Ranking My Fledgling Website

Hi Gavin,

There is a bit more to ranking a website than basic on-page/off-page SEO, This is 2017, what worked to manipulate SERPs 15 years ago isn't going to cut it with today's Search Engines. You actually need to have content that deserves to be ranked highly. Google is more focused than ever on ranking content based on usefulness and relevance.

You do not need as many backlinks today to rank well as you might have needed in the past. You just need a couple of highly credible citations from trusted sources and some really useful content and you can rank well, and more importantly, generate highly targeted traffic with great value potential.

The key to getting those highly credible citations is to earn it. You don't earn it by getting citations, that's were your strategy is off. You earn it by creating incredibly useful content, the kind of content that any well meaning person will want to bookmark and share with friends and associates. If you create that type of content, you will have little resistance in your webmaster outreach efforts.

Sure, you are likely to encounter other webmasters that are in it just for citations so that they can attempt to manipulate the search engines, but you will also find webmaster that genuinely care about their readers interests, and trust me when I tell you those are the most credible citations you can earn. Don't chase phony metrics designed to fool search engines, instead, build genuine value into your content and utilize the real value in your promotional efforts.

Which brings me to your website content.

I scanned your content, read your about page and a couple articles. While you have adequate on-page SEO, you content lacks utility value. You have selected interesting topics, however I didn't see much that would be useful to your audience. I don't know much about driveways, but I can tell you that after reading the few articles that you have posted I didn't feel any more confident about how to accomplish the DIY tasks, the content seemed like boilerplate content written by an author that is paid based on word count, not usefulness. I didn't feel like I learned anything that could be useful.

Perhaps if I went through all the content I might find some gems in there, but a quick skim and a couple of articles read and nothing that made me say to myself, "Wow, that is really useful."

There were other usability issues that could easily be improved on ,like a slightly less contrasting design (white text on black background), left aligning text, especially on multi-line text elements, and more useful headings on numbered lists, and so on...

The point is to first build something that another webmaster would be proud to share with his readers then approach him about a link, not every citation is based on exchanging links, and you might have better luck by offering useful content in your outreach campaign.

HTH,

Don Burk

I had a look at your post.sorry to say but the content is very thin.You should probably work more on content for now and then start the ranking process