FSHD$$$

Hello, I'm in a situation and I need a few expert opinions. I've gotten myself in a real spot and I'm so worried that something is wrong with the way that my websites are set up.

I'm pretty new in this industry. I put my first website online in 05 and since then I've built a few more good size sites. Being new and learning new things all the time, these past three years have been an educational period for me. I come to this forum and read what you guys are talking about and then I try to do what you all say is successful. (Thank you for that.)

I'm not alone in this, I have a husband who is a industry professional. He's a programmer and webdesigner. He's really good at what he does and he's been doing it for nearly 20 years. He makes the sites for me and then turns me loose to keep them up. He taught me basic HTML and I'm hooked up with an editor program so that I can easily create new pages as I want them and update the existing pages.

I have two sites that I'm worried about. The first site I put online two years ago. It's a 50 or so page homepage with a vbulletin forum. The forums are doing fine. The homepage was a blog and six weeks ago I took down the blog and put up this really nice homepage. Google gave the homepage a page rank of 4 although they have yet to give any of the new pages a page rank. I've got lots of link trades and TONS of organic backlinks. Thousands of those backlinks are from puzzles that my husband made for the site. The puzzles were picked up and passed around all over the world. This made Google see the site as international and so it is. The site caters to USA, CA, UK and AU. It's an impressive site compared to many sites in it's niche.

The site is set up as 4 websites in one. The homepage is the entrance to the USA site however there are tabs where traffic can choose what country they are from. Clicking on their countries tab takes them to a full site just for them (a duplicate of the USA page).

The second site is in the same niche and it's the same site structure as the first site although it is targeted only at the USA. This site went online Christmas day 07. Google just gave us our first page rank of 3.

As I said my husband is a great programmer. He's very knowledgeable and has taught me everything. He and I discuss SEO CONSTANTLY because there is so much conflicting information online. I really hate to insult him but I worry that he's not "up to speed" regarding SEO. He makes websites and software and he's never gotten involved with working with affiliates, sales or internet marketing. That's all my websites are about. My sites ARE making money. Not nearly what I want but I could pay all of our monthly expenses and then some from the revenue that my sites generate with Google and various affiliate companies.

OK with that being said, please help me. If anyone would like to take a look at my sites please PM me for the URLs.

We have keywords (my husband made me a program which lists specific keywords that I've chosen for each page and then grabs keywords from the content of the page), my titles are good, I've made sure that my keywords are sprinkled here and there throughout the pages, I have link exchanges with sites in my niche, I have directory listings, blog posts and social bookmarks I hired the Indian gentlemen to do that for the site that went online last Christmas the other site I did by hand. I've been adding original content (we wrote them) articles to the older site and I hired a guy from this forum who is working on a pres release for the older site.

I fear that my site is not set up properly. I can not get anywhere near the first pages of Google searches for my main keywords. In fact I'm very jealous of a site that is much younger and frankly much less of a site who has managed to capture those words. I've looked at his site and I've looked at the properties of his pages and I can't see how he's so much better than I am in SERPS. He has far less work in his site and hardly any link trades or back links.

What worries me is that my husband says trading links is stupid and meta keywords are not important and a few other things which conflict with so much of what I read here and in other forums. The bottom line is that my sites are not indexed well for my main keywords so something is not right. Someone please PM for my URLs and take a look for me. I would appreciate your help so much. This business is ALL that I want to do and I MUST be successful.

-Matt-

Backlinks are important. Trading links with relevant sites (using your keywords as anchor text) can definitely give you a boost in the SERPs.

Meta tags, I'm not so sure about. I have read a lot of comments from SEO 'experts' saying they are important, and other comments that say Google ignores META tags now. Regardless, I'm sure many smaller SE will read the meta tags and they only take 30 seconds to generate so you may as well put them up.

Keyword density is also important. Write some articles for your website with your chosen keywords. Slap a density of 4-6% on them.

FSHD$$$

Matt, you rock. Thanks so much for looking at my sites. I appreciate it and I repped you.

Davros

Keyword density is NOT important at all, pretty much.

Obviously include your keywords on the page, but working out a percentage is mildly retarded.

FSHD$$$ if you send me a PM with the URLs to your sites I'll take a look and give you some recommendations.

patrick24601

I think everything you mentioned is a factor. Not any one of them will solve all your issues, but not having one or the other (keyword density, back links, etc) might hurt you.

