else you'll start slipping in the SERPs.
Very interesting thread. Thanks for sharing your efforts. Would I would like to know is how many links do you submit to blogs and forums etc? Did you keep track of what you submitted to?