My site http://www.roommatesonline.net, can't seem to make it to the first page with google. I have spent countless hours (hundreds, maybe thousands over the past year and a half trying to get this thing on the first page on G. Any advice?
There has been talk about link exchanges working well. with outbound links to 'authoritative' sites, you may get better rankings. Your pagerank is only 5, so if you're looking to get higher on the list, you may need to improve your inbound links by quite a bit to get on the front page. only 42 backlinks on google, I have over 600 for my site and I rank pretty well for my keywords -- of over 12 million results. inbound links are going to be big for you as a need. try to get into DMOZ and maybe spend some cash on inbound links.
You could either ask on this board or you could take a look at the link in my sig (it's to a text link broker).
Is this who you have used for your sites? I signed up for an account. Are there any other suggestions? - I've already analyzed the competition and have several common links with the sites above mine. I used SEO Elite which I found to be quite helpful, however, there still is much work to be done it seems
I use this program to sell text links for my site. They take 50%, but they have a much larger inventory and buyer market so I'm more likely to find buyers AND it makes it effortless to get textlinks sold on my site -- additionally no management on my end, just a check in the mail err paypal payment. While I don't like them taking out 50%, that's the deal and they've been faithful so far. Got my payment today for last month's text links and it was some nice extra cash. There are other text brokers out there, but I like this one.
I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. I feel pretty stupid for doing this for so long and not knowing about it. Checking it out right now and it looks great! Thanks a lot!
Sure, glad I could help. Best of luck with your link development. Also, a free method, you could try submitting your site to a bunch of directories -- even paid ones -- and this will help your linkbacks as well. directories are proven methods of good pagerank. Keep us posted on your progress though, I would like to see if you make it up to those rankings and which method you think made it happen.
Boring or not, that's the way things work. There's a good plugin for Firefox called InFormEnter which makes life a lot easier, someone else recommended it on this board. Take a look at it, you may find it goes faster
I know, I'm right there with you about that. What do you guys think about the news section that I have developed? (i.e. http://www.roommatesonline.net/news_read.php?id=9) Will this be picked up by the SE's or should I make more static html pages to put my news on?
Some search engines completely disregard anything after the ? in a URL, so I suggest you use static SEF (Search Engine Friendly) links, such as /news/2005/10 or something, whatever the URL may be.