I first learned of SEO in 2008 so it has been five years now. I started my marketing company that same year. Along the way I have had heard lots of options and I have even made many success with in SEO as well. I have spend thousands of dollars on different projects too but my returns seam to have been marginal if anything. This year I moved one of my main project websites over from Google sites into word press because I was told from many ppl this would help me. This has been far from the truth or at least for me that is. I had a Google page rank of #3 on Google sites now I have PR#0. I had many issues with this move working with a few or a list of wrong ppl. At this point I am working with a really nice guy but after 3 plus months we have little successful results I can say is working. *He is telling me that back linking is basically dead now with Google's new updates. *He is telling me that we need to do PPC even at a small amount to better our ranking results as an option of his and in a way that makes sense but I wanted to ask some of you guys here for options and feed back on this theory. *I have many success with social networking with PR#5, PR4, PR3, PR2, etc. for back linking to my sites as well along with thousands of good quality back links to my site. *I also am doing a blog weekly now. *I paid for every single page of my 200 plus page site to be onpage SEO work done and he recently told me that we dont want that meta data anymore and went with a different plugin called yost that did an auto eval from our content. I used yost a few years ago and is still on other of our sites but we had it mixed with all in one SEO plug as well. *I know we want to be listed in more local directories like yellow pages, yelp, google places, etc and this is something we are working on as well but is this such a big factor in SEO now ? I would love to hear some feed back on my situation and the things I am being told to confirm I am going in the right direction. Thanks in advance.
Hi MichaelAaronTaylor, I completely understand your frustration. You've tried many things and listened to the "gurus" but still cannot get any traction in the SERPs. I never really bought into the whole "WordPress is great for SEO" concept. Sure, it can help if you do not know how to properly SEO a static HTML or a PHP-driven site, but I seriously doubt that Google "prefers" WordPress over any other site that adheres to its Webmaster Guidelines. Its just that WordPress is coded in a way that makes it structurally correct in Google's eyes and provides an efficient way for the site owner/developer to do things the "right" way, especially with the aid of good plug-ins. With that being said, I do not think you should now move away from WordPress, it will still work for you - I just don't think WordPress has any under-the-hood magical formula that makes it superior to any other properly optimized framework. I don't believe backlinking is dead, but I do believe that your backlinks now have to be from quality sites and relevant. Also, "bad" backlinks can hurt you. Backlinking will likely never go away because that is the foundation which Google founded its entire search engine around. I do believe that getting listed in the directories you mentioned will help because those will be considered quality sites that are linking to you. The two pieces of advice I have for you at the moment are as follows: 1) Read through Google's Webmaster Guidelines and understand them. Do this yourself so you know if your hired help is doing the right thing and advising you properly. Also go to Matt Cutts' Youtube channel and watch all of his videos. Really spend some time learning exactly what is is Google is looking for in a site. 2) Try to reverse engineer your competitor's websites. Find the top 10 websites that you consider your competition and see how much content they have and the quality of the content, what backlinks they have, what framework they are using. And don't just look at their backlinks, look at the sites they are linking out to. Do you see that they are following all of Google's Webmaster Guidelines or can you find some areas where they are violating those guidelines? I do believe if you will take the time and do these two tasks, it will start to open your eyes as to why your are experiencing your SEO troubles. These two tasks likely will not give you all the answers. But you have to understand this, there are millions of websites and billions of webpages indexed by Google. And not every page, site, or niche will rank exactly alike. A particular site structure for one niche may not work at all with another niche. This is the reason for reverse engineering your competitors and not just following "general SEO wisdom." Your niche is your niche and you need to figure out how Google wants to SERP-out that niche. Hope this helps and good luck with your ranking endeavors!