Seeking advice...

hategate · Joined: 15 May 2008 Posts: 1

Hello, I just registered and would have read many of the posts and think they are very informative. I have a websites and wondering if anyone could help me out in increasing sales (by better SEO, obviously). Any advice is greatly appreciated. Any recommendations on getting guaranteed placement companies that WORK and are not spammers is also appreciated.
Thanks,

SeO · Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 12:43 pm Post subject: Re: Seeking advice...

First, guaranteed placement is a non sens in the SEO field, it's actually a way to determine if an SEO company is or not serious.
If they pretend to provide guaranteed placement, they either lie or play with words, since you can off course show up on Google's first result page with AdWords, it's only a matter of money.
Of course AdWords can be a great part of the success arsenal, but one should always keep in mind that the effect of an add campaign only last the duration of the campaign itself. It's not an SEO investment that can help getting higher in SERPs.

To me, the best possible SEO company is most of the time the webmaster himself, since he's usually the one to better know his sites content and targets.
Off course, one cannot know all or do all by himself, but every webmaster should IMHO, get involved into his website's SEO to at least be able to put money into precise SEO services rather than into supposed complete SEO packs, which are most of the time promising a lot without telling much about the recipes actually involved.

Besides, the time when we could easily trick Search Engines is past, so we should now focus on the long term and rely on natural SEO rather than on wonderful promises.

This being said, you can work on several things to end up better positioned.

First thing is content. Your content must be of a good quality and you should add content on a regular basis (even not too often, but regularly).
Your content should as well be well targeted for the public you wish to reach. This leads us to the marketing field, what is your target, how strong are your competitors, how can you provide with something unique, something your competitors do not offer.
The idea is to please your visitors before pleasing the bots, since usually, what's good for user is good for SEs, especially since SE started to care about traffic and user behaviour.

Talking about an online shop, this mean you need to work well on your product description, and better, provide with related content on the same domain, like reviews of the best products, articles about the usages, blog about the industry news etc ...
The only limit is the effort you'll be ready to put in. You do not necessarily need to write tons of articles, but adding some on a regular basis can be really a good thing.

Then, you should follow this very basic principle : One page, one title, one url, no duplicates. Better if each page has a unique meta description and keywords as well.

URLs can as well play a significant role, nicely rewritten url with targeted keywords can make a significant difference in comparison to dynamic urls.

The other part you can work on is backlinks. You want backlinks from sites (or pages within a site) related to yours in content with the best PageRank.
The amount of backlinks is less and less important in comparison with their quality.

The backlink quest should thus be as well handled on the long run, there is no real point to suddenly obtain 1000 backlinks, and then none for months. Since quality has become so important, it's something you should keep in mind all the time, making shure you won't miss any opportunities to get good ones.
Directories can be good if they are good, but the best always will be to be inventive.

For example, if you are selling, let's say, camping equipment, then you should try to get backlinks from camping websites (not necessarily the general ones, but rather the website of a given camping location), they are plenty, well related, and usually small enough to make the link exchange possible (not like if you where trying to exchange a link with google.com if you see what I mean).
If your product are related to a geographical zone, then, there are probably a lot of small but decent websites related to the same geographical zone you could try to contact.
Another collateral advantage of such link building strategy where you try to obtain links from related websites, even small, is that you'll as well target related visitors. If someone is looking for a camping area, and sees a link to your camping shop, it's a good opportunity to sell something, not only to go up in SERPs. You're this way working on more than on thing Wink

Of course, this means some work, but you can win a lot of time if you first set up a good strategy and then follow it on the long run.