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Small Biz advice

by Attrition
11 replies
Hi

We launched a few months back a small niche travel website. We are trying to follow the best practices we know for SEO to improve our rankings. We have mainly focused on

* submitting to search engines and directories
* putting out about 50 articles for two target keywords
* Manually created some social profiles
* Manually commented on a few blogs

All of this has actually only lead to around 230 links showing in Yahoo! and 380 showing in Google. So although we are slowly creaping up the rankings, we are some way off page 1 for the high volume terms on Google.

Currently we are only getting around 5 organic visits a day and ppc is currently supplementing our traffic short fall.

We have a couple of tools in IBP and WebCEO that help. And i have read countless reviews of products such SENuke, and Nuclear Link Blaster but im a little wary as they seem to be more catered to affiliate websites and blogs and worried about getting our business penalized by some border line techniques. Im also unsure whether my own technical capabilities will allow me to get the best out of these tools.

We have outsourced some work and will be getting around 250 links per month being submitted through articles.

We are also planning on launching a blog to support our website in January which i think will help with our rankings.

My questions to the forum would be:

1) what more should i be doing?
2) what can i do to speed up the rankings?
3) what more can i outsource or automate to speed things up?
4) what tools or products or automation techniques should i purchase to help with my efforts?
5) any other advice or tips?
6) One other question - im not keen on reciprocal links as i dont want to take away from the business feel of our website and also dont want to link to people in the same niche due to competition. How else can i build links without paying or using reciprocal links?

It can all seem a little overwhelming when trying to work out whether any of the products will really help or just another crock. I am also very weary of doing anything that might get me blacklisted or sandbox either through the technique being black hat or my experience meaning i do it incorrectly and get penalised.

There are obviously a lot of gurus out there and i believe different techniques are more benefical depending on your objective. E.g. mass traffic to sell a affiliate product over a small business trying to carve out its niche. Most of the advice seems to cater for the former but would be good to hear advise for small businesses as well as i think it would benefit others on the forum.

Look forward to hearing your replies and appreciate you taking the time to do so.

Thanks in advance
#advice #biz #link building #ranking #seo #small #small business
  • Profile picture of the author Rich Struck
    You might want to try looking for some busy travel sites and see if they have any ad spots for sale. You might also want to look into AdWords.
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    • Profile picture of the author Attrition
      Hi

      Thanks for your reply. Although I think you may have miss understood my question. I'm looking for advice around give an injection to our seo strategy so we can gain, quicker, higher ranks based on the information above.

      We are doing adwords and lodging with directories, particular travel ones.

      Really want to speed up our efforts and what tools would be best for our business type

      Thanks again
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      • Profile picture of the author scott g
        How many articles are you guys doing a month/week/day? Make sure the ANCHOR text of your hyperlinks are your "keywords."

        Submit to:
        Social Bookmarking: All the pages on your site - All of your articles:
        (register for all of the services)

        Use targeted search strings to find blogs to comment on:
        • "keyword" "post a comment" inurl:blog name email website
        • "keyword" "post a comment" inurl:.edu name email website
        • "keyword" "post a comment" inurl:.gov name email website
        Forum profile work... I guess... Not a fan of that though... I'll just outsource LOL! But do get involved in communities and forums and contribute. Forum signatures.

        • AOL Answers (dofollow)
        • Yahoo! Answers
        Oh, another good one is when you do searches in Google for keywords of junk related to your site/niche, click on the "More" tab on the left - You can then select "Discussions" and/or "Blogs." I've found A LOT of great place to leave comments doing searches like this.

        I create RSS Feeds with ALL of the links back to my backlinks (if that makes sense) and blast the feeds to RSS Aggregators... I also meta index and ping my backlinks... Whatever it takes to help the Search Engines find my backlinks faster (if at all). You're not going to be give credit for all of your backlinks, that's just how it is.

        I'm tired of typing. Hope this helps a little and makes a little sense?!?!

