Hello all, after having paid a lot of money over a couple of years to both individuals and companies who made promises of 1st page ranking for my site in 3-6 months which none of them could deliver. I finally got fedup and decided to try to market my site myself and would very much appreciate any help you guys can offer. Ok, so here's my old site: http://www.pcandnetservices.com/ if you guys can have a look please? I had inquired on an SEO forum and had asked if anyone can help advise me on what will be best for me to get some traffic. I was told I will be needing: 1] To fix the broken links 2] Create original content on the pages and optimize with keyword density and tags 3] Optimize the meta info 4] Get safe white hat high PR backlinking 5] Get the best keywords 6] Get a new professional theme Following the recommendations on the forum and with a low budget I have hired 4 guys on fiverr to perform different work on my site and Home page. Content writing for original article, fixing broken links, updating the WP Theme, backlinking and keyword research but I am now being told by some that the Home page still needs work and others saying it's fine so I am totally confused and don't know who to believe. My plan is to first optimize my home page to start generating some income then I can use that income to purchase and install this theme here: http://www.templatemonster.com/demo/40857.html Any advice/opinions will be greatly appreciated, thanks.
1. I wouldn't purchase that theme. It may look better, but it's not necessarily better. I will not be surprised if that theme is based on bootstrap. You just need to update your current design somewhat, clean up the html/css mess and you should be good to go. 2. Don't ever hire / pay to anyone who promises you 1st, 2d, 3d pages on Google. All those SEO services are nothing but one big pile of manure. Instead, hire someone locally (maybe some of your friends know someone who is familiar with web design). Maybe some of the people here will volunteer to help you out free of charge. 3. Instead of spending any more money on SEO or some dubious ways of getting traffic, spend it on Adwords and Bing Ads (if you have not yet). But first, refresh your design. First impression does count.
Thanks for the input/advice. First, main reason I am looking into trying that theme is to have an interactive feature [blog] which as I am being told is great for SEO purposes? Next, I am definitely not being cheap, I simply cannot afford a local person to do SEO work as I can't spend what I don't have. The pc jobs are no longer what it used to be many years ago. Especially here in where I am in Queens, NY, there is at least one tech on every block, some are reloading OS for as little as $30, that's how fierce the competition is. Even with the ridiculously low prices as stated on my site, I have only been getting maybe one or two jobs per month, some months nothing. The marketing course I am contemplating taking costs $99 per month so I am thinking best I scrape up and go that route instead of putting any more cash into my existing site.
Looking into the theme options, appears it will cost me more to overhaul my current theme than it would cost for the new theme so I'd like to ask please, if I were to update to that new theme, as far as SEO is concerned, will doing SEO work on the new theme work just as it well as if on my current theme?
You may want to read this article before considering a full site overhaul: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/42824/
Hmnn, that's certainly a great article, I never considered those things, thank you very much! According to that link, my best best would be to first get an SEO audit? If yes, can you ballpark what that might cost and is it the same as a site analysis?
While it took a year and a half to load, on first inspection your old site is BETTER from an accessibility and usability standpoint than that train wreck of how NOT to build a website you found at the scam artist whorehouse known as TemplateMonster. I can actually find more fault with that than I can your original site -- from the fixed metric fonts, broken attempt at being responsive, goofy space and bandwidth wasting artsy fartsy banner crap, etc, etc... Laundry list of how NOT to build a website. As to the existing site, well... it's turdpress. Doesn't really matter what you install if it's off the shelf, you're pretty well shtupped. Honestly, I can't tell what links work and which don't as it takes too damned long to handshake to your existing hosting; what I can see about two thirds of the codebase belongs on the cutting room floor -- but that's just the idiotic mouth-breathing dumbass BS known as "trying to use a blogging system to make a static website"... My advice would be twofold: 1) Get better hosting that has less than a 20 second wait per handshake 2) Unless you're going to actually use it as a blog, switch to a static website or the "poor mans" technique of using PHP or some other server side language to glue the unique parts of each page to the parts that are the same on every page. As sad as it is, that overpriced pile of junk you are ogling at the Moulin Rouge of web design would actually be a step BACKWARDS in functionality, usability and accessibility. To be brutally frank, that template I would consider to be overpriced if it was free... Though to be fair, I say that about 99.99% of off the shelf templates and off the shelf solutions for business websites. They're all a giant scam run by even bigger scam artists who prey on the ignorance of people who just don't know any better.
Thanks for the critique, I had thought it was something within my site itself which was causing the long loading time, if it's the Godaddy hosting, any other hosting you can recommend which will speed up the loading time? If I should need an interactive feature, I can add it to my current site via a plugin?