-Matt-

Yes, keyword density is fairly important. You ever hear of article marketing? Keyword density is the main SEO technique applied there.

Davros

You give me evidence that that's true and I'll agree with you - I've yet to see anything that convinces me it's true.

As for being a retard? Well, my mum's always said I'm special...

FSHD$$$

You guys, LOL!

You're both pretty great for helping a girl out and neither one of you is a retard. Aside from this keyword density issue you both gave me the same advice via PM so you're on the same page, LOL!

I've tried to rep you guys for helping me but I don't see the reps on your profiles. Maybe there's some noob rule that I haven't read regarding giving reps to other members.

FSHD$$$

You know...you're not just answering some woman from a forum sites questions, you're helping me fix problems that will directly effect my income and my ability to live a good life and care for my family. I can't even begin to thank you guys enough for this.

-Matt-

Keyword Density - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization

" » Importance of Keyword Density in SEO" by Online Marketing

@FSHD - your welcome.

erect

I tend to agree with your husband. I wouldn't consider link trades to be very valuable, perhaps for indexing (volume of links) but not for ranking. Meta-tags are useless.

Now if you want to do link trades, I would consider laundering that link juice by doing the trades with some random hubpages or squidoo pages. Perhaps after they pass the links to you the profile of the links might not be so dirty. Drop in a few wikipedia and other authority links in with the article ... this might help confuse the algo.

+/- Rep is under their avatar by the way.

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FSHD$$$

The rep things did work. it's the orange boxes. I was looking at the trader marks. I got one of those when I did some business with someone on this site and I thought they were reps. DER....

So cool.

FSHD$$$

He'll love that you said that. I asked him to come on here and chat about this but at this point he says so many people have so many different opinions on this stuff and I'm too busy right now to explain myself and I don't want to argue with anyone. He also said that we can make the changes that these guys are suggesting if I want to. it's sure not going to hurt a thing. (He's a nice guy.)

This is interesting and I intend to figure out what you're talking about. I'm sure that my husband will know. I love learning about different tricks to do to get an edge. This forum is so good for that.

Thanks, I found the orange boxes. I've never read the rules or instructions for this site, I've been a member for a year and when I joined I never thought I'd have enough knowledge or balls to post on this site. I guess I should go read the rules, lol!

This site is way better than any class or text book.

Bolotomus

Hi, I'm the aforementioned husband.
Some background: The site is basically in two sections, the forum and the homepage area. (I call the "homepage area" the actual homepage, all of the country subsections, plus all the sub-pages.) The forum is a Vbulletin.

I think there are two key points here.

First, the homepage structure changed radically about two months ago. Google is still busy playing catch-up and they haven't indexed the new pages. (Actually a few pages have shown up in the sandbox just in the last few days.)

Second, the forum is really not doing too bad, a few months ago it got about 1500 unique visitors daily, now it's getting over 2000 a day. I don't know how good that is for this niche, but it doesn't seem too bad.

A few months ago we were getting about 1,000 unique visitors/daily to the blog-homepage. Then we gutted the homepage area and replaced it with HTML. Immediately the homepage area dropped down to just a few dozen visitors a day. So now our traffic is coming in through the forum almost exclusively. This was to be expected.

Now, two months after the big homepage area redesign, Google still hasn't indexed the new work. I think a few of our pages have recently shown up in the sandbox but for the most part Google is taking their sweet time. My rule of thumb is to wait 3-6 months, and it hasn't even been three months yet, so I'm not worried at all. I think the HTML is excellent SEO, no fluff and lots of indexable content, it's just that we haven't waited long enough to reap the rewards. My wife however is frantic thinking that something must be terribly wrong otherwise Google should have already fallen in love with our new pages. My opinion is that the best thing to do right now is chill. Just wait a few more months and see how Google indexes the new pages. She agrees, but only for a while. How can I put this gently, "waiting is not her forte."

Bolotomus

Hi, I'm the aforementioned husband.
Some background: The site is basically in two sections, the forum and the homepage area. (I call the "homepage area" the actual homepage, all of the country subsections, plus all the sub-pages.) The forum is a Vbulletin.

I think there are two key points here.

First, the homepage structure changed radically about two months ago. Google is still busy playing catch-up and they haven't indexed the new pages. (Actually a few pages have shown up in the sandbox just in the last few days.)

Second, the forum is really not doing too bad, a few months ago it got about 1500 unique visitors daily, now it's getting over 2000 a day. I don't know how good that is for this niche, but it doesn't seem too bad.