        CHEERS!!!
        Signature
        scott g
        "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve."
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    • Profile picture of the author Marx Vergel Melencio
      Hi Attrition! I'm sure it's quite logical for me to assume you need to increase the targeted traffic of your website and also widen the exposure of your business, brand name and links as well as to establish your business and its credibility as a friendly expert source of relevant, timely, popular and useful info/advice/content offering unique benefits to your target audience. These things will improve your sales and conversions (subscription signups, bookmarks, organic links, downloads, ad clicks, filled out CPA offers, etc.), and so improving the search engine rankings of your website and pages for your target keywords will also help you gain more targeted search traffic.

      For onsite and onpage search engine optimization as well as search engine ranking improvement, perhaps you can identify some points in my post here if it could possibbly benefit you in terms of your objectives. For target traffic generation, maybe some points in my post here can help.

      Hope some points outlined by my 2 posts I mentioned provides you with beneficial utility.


      Marx
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      • Deep Learning & Machine Vision Engineer: ARIA Research (Sydney, AU)
      • Founder: Grayscale (Manila, PH) & SEO Campaign Manager: Kiteworks, Inc. (SF, US)
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  • Profile picture of the author xenergy
    Hey, below are my 2-cents to your SEO efforts. Not sure whether you already doing this or not :

    1. Create deeplinking - Always create backlinks to all of your inner pages, not just homepage.

    2. Natural backlinking - If you target specific keywords, don't just use that particular keywords as anchor text. Give it 80/20 rules: Use 80% your targeted keywords, and other 20% related keywords. Example: You target "Travel Asia". From 100 links, only use 80 with "Travel Asia" anchor text, while the other 20 use OTHER related keywords i.e. Bali Travel, Japan Travel, Visit Asia, etc. This is also applicable to your inner page backlinking strategy.

    3. Article Marketing is my personal secret weapon to build relevant backlinks to my websites. Use service such as SEOLinkVine and UniqueArticleWizard to accelerate your natural link building using articles. You may want to refer to Steve's automation service as well (refer to my signature).

    4. Be natural in your content: Instead of using page Title "Travel Asia", use "Travel To Exotic Asia Destinations". Remember, Google LOVES natural.

    5. Creating regular quality and unique content in your website i.e. blogging about Asia destinations.

    6. Create free giveaway that can create "Social Buzz" to your websites. i.e. discount coupons, free travel ebook guide, etc. Google will take "special notes" to websites that have many visitors from social media. This method also will improve your Alexa ranks.

    7. Internal linking: Use "anchor text" as your primary way of linking between each pages. Don't use images and Flash (worse).

    8. Add images into your content, but remember to use "keyword" as the image's filename. Google is indexing images base on its filename. One of my websites got hundreds of visitors daily just from "Goole Image" traffic. Not the best type of traffic, but it helps.

    Hope it helps. Good luck with your SEO.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin_Hutto
    Travel is a very competitive niche, many of the top sites in the niche have hundreds of thousands if not millions of links to them. You are not going to outrank expedia or travelocity or something like that unless you have a monster SEO budget. You can beat them playing small ball with extreme long tail keywords, but you are still going to have to ramp up everything you are doing tenfold at least to beat their site's authority even for those vulnerable keywords.

    As for specific strategies that you arent using - buy great directory links like: yahoo, BOTW, business.com, etc... Getting those links will help. You should also start trying to develop a guest blogging strategy to get some anchor text links in content of high pr blogs.
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  • Profile picture of the author nelaffiliate
    Write more articles and submit them at the top 10 article directories. But, when writing the articles you shouldn't only target you two main keywords.

    Target lots of other low traffic, long tail keywords. These keywords will together bring you more traffic. They will also get you on the first page of Google faster.
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    "King of Fast Video Keyword Research"... Get Easy to rank, Zero competition keywords today. Rank your video on Youtube first page in minutes! Visit: https://www.fiverr.com/nel11111/do-v...yword-research

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    • Profile picture of the author Attrition
      Thanks all for the responses, all very useful.

