Hello. I know many of you say TIME is the biggest issue when it comes to ranking well on popular keywords. I am working on a daily basis to rank higher in many "Pest Control" related keyword areas. I believe my site its optimized to the fullest. I feel that webmasters do not want to even think link-swapping and is blogging/article writing the only other method? Please leave some ideas on where to further spend more time. Thanks
Write down all the different combinations of Pest Control with longtail words included that you want to win. Chances are you'll come up with a solid 20. These probably won't be high competition. Then write 7 articles (3 sig links allowed so 7x3=21 phrases covered). These articles should be readable and not purely slop for backlinks. After writing 7 quality articles submit one at a time to the major article directories such as ezines with the various about author links you want to use. First article might have Pest control cheap, best pest control, pest control done right, or something like that, with each article given it's own about author section. If the articles are quality they will get accepted and your rankings will soar. This takes awhile, but don't take shortcuts and try to spin your articles...it adds nothing to the internet and chances are you will be wasting your time.
I would continue to post good content related to whatever keywords you are targeting and start to get quality anchored text backlinks to your site.
20 keywords is probably pretty strong, I would start with a few keywords that you find most desirable in your industry, i.e. they have the highest consumer intent and have a matching search volume. There are more important keywords, so do those first and you will begin ranking for the others naturally while keeping the most important searches at the forefront.
My priority would be creating amazing content which will generate organic backlinks and bring in traffic forever and ever.
For SEO, you should (and do) not need to spend much time daily. SEO is more of a long-term thing. One or two hours everyday of article writing and basic linkbuilding should be enough. What I would do is write say 10 articles related everday. Submit 3-5 of them to places such as EzineArticles and the rest, put on your website. Then social bookmark all of the articles.
How about some firm who markets website using seo, I'm sure they're doing their job more than 2 hours... SEO is really has a long-term time allotment to see wether you do well on your optimization but you can still have goals like Traffic that you can check weekly... lol, "forever and ever"... quite funny on how you state it... Nice, contents are really great in driving backlinks and some traffic into our site... "Pest Control" alone leaves a 20million+ of search result, I bet you'd be having a hard time ranking on it... Try to make at least 5 major keywords that would compete well, and research on minor keywords just for support...
Have in mind that if you build some simple "pest control" links and spend some of your time on that will help ranking on all related keyphrase combinations containing those words in that order. And it would be quite a few i believe. After a while you can check your rankings for some of the popular ones and see where to put your firepowder. Quite honestly im not sure how much a 3rd word in there would suck out benefit from the two first keywords.. Anyone?
use social bookmarking site and web 2.0 and high PR link directories.. all you need is lot of backlinks from high quaility site to become competitor for this keyword
URL Consistency, Canonicalization Issues, and making sure your site Title and Description Tags are well constructed. Figure out your keyword phrases for your homepage and deep links... then go chase those links.
You have a nice site. It looks like you're using a CMS (since ALL of your pages are extensionless). I love the extensionless page names with trailing '/' on all URLs. This is how I implemented our site as well. Would you share with us which CMS you're using? As far as SEO, I don't see any obvious canonicalization issues. I think some of your <title>s could be slightly improved but most are in good shape. I like that you've included a single <h1> for every page with your targeted keyword phrase in it. You seem to have EXACTLY one <h2> on every page as well. I think this is one place you can improve. I try to have 3-5 <h2>s on each page that target my primary keyword phrase as well as my secondary and tertiary phrases, if applicable. But this would be hard to do the way the site is currently designed... It appears that EVERY page is using the exact same template. The header, the left sidebar, the right sidebar, and footer are identical on every page. Only the center "body" section appears to change. So it would likely be difficult to throw up context sensitive spotlight components (little sections or boxes of text and graphics and links in the left or right sidebar) without doing so on EVERY page on the site. We use a CMS and I can add any new component (log in box, advertisement, spotlight component highlighting a product, spotlight component hightlighting a set of new articles, etc.) on a page by page basis without changing any code. It's all done through the CMS UI by a business person. It gives a lot of flexibility and makes it so every page on the site doesn't look the same. Sorry... back to the <h2>s... For example, on your home page I would render "Find a pest control company" that is the header for the search box as an <h2>. Notice it contains some of your targeted keywords already (or slight variations like company - singular- which will still help you rank for the plural, just not as much as companies would have). I would probably render the "Categories:" header for the left navigation as an <h2> and change the text to "Pest Control Categories". And I would render "Recent News" in the right sidebar as an <h2> changing it to something like "Recent Pest News" or "Recent Pest Control News". I would add more content and images to your "crawling insects", "flying insects", "vector carrying insects", etc. type pages. Today the body basically is a set of links. I would add content and make those links be contextual links within the content. You already have the same list of links in the left navigation. And when the same page (Vector Carrying Insects for example) links to the another page multiple times (like "American Dog Tick"), you should vary the text... If you use "American Dog Tick" in the left navigation, then use "dog tick" or "common dog tick", or "dog ticks" (plural) as the link text for the other link on that same page. I think your linking structure could be improved. Personally, I don't like building sites where every page links to every other page on the site like your site seems to in it's left sidebar navigation. I think this dilutes both the flow of page rank and flow of relevance around the site. I like to choose where my page rank is being passed and which pages I link to in my navigation. I'm a big fan of Theme Pyramids (see 4th post on thread by Brett Tabke) and the SEO benefits it provides. You have your site organized into theme pyramids already (for example your bug library), but your linking structure is not a theme pyramid linking structure where (other than your top nav which should link to the most important 5-8 sections of the site) each page links mainly up to its parent page (which is about the same topic just more general... therefore relevant) and to it's children (which are about the same topic just more specific... again relevant). Using this type of information architecture insures that any page on your site is linking to the other pages on your site that are most relevant. Google loves this... Did wonders for our rankings when we redesigned our site using this approach. I would consider adding breadcrumbs to all pages. It's another great way to enforce theme pyramids and gives you another set of links to parent pages where you can vary the link text. And of course... look for link building opportunities. This will do more than anything towards improving your rankings.
Just spend few hours daily answering couple of questions on forums, posting some comments on blogs (don't spam).And before you know, you will have a lots of good backlinks....which should help in your keyword battle..
@Canonical Thanks for the response...In regards to it...its wordpress...IntelligentPestSolutions.com is one of my sites, NoPests.com is where we are pushing our time into. I will take into account many of the things you said. BTW what does mean? How can some of my headers be improved?