A few months ago we were getting about 1,000 unique visitors/daily to the blog-homepage. Then we gutted the homepage area and replaced it with HTML. Immediately the homepage area dropped down to 100/daily. So now our traffic is coming in through the forum almost exclusively. This was to be expected.

Now, two months after the big homepage area redesign, Google still hasn't indexed the new work. I think a few of our pages have recently shown up in the sandbox but for the most part Google is taking their sweet time. My rule of thumb is to wait 3-6 months, and it hasn't even been three months yet, so I'm not worried at all. I think the HTML is excellent SEO, no fluff and lots of indexable content, it's just that we haven't waited long enough to reap the rewards. My wife however is frantic thinking that something must be terribly wrong otherwise Google should have already fallen in love with our new pages. My opinion is that the best thing to do right now is chill. Just wait a few more months and see how Google indexes the new pages. She agrees, but only for a while. How can I put this gently, "waiting is not her forte."

About link trades:

I never said link trades are "stupid", I just think that they can only help a tiny little bit at best, and in the worst case could hurt severely (950 penalty eeek!).

This site in question actually has an assload of incoming links, maybe 30-40 of them are due to link trades, and the other 2000 are organic. So all the hours spent on link trading here have added about an extra 2 or 3% to our link juice. So yeah, in our case I consider it a waste of time. For somebody with a complete zero of a site I suppose it could help get them on the map, but once your website has grown even a little bit, it's just a lot of work for very little potential benefit.

The good news is that we don't need to worry about laundering our link trades, due to all of the organic links anything we accumulate is pretty much pre-laundered, if you see what I mean.

erect

I agree, 2% of the links is too small of a number to worry about. no real help either way. And yes, that 950 strike is a big one.

I disagree about 3-6 months though. Perhaps I misunderstood but I though there were <100 pages in the "home" section and that's what we are talking about. That should be easily devoured and be updated in the index in just a few weeks since you have a decent number of links. Sandboxes won't apply to this since your site already has decent authority.

If the pages aren't indexed work on a sitemap of them (either rolling on the homepage or static as a link). If they are, try and build a few quick and fresh links to them ... ranking in no time.

For FHSD$$$ ... what I suggested is a light weight version of this. I know you are not talking about his extent of automation but I feel what Eli says about cleaning up the links makes total sense. You are basically distancing your self 1 step further away from a "bad neighborhood" if that's what you guys consider link trading to be.

For both of you guys, How's working together on this going? How many hours do you work together on this daily? My wife has plans to come home shortly to help out with my stuff, she brings nothing technical to the table but is insanely organized and well educated in customer shit that I just don't care that much about. She's going to bring a different element to my work all together.

I'm personally worried about her hurting my creativity & productivity. I hate to say it but she might be too high maintenance (:]) for me to get anything done. For the hubby, PM me if your answer isn't suitable for public viewing.

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FSHD$$$

erect,

we work together 24/7. He has his business and I have mine. It works out great. He's my best buddy and we work and goof all day. it's cool. Like you and your wife, he's the tech guy and my background is sales and marketing. I really love learning about all this geek shit though. I can't get enough.

The thing is I'm bound and determined to do this and to get it right. Like I said earlier, my little empire of sites is making money but I KNOW that I could be making a whole lot more. My goal is to master what I'm doing and use my forum to launch viral sites in order to collect data to do emailing. It's one foot in front of the other.

I have 5 newsletters collecting data right now for my future email endeavors. I'm trying very hard to do everything just right, double opt in everything and absolute disclosure.

I'll get there. I've always been number one in every office that I've ever worked in. Now it's time to do it for myself.

Bolotomus

Is it really just a few weeks to wait? I've noticed that behavior on a behemoth website I run--in fact there I've seen pages soar in the search engine the very same day I make them. I always thought that was just because of the site's stature, I figured for the small fries the old 3-6 month rule was still in effect.

And so I just did a more thorough check, and sure enough the new homepage area (about 50 pages) has been indexed now. I did some tests to see if they show up in the SERPs and yeah, they do, usually in the #1 or #2 position if you do the obvious 3-word searches. For 2-word searches it's hit or miss. I've never seen the site come up on the first page for any 1-word search, c'est la vie.