      In response to the point about expedia etc. We are targeting a niche but popular destination. The likes of expedia aren't actually my worry and they dont rank that well. Our compition is actually a couple of websites also targeting the area. They aren't great websites and we offer a lot more but they have been around for years. They have around 13,000 links so far so its not an insurmoutable figure. Just founding it hard to build up the numbers we want, quick enough...

      Its great advice on the articles and although we have outsourced this to get a reasonable amount done on a regular basis. There are some good tips to maximize these.

      Lastly, in terms of products or tools for SEO - Are they any you would all recommend to add to the arsenal?

      Thanks again
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      • Profile picture of the author Auto Glass
        Great advice from all so far, im still knew at this myself. Submit to Dmoz and get as many backlinks as you can seemed to have helped my windshield replacement shop in Dallas.
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        Auto Glass Allen
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        • Profile picture of the author dadamson
          Originally Posted by Auto Glass View Post

          Great advice from all so far, im still knew at this myself. Submit to Dmoz and get as many backlinks as you can seemed to have helped my windshield replacement shop in Dallas.
          Yes, getting on Dmoz can give you some great credibility. But often, your application can get rejected.

          If you are a traditional brick & mortar type company you will stand a higher chance but rejection is often the case.

          When submitting to Dmoz, your site is actually reviewed by a human and rejected or approved for listing. If you don't show up within about a month it's safe to say you were not approved.

          I have a reminder set for each of my sites to resubmit to Dmoz each month until approved (you get a different editor each time, so you should get approved eventually).

          -Dave
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  • Profile picture of the author dadamson
    Hi Attrition,

    What you are already doing is ok for a very low competition niche but I would suggest it will take many months to outrank the sites you want to outrank.

    Firstly, drop the search engine and directory submissions. They are a waste of time.

    Article submissions are great for boosting your rankings. Just remember to include 2x anchor-text links back to your site in the resource box (you could use one link to your site and one link to a previously submitted article to strengthen your backlinks).

    As Scott G mentioned, these are the best article directories to use and the best investment for your time:

    Article Base
    Article Dashboard
    Amazines
    EZA
    IdeaMarketers
    GoArticles
    Gather Articles
    the Free Online Library
    Article Click
    Article Alley
    Article Blast
    etc.....

    As far as software such as SEOQuake is concerned, yes, you could definitely be taking advantage of this.

    SEOQuake is one of the best free software programs for SEO, it gives you loads of information on various websites.

    Google can penalize YOU for using it, it will not penalize your site. You may experience slow searches and searching more than 10 listings per page disabled for a few hours. It will not penalize your rankings as the software will not be associated with your site, you are just using it for Google search to gain URLs.

    That said, once you download the software, head over to YouTube and search for configurations of SEOQuake to stop penalization. There are some great tutorials to show you how to set up SEOQuake so that it doesn't pull to much information from Google.

    There are some good tuts around to show you how to use the software, but I have recently written a blog on my site about how I use it to get high PR blog comment and gov/edu link backlinks. - Creating High PR Blog Backlinks

    PR is Google Page Rank - it is the rating that Google gives some websites based on the trust they have, it is not directly related to a websites ranking. These high PR backlinks are worth much more than standard backlinks to Google.. This is why SEOQuake is a great software, it allows you to sort your Google/Yahoo/Bing, etc. results by PR.

    Ok, enough of SEOQUake.

    To break it down, the best investment of your time is backlinking. The best way to backlinking is Article Marketing, and High PR Blog/Gov/Edu Backlinking (just like PR, the SEs reward backlinks from .gov and .edu sites).

    You may find that your money will be better spent by outsourcing an SEO team to do your backlinking on a larger scale. Depending on how your PPC campaign is going (in relation to traffic to conversions/leads ratios) you may wish to think long-term SEO rather than short-term traffic.

    Best of luck,
    -Dave
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