Hi everyone. I am excited to be a part of this forum. Being new to the forum, I have a lot of questions. I have just launched a new golf related website, www.loftgolf.net, and am trying to kick it off strong. I now realize that I have a lot more to learn. 1) How do I get back links to improve my SEO? 2) Is pay-per-click a smart option for someone really impatient for rank improvement? 3) Is my site missing anything that would prove to be important?. I thank everyone in advance for any help you may give
im sorry to say but first of all i would get a professional website design. as soon as i visited your website i wanted to leave.
I'm only addressing these two questions for now. #1 - Build a great site with lots of content and you'll start getting people linking to you naturally. This is how it is SUPPOSED to be done. However alot of people around here will buy text links or do other tactics. #2 - PPC will have no impact whatsoever on how your website ranks organically, they are two completely different creatures. But the more money you put into PPC, the more paid traffic you will be getting. I strongly advise against doing PPC when just getting started, you'll login a few hours after starting your campaign and find you've spend hundreds of dollars and gained nothing in return. Don't try it till you get more experience.
1) How do I get back links to improve my SEO? Backlinks come from other websites linking to your website, now this could be through someone else taking a liking to your website and finding it useful to link to you. However the best way would be through blog posting, and forum signatures. I suggest when you are able to put a signature on your membership here that you do that and that it links to your website. For every post you make you will get a link to your website. However do not spam the forums. 2) Is pay-per-click a smart option for someone really impatient for rank improvement? Pay per click has no impact on your search engine rankings at all. 3) Is my site missing anything that would prove to be important?. I thank everyone in advance for any help you may give Although i do not want to sound rude and i take in to consideration you may not be the most skilled when it comes to coding a website i admit i am not either however i do have to say that i do not like the design of your website. In my opinion it seems to be lacking the professional and simplistic design that you really should of gone with. Now considering you can get many half decent templates for free to suite everyones needs i would suggest you search the internet for a web template that suites your needs and one you like. This will firstly help keep your bounce rate down (bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave a page) so what i mean here is, when i went on your website i wanted to leave straight away, and i see that the first person who replied also did, the second person did not say whether they did or not, now out of us three the bounce rate of your website would be 66.6% considering two would of left and one may not have. A simple yet clean template will help you receive traffic, it will help keep your visitors on your site and would probably help your rankings as search engines will be able to crawl your site more. Sorry for this essay and the negative viewpoints put forward, at the end of the day this is my opinion and things i have suggested you do not have to act on.
Hi Loft, It's obvious from visiting your site that you're still getting it set up. So it's impossible to know how professional looking you plan for it to appear. But with what you have so far, other professional golf/sports sites probably won't link to your site. I suggest you: 1. Hire a freelance copywriter to articulate/organize your information. I can't tell exactly what people are supposed to come there to do. Is it an interactive game site? Is it just for kid golfers? What the site is and who it's for should be told right up front. (Note, your font has a kiddie feel, which is why I'm thinking your site is mostly for young golfers.) 2. Maybe hire a web designer? You can probably find someone here who would do this without breaking your budget. Maybe advertise here that you don't have but a few bucks, but if anyone wants to work with you it would be a good way for them to build up their portfolio. 3. Once you get those things under control, you can always submit your site to various website directories to build your backlinks. This means you don't have to hope and beg others to link to your site. Just pay a website submission service, or submit your link to many directories yourself. 4. Also for backlinks, you could get into article marketing. When you write golf-related articles and submit them to the article directories, people who find and read your articles can click to your site from the link you place at the bottom of each article.
Wow! I must say that I am a bit surprised with the response to my site. I honestly think it looks good. I have no experience with this so I hired Heritage Web Sites to design the site. I was looking for a professional but fun looking site and honestly, I thought I'd accomplished that. The definition of L.O.F.T. is Lack of f***ing Talent. This is because most golfers are self-depreciating and we felt this could be fun. If I may ask, and I am trying not to be defensive, especially because I asked for advise, what is it you don't like about the site. Is there any simple changes that could improve the site? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
To be honest I don't think the design of your site is that bad. It's not very well done for SEO purposes as you have a huge chunk of javascript above your content and the coding is all standard HTML, not CSS. But overall you've got a good start. A couple suggestions: Make the logo clickable to your homepage. You have a link in your menu to your home, but 90% of the people that visit your site are use to having header images be home links. Take all the javascript coding and put it into a seperate .js file. The overall URL structure you have is good except for the forum. Download the SEO plugin for your forum software to make the url's match the rest of your pages. Your store takes people to a different website, that will really piss them off. Keep your visitors on your own site. It looks like you're using zencart, so it shouldn't be hard to setup. Also get rid of the session id's in the url's when a user is in your store.
Thank you very much Christian Little. That really was the kind of advise I was after. I have printed off your suggestions and will work on them today. Once again, thank you
loftgolf, I'd suggest getting rid of the bold text on the homepage. Just make it regular weight font, a little smaller font size. Also lose the graphic, it's redundant. looks the same as the graphic in your header. keep reading this forum, there's lots of advice you can get here, just need to read and ask questions when you can't find the answer here. Try submitting to directories for some backlinks. They will help a bit.