I didn't notice the traffic earlier because it's small compared to the forum, but now that I look more carefully, yeah we're getting some traffic to the new pages. To add to the confusion, this company that hosts the website has a really obnoxious logfile setup that makes it almost impossible for me to see what's going on, but that's another story.

erect

Yes geeky stuff is fun, especially when you throw in money. Every site could always do better, don't get down on this point just make more of them. Volume is sometimes better than quality ... and it's almost always more stable as far as traffic and income goes. It's the whole not putting all your eggs in one basket thing.

Bolo, glad to see all is indexed and working well. 1 word phrases just aren't going to happen, but there is enough random traffic for all of us out there.

Glad to hear working together is good stuff. It sounds very productive if done correctly. Plus there is time for quickies always ... that's definitely a plus.

Good luck

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erect

update on the google indexing delay thing.

Monday I fucked up a script and google had some error messages displayed in the SERPs ... woops, big fuck up. I found out Thursday and fixed it. Just checked, the error messages are gone .... we're talking about 2 day index updates at this point.

Just as a measuring stick, this particular site has about 2,800 incoming links and 15k pages indexed as well. So we're talking apples for apples here.

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Davros

Read this: SEOmoz | Rewriting the Beginner's Guide: Part 4 Continued - Keyword Usage & Targeting

I'm not saying don't mention the keyword, I'm saying don't work out some stupid percentage - it's a waste of time.

FSHD$$$

YES! More, More, More!

I will make many more sites. I have 3 income producing larger sites right now and 4 domains that I bought waiting to be developed. As soon as I get done puttering around with this project we'll get another one going.

The first site that I put online is full of great content, it took me 2 months to write the thing. I loaded it up with Google ads and a few affiliate banners and turned it loose. I NEVER even look at it. I just watch the stats and it makes me money every month. I need a dozen more sites like that one.

-Matt-

All right, I'll concede on this. That article had some good points.

For the sake of tradition however, I will continue using a KWD of 3-5% when I do article marketing. It has been working for me over the years. I am #1 for many of my keywords and 90% of my articles are on the first page of Google for their keywords.

Bolotomus

I've seen that behavior as well, but changes to pages already indexed and adding brand spanking new pages are two different things. Anyhow, I don't worry about it, because there is no way (to my knowledge) to accelerate the process. So why lose sleep over it? When it happens, it happens.

Majic

Some people have said meta tags are not important well this is sort of true. I made the mistake of leaving meta description blank in a recent seo review.

In the current google update i'm getting great improvements in SERPS however the search results 'intro' in google are listing my menu structure.So i guess meta description should have something short and snappy to look good although this seems to have no bearing on actual raw serps placement.

yoink*gasp*

Having your website as optimized as possible is obviously important. Try changing little things around, like titles, <h#> text, and even your meta tags. I disagree though that 3 to 6 months is acceptable. I have sites built and indexed in a matter of days, and I get decent rankings in 4 months or so. From what you're describing, Google hasn't even indexed your new structure.

Try doing regular article submissions with your keywords in the anchor text. This won't necessarily help your rankings, but it should get Google to come crawl your new pages. Else, what I would do if I were in your position, is begin developing sister sites with the purpose of gaining authority to link back to your main site.

When I try and hit a niche I'll do so with 5-10 sites, with one site being the money-maker (the site with the good domain), and the rest being little more than content hubs that direct links and traffic to the main site. I host them all on separate web hosts located in different locations and build links to each of them independantly. I'll spend a solid two months developing all of the sites and ensuring that things are running smoothly before I move on, and generally I find I have decent results.

Another thing you may want to do is to perhaps post "guest content" on other websites in exchange for a link. If the websites you're posting on are related, and they have decent link power, adding another 30 or 40 high-powered links may do well for your rankings.

Let us know how it pans out.

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MDSandB

Here is a something that helped my site. I added my blog on Technorati. Added some of my like sites friends blogs on Technorati as friends and gained authority on Technorati. Wrote articles on my blog everyday (new articles). More and more people approached me to add them in Technoratiy. I've reached a level where its is at 87 authority. Took about 8 months of time doing that though as i wasnt concentrating much on it. But, it rocks now. I did a plenty of things along with it. But most of the affiliate sales are from the viewers who reads my content on Technorati. I ping using Technorati always as i update the content and it gets picked up by Google real fast.

If am not wrong, you are talking about the site i worked around Christmas time last year? If yes, your site had VERY GOOD potential of making u chunks of money. Am not saying do what i did for my sites. Something that clicked for me may not click for you. But, its definately worth trying. All you need is Inital Technorati exchanges on similar niche sites.

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