The title says it all. I'm not a web developer but I do actively plug our own SEO. I'm seriously considering the $300 yearly Yahoo Directory listing as it's a PR9 Directory and I'm thinking it might just boost our PR? What you think everyone?
I don't think so, mainly because it's not profitable, you can allocate them better in SEO and have better results
No way, don't throw that much money into a directory. There are faaaar better ways to invest that $300
OK, put yourself in my position if you will. I pay my SEO company $300 per month to do what they do (articles and directory submissions)... They seems to be doing an 'alright' job. We're at Google position two and three for our two main keywords and position twenty three for our third main keyword (much more competitive). I want to give our site the boost that it needs because according to Alexa, we only have 160 sites linking into ours. What would you invest the $300 into instead of the Yahoo Directory?
Simply, if your site/domain is older than 1 month (better if it's approaching a year), buy good content ($100-150) and backlinks ($150-$200). The article purchasing is pretty constant at $1/100 words, but the backlinks...You can either spend a fortune and get no results, or spend a little bit and explode in rank. If you want to diversify a bit more, invest in some interesting scripts to make your site function better. Buy some templates to keep visitors interested. Buying links on authority PR sites will help, much better than buying forum signature links. Videos and alternative media are getting much heavier emphasis, invest in scripts that pull videos or software so you can create gifs/videos/pictures. Tip: Alexa is insanely inaccurate. If you want to see true links, try MajesticSEO
Tried MajesticSEO and it's a similar result to Alexa: Referring Domains 114 External Backlinks 433 I like the idea of purchasing backlinks. I'd post a link to our website but don't think I'm allowed as I just signed up here today. Just Google "artificial wedding flowers". We're position #2 in Google.co.uk (there's a big clue in my username)
Our main competitor (position #1) is: Referring Domains 162 External Backlinks 407 Do you think if we had more referring domains than them, we'd kick them off their top spot?
Look at the other site ranked higher, they make no mistake that they're a store. You need to do a redesign first. If you use firefox, get the SEOQuake addon and check out your competition. Don't watermark the thumbnails Do not be ashamed or hide the fact you're a store! You're there to provide a service and good, just like your competitors. Buy a webstore template that loads faster than your competitor, because their site is terrible. Add backlinks and you'll beat them. Edit: I checked backlinks....you're really close to beating them . Their domain is older, they listed in DMOZ and you haven't, but that's easy to beat. Create more internally linking pages and that'll help you out; get your visitors clicking around your site a lot. Getting a few backlinks from .edu or .gov wouldn't hurt, as your competitor has none. You have more backlinks to your page, they have triple your backlinks to your domain.
I know, I think their site ir awful too! So are their products Add backlinks, that's the general plan. Been slowly but surely creeping up the rankings, slowly but surely adding backlinks (mainly from relevany, paid directories and from the SEO package I pay for). I'm just on here trying to figure out if there's a way to get better PR and more good quality, relevant backlinks. You mentioned paying for backinks. Do you mean just purchasing ads on big sites?
check the edit! Paid links from PR5+ sites help insanely, as do links from PR2-4. The idea is not to spam so much as to direct...And this is completely in the eye of the beholder as google changes what's "promotion" and "spam" every few weeks. Don't be throwing links everywhere, but do guest and cross promotion to stores that offer other wedding stuff that doesn't have to do with flowers. Offer coupons and combined packages with other wedding sites looking to beat number one in their niche btw, your site is PR2, their's PR3...and their domain is old...you will beat them
Yeah, I see your edit and I've installed SEOQuake on FF. Thank you for your help here! I see what you mean about the internal links. Are internal links really that important? I've always just found them to be a pain! Take my competitors site for example. It takes about ten clicks to get to see their products! I prefer how ours are just there. If it's going to boost our PR then I can look at adding some internal cross-linking but not via sub-categories upon sub-categories upon sub-categories. I've never had much luck getting .edu or .gov backlinks. I've seen people selling these on eBay... would you recommend these or are they likely to be pretty poor? So, if I triple our backlinks we should kick them off top spot? No mean feat!
It is a pain, I hate having to click a bunch of places to get where I want to go...but it's a dirty trick to keep visitors on your site. Bounce rate might go up slightly, but time spent at your site across multiple pages will increase...and Google being the dummy it is will think "oh look, quality".... .edu and .gov on ebay is a no go; you have no idea of the quality of the links or how many people are using them. some .edu and .gov are just spam centers and carry little weight...BUT...if you find a crazy deal, it couldn't hurt. One technique is to have a bunch of backlinks whose quality is dubious directed to a site that links to your store, not directly to your store. You don't want references from sites that are seen by Google as generators of bad visitors Get backlinks directed to your main domain. Make sure on your main page there is plenty to catch the visitor's eye and plenty to do. Top lists, best sellers, daily deals, coupons. Try to keep outbound links at a minimal, but have a lot of internal links to unique content. Just linking between the colors of flowers won't work, make it go from flower to bouquet to table sets (i'm in way over my head here with wedding stuff lol i'm doing research as i write this) Build links steadily.
