What I have done: I started working on my site BuildingMainStreet.com about 8 weeks ago. I am not launching my business until the first of the year, but started working on the site so that it would show up on the search engines. The "Call to Action" I am looking for is either a call or email from perspective clients interested in my service or to join the forum I have created with WordPress. I am getting phone calls or emails on about 7% of the traffic - which I think is great, but my forum has yet to have a single post and only one member joined. I know everyone says to get links - I have only been building links from related forums by answering quality questions and yahoo, google and msn listings. Yahoo show that I have 31 links from 7 sites, but I think it should be about 100 links from 25 sites. My site is only about 6 pages of data right now. I also created a news section but I do not have a feed yet. I have only had about 20 refferals from search engines out of the aprox 1000 uniques I have had. I have been doubling traffic every week since I started. The Questions: 1.) What direction should I go first to improve the traffic to my site. I have limited hours in the day so should I first focus on continuing linkbuilding or work on content for the site knowing that launch of my business is a couple of months away? 2.) The forum section is a great idea to help with content and repeat visitors and 100 other reasons - how can I get the traffic I currently have to join? 3.) News feeds. I dont mind spending a little cash to stay legit, but are the free news feeds advertised legal or should I go with AP or some other organization? Please insert your recommendation! 4.) As a beginning website is it better to chase keywords that are further down the list that I could reasonably get a top 10 result for in the near future, or to start chasing the highest volume keywords knowing I may never get a top listing or some mix of the two? Thank You, Ronnie
First of all, it's not very clear on your site exactly what it is that you do. Loading the page and being hit with a giant wall of plain text isn't good either. Simplify that and work on your formatting. Secondly, hire a decent web designer instead of using a page generator. Compare it to your competetors Benchmark.com, Battery.com, KPCB.com, etc... Not to be rude, but your site makes you seem really shady. A forum is just a complement to your business. Not something you should be pushing hard at the very top. What you have isn't a forum either. It's a blog with nothing posted to it. Forget about news feeds. They don't sell your services and are just a distraction. As for promotion, get the site listed in VC firm directories after you fix it and do PPC.
Thanks for the honest feedback, I should have been more clear. I am having a site professionally developed but the deadline is for Christmas and he cant start on it for another couple of weeks. I just wanted to get some data up in the meantime and start working on links and such so that we dont start with zero traffic and zero links for the first two months. The devloper is working on the forum and reg site navigation, but I was hoping to get a few people to join before it is done. I will take down wordpress page I put up for now. Why do you think the news feed is a bad idea? Doesnt it help with visitor loyalty, seo, traffic if done properly? He is pitching me his SEO services for link building, but I think they are way pricy and I would rather have control over what is posted in forums under my name.