Hey guys, my website's products are very seasonal. Right now, dead business, come about March, starts getting busy as hell. My question is this. I have 9 months to really gear up for next season. I do some reciprical linking, and some paid directory inclusions, but some fo my competitors have been online for 4, 5 or 6 years, and have been link building for that long. So there IBL's from recip's is VAST, and mine are...not so much. It'll take a few more months for my recips to start really showing up with some weight. Here's my question. I'm applying for a SBL, and I would like to earmark some funds for a big SEO push. Let's say I can put about 5000.00 into it. Where would you go, and when? Many online news ads are for a limited time (per month basis) and many use link redirection scripts to capture click throughs. I want real links. I have NO idea where to get edu links. High PR sites in my industry are already trying to sell my products. How can I get the most bang for the buck. Where do you guys go for sitewide links, high PR links for the Home and Garden market, with some lasting power. I'm trying for search engine placement as opposed to Adwords, because there is, by our Adwords campaign, a 50 times higher return on search engine organic (search results) click throughs as opposed to Adwords or Adsense. So if you had 5000.00 bucks to spend over the next 6 months, where would you spend it?
You would want every non-competitor with a relative website to you in your genre linking to you in a variety of ways, banners, text links, articles with links deep in the text from an SEO point of view. High pr means very little, one pr8 link would not equal 10 pr3 relative links imo. If it was me, I'd look for old sites & not updated one's and try buy them cheap , especially one's with old backlinks and buy sites/domains in the same genre and get them passing traffic through banners etc and linking back.
That sounds really interesting, but how would you go about researching something like that? Everybody has an old site sitting around somewhere. Where would you go to research?
Yes I did, I don't do it for a living though, if you want to learn watch the posts from Mad4 & MattUK as they are very much on the ball as regards SEO.
Erm, some things you just have to learn for yourself. For starters go through your genre in the likes of dmoz and look for sites/domains that look inactive/dead as they would likely have plenty dmoz clone + other backlinks and you may be able to get a gem for a cheap price. Age of backlinks is an important factor, add that to age of domain + website and you could have a bargain, you have to do your research though.
You have lots of time to start building your site up as an authority. Sit down and write some 500 word articles and "how to" guides about things relating to your niche. Publish these on your site with lots of nice pictures and a couple of links to some relevant products. Don't hire somebody else to do this for you - you are the expert. Email a few relevant sites and point out how good your articles are and ask them nicely to link to them. Talk to your programmer and get them to remove any underscores from your urls and make sure you 301 redirect the old page to the new page. Use either keyword1-keyword2.asp or keyword1keyword2.asp both are fine. Try to alter urls like http://www.cushionsandumbrellas.com/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryID=6 to contain your keywords if possible and add some <h1> tags around your product titles at the top of each page. You don't have many links so you need to start linkbuilding. If you find a relevant site then do whatever it takes to get a link (pay/exchange/beg). Also your server seems pretty slow today.
The offseason is a great time to handle all the things you can't during the onseason. Think heavily about newsworthy info that you can generate in your niche and work on Press Releases. It's much easier if you have them done well ahead of time, and if you have something really good, you can earmark a large sum to promote it and also a large amount of time. Become a contributing member to relevant online communities. You will find that link exchanges and links in general can come from the friends you make - and they will recommend your services come the high season. Get to know the bloggers in your niche. Figure out what free services they would appreciate - simple online utilities that can get them thinking about you later. Work on on-page SEO, but don't over do it. Come up with a set of content that you can begin publishing daily for about a month before your high season through the entire high season - relevant and helpful info within your niche. Look at all your competitors' ibl's. Use that as a contact sheet for link exchanges. Search engine marketing is as much about people as anything else. If the community at large likes you, then they are probably going to give you some great and relevant links. Figure out what it is that will make them like you and start doing it. Go through any relevant pages in wikipedia and figure out where you can start contributing information and where links to your site will fit in. Don't spam them. If your site isn't appropriate, build one or buy one that is and link to your site from there. Think about an affiliate program that would work for your site. It helps get the word out about your site to people who are already players in your niche. Focus on the areas that will a) return revenue easily to marketers and b) amplify the fact that you are better than your competitors. Things like high percentage commissions on consumable products and you are offering free shipping and a lower price than anyone else. If you take a loss, consider it a marketing effort. Everything doesn't have to be cheap, just one thing that the affiliate marketers can focus on to sell your site in general. Involve yourself as well in other online activities that can gain you helpful resources - myspace, friendster, whatever. Maybe find some friends in a relevant niche that doesn't compete directly with whom you can share information and help each other with links, content articles about each other, etc. Spend time focusing on your products. Put together information sets about each product, how it is used, downloadable manuals, quantitative competitive analysis, etc. You'll have more content, which is good. You'll be a great place to shop because there's always good info about the products. And you might identify other products that you should be carrying. It's more about the effort that you put in than the money. For money, press releases, niche sites and forums. Put less effort into directory listings and more effort into relevant link acquisitions and exchanges. A few directories are worth money - yahoo, maybe the Microsoft Small Business directory. Other directories come and go in the night and I question their value unless it's a high quality niche directory. Or you could spend 2K and head up to the Search Engine Strategies conference next month (San Jose) or another one in your area. Start working on your laptop occasionally at Starbucks near the local newspaper. Maybe you'll make friends with someone who works there that can help push an article your direction. The same goes for other areas where you might network outside your current circle. If you find someone valuable, tell them - "shoot me an email with your contact info and I'll stop by with something free". All the little things and social interactions might add up to 50 links, but they could be the 50 most valuable links you have - and they will be links your competitors won't be able to easily gain.