No choice really. It's steady as she goes as I only have so much time I can devote to it. Most of my time goes on the day to day operation of business. I've just purchased 50 .edu and .gov backlinks for $9.00 on eBay. That can't be bad! The thing I'm finding most difficult is purchasing baclinks from highly relevant sites. The really good ones would be sites like confetti and ukbride.... but they're huge sites with loads and loads of visitors so they're not cheap to get links from. Worthwhile sites are expensive to buy backlinks and if the links not coming from their homepage (it's coming from four or five sub-folders in, via a 'supplier index') then you're not really buying a PR7 link it's more like a PR2. So I don't know the true value of a link. Some sites want $1500! Does that really reflect the boost value? I doubt it! What would you say I should be paying for good quality backlinks?
A good quality backlink can be worth 50-100$ a month - that really depends on the niche you want to get in. Buying edu-and .gov links is not recommended as most of the links come from bulletin boards.
You want the terrible truth? Yeah, having your link on a PR6-9 is pretty much worth whatever is being asked. If you have the funds for it, it will make the money back. That being said, it's not necessary. I'm SOOO glad you understand that domain PR is different than page PR...TOO many people sell/buy links to a page that has good PR when their domain is garbage, and of course the quality of the link is also garbage. PR needs to have an overhaul to its algorithm, it's broken. Also, it isn't the best idea to be buying PR5+ links immediately, especially not to a developing site. Use the PR5+ when you hit a wall with your more organic and natural development; think of it almost as a pressreelease of sorts to buy a PR7-9 link
Excellent advice and some really interesting food for thought. I'm going to go sleep on it as it's 2am here in the UK Thanks for everything. I'll keep you updated on progress..... but last question, if you don't but .EDU and .GOV backlinks then how on earth do you get them?
I find my own, it's part of my business (just got into baccklinks rather recently, IPs were more my deal for a while) I developed a knack for finding goooood baccklinks,keywords/niches,IPs,developing articles and copy for shops I find them through a lot of searching, most people who sell will copy paste from public forums and compile a list. Basically everyone sells the same lists of everything online...And it's terribly obvious with IP...where you can get a list of 1,000,000 IPs but only 20,000 are unique...same thing with baccklinks/keyword lists/articles... I've only been able to stay afloat because I do my own work and create my own stuff, and thank GOD google has decided to help people like me out by making it more difficult for thieves and spammers Going to bed here too soon, PM me if you want to talk more!
Tried to PM you but doesn't seem to let me. Perhaps because I'm a new member? I was just saying, that I would appreciate learning how to analyse my competitors inbound links. I'd apprciate any info on how to do that. I tried this before by looking at their Alexa links list and I did use some of them but the majority of them didn't seem to exist (even though Alexa thinks they do). Is there a better way to view their inbound links? I was looking at SEOQuake there and it says I don't have a sitemap. "sitemap:no" I've just cheked my robots.txt and it does point to the sitemap. Weird! Also, how would I increase SemRush rank and SemRush Price? What even are these??
Thought I'd jump in with a few suggestions from a copywriters writer's point of view... I'm not sure what your SEO company is doing for you but one of the things that jumped out at me immediately is the URLs for your site vs your target competitor. Their URLs tell you what the product is and contains the keywords. Your URLs are gobbledy gook. The product pages did not have your keywords on them other than in the header (having the same H1 tag on every page is a very flawed SEO strategy). On the product pages the keyword meta tag is tremendously overstuffed and the descriptions have zero salesmanship. The other site has stuffed metas too (not as bad as yours) but at least their description has got some salesmanship. That said, it's the same on every page - an opportunity for you. Neither one of you have any content on your category pages; which means an opportunity for you. If you came to me as a client, the first thing I would tell you is that your site looks like an Amazon or other affiliate site thrown together without much thought. Your flowers are worthy of a better storefront than that. Invest some money in a better looking site. That will help you both with SEO and with branding and sales. Dump the stock photos that everyone's seen a thousand times that are in your heading and use pictures of brides with your flowers that make it more clear what you are selling and sets the mood. And dump the iStockPhoto lookalike watermarks (I could see people thinking you stole your photos from them). If you want, still use watermarks, just make them more subtle. Reconfigure you shop software so that you have content on the category pages, unique meta tags in each category and heading tags that match the page. I'd work on some of the content pages to make them shorter and give them more punch/salesmanship. I would also request a sit down with the SEO firm. Is the SEO firm working on getting links to the interior pages of your site? Where are the articles they are claiming to write for you and what page(s) of your site do they link to? (I would also double check that they actually wrote them rather than used pre-written content that other sites are also using.) Ask them to show you what you are getting for your $300. If it is solely directory submissions, it might be time to find a new SEO firm. I would also ask them why they haven't set up a blog or articles on your site like your competitor has. Instead of just having a graphic that mentions the Glasgow event, you could post several articles about what you plan on bringing, where you will be (table number, hall, etc), offer an event only special and even report on new trends you noticed at the event. Their "blog" has three old articles - yawn. I'd go back to whomever set up your site and ask them why they did not use search engine friendly URLs, why they used the same H1 heading tag on every page, why there are no category descriptions and why they used stock photos instead of your beautiful flowers in the heading. I think you might be better off finding someone with more experience with Zen Cart to help you then going back to them. Their company name doesn't show up on too many sites and the one I found that was working is set up like yours. There's more but that is already probably more bad news than you wanted to hear. If not anything else, I would definitely grill the SEO firm. For $300 a month, you might be able to get quite a few ghost written articles or a editor who could clean up ones that you write. If all they are doing is directory submissions, I'm not sure if I would keep them at that rate. Good luck.