I thought underscores where prefferable to %20 (spaces) and even - dashes. What's the current thinking on this? Underscores or dashes? No can do. The application MIGGGHHHHTTTT work with some URL rewrites, but I read at few places that if a page has a least a PR of 3, Google regurlary crawls them, so don't change them. Interesting proposition though. Already have some. A lot of them are advertising deals they did YEAARRRSS ago, with online news sites, the online version of newspapers, so they are grandfathered in at their old rate. It's hard to break into that Kind of advertising. Some of the older websites don't do link exchanges anymore. I've looked. There are no bloggers in my niche. Outdoor Decor? There are bloggers in home decor, but they've all gone very, very commercial, charging thousands of dollars for a text link. One of them said they would revue my site for a fee, and free stuff. I don't mind paying for advertising, that's what I'm after, but you do get a little put out when you find gross price gauging. On the flip side, I have found a great rate for a PR7 site, internal pages run from 3 to 7, that's site wide. The only problem is that they are not related. But over 63k pages. Does that many non-relevant pages seem worth it to you guys? Actually, there are NO relevant pages in wikipedia conserning this niche. I've signed up, and can start one, but it would take a ton of history searching for my products, and I do have articles I can point to. But I'm scared that it might be an uphill battle. Never thought about that. But if one is innactive, or offline, wouldn't have a ZERO PR? I'm in Miami, Florida. Yes we have plenty of wireless hotspots, but we are certainly not the capital of internet culture. But I'll give it a whirl. That's the problem. There are no NON COMPETITORS. Most of the people in my industry sell furniture AND my products, and are not interested in advertising or sending business elsewhere. Look up any home decor site, and they sell outdoor decor as well. Look up any home-improvement site, and you can't find areas relevant enough for a link. It's tough man. I would love some suggestions. Trying to find em. It's tough though. Any suggestions as to a research model? I seem to remember a "search engine" out there that searched Google, MSN, and Yahoo based on PR. You put in a search term and it would bring back relevant sites from all three, in order of PR, from highest to lowest. Simple site, but I lost the url. Anybody know of it? Thanks guys, I would love any other suggestions.
There might not be many bloggers who specialize in outdoor decor, but I bet there are a ton of bloggers who have outdoor decor and who mention it on their blogs. Run through the technoratti tag list for terms that would be relevant. Maybe you can make some helpful suggestions in comments where people have talked about their decor. I know my wife and I both would have appreciated some advice when we went looking and heck, I didn't even think about looking online for an umbrella. If you can't find specialized blogs, find blogs with categories - people who are talking about building pools might leave an opening for you to discuss your products - we have an umbrella on the steps in our pool and it's definitely one of the coolest things about the thing. There are a lot of cool utilities and search engines out there to find bloggers who are writing about what you are looking for. Just be very careful not to be spammy. That kind of reputation could kill your business.
Dashes or just keyword1keyword2.html. Never underscores. Your rankings may go down for the deep pages in the short term (a couple of weeks) but as long as the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages then you will be fine. If google spiders the pages on a regular basis it will find out the pages have moved pretty quick. As has already been mentioned use Technorati to search for blogs. Also go to the buy, sell & trade section of this forum and buy your way into some relevant blogs. Get them to write a review on your products with a link to the product page. Don't do it. You only have a few links and this will just raise a flag. Create a page, it will stamp your authority on your niche.
I have dabbled in furniture and bought some old sites, domains and built some new one's. I would suggest you have a product feed and submit/pay for it to be used on as many price comparison sites as possible, that is a goo dway of getting your products out there, there are quite a few of them in general and quite a few that specialise in furniture.