The Ultimate Question
-
This is probably going to look bad, but Im going to do it anyway.
Ive owned my own business for over twenty five years. Due to the economy and a health crisis, my business has come to an end. Im left pretty much with nothing except my family, which is on shakey grounds as well.
anyway.
Ive been working on the IM, SEO thing for about two years. Ive made some money, but nothing that would make a difference to my situation.
I now have a site in a competitive niche. The site is rated A by the app here on seomoz. But my site is lacking in authority backlinks. I write my own posts, about two a day, and honestly, it is of much better quality than those ranking . My site stays right around #11. Every other day, the site goes to #7 or 8. When that happens, I make between 300-400 a day. Then it falls back to 11.
So the on site is good, rated A here.
My site is speedy
Not enough backlinks
The content is good
I was foolish enough to believe the G story about backlinks not being important. Concentrate on the content. All of that crapola. The sites that are ranking well have all the typical xrumer links. Totally not related links. Junk. And from what Ive seen, I believe the sites ranking 1-3 are making about $1000. a day.
So you can imagine what being this close, after losing so much is doing to me.
So....
Right now I am just writing content, pinging, social bookmarking and submitting rss feeds daily.
Does anyone have any real information on how to bump my site up in rankings. Please, no stories about guest blogging, or attempts to sell me your SEO service
I know I would do it for someone else and I have many times in the past.
If you can help me, please reread, and contact me. I wish you all the best. Sorry for the melodrama.
-
I think it is very difficult to judge your own site objectively. I tend to snap at my wife when she is critical of something on my website (although I am more tolerable with other people weirdly). It sounds like you need fresh eyes on the situation. I am no expert at SEO although I know enough to know when something is not right. I am pretty new to SEOmoz so I am not sure what the rules area about sharing sites etc but if I have your web address I would be happy to give you feedback on your campaign at no charge (if this is allowed) and whether there are any obvious steps that could improve it. I am not looking for SEO business so this is in no way going to lead to me selling you anything. From what you are saying though it sounds like you need to divert some of your time from content creation and syndication to developing relationships with authoritative sites so that they link to you although without looking at your site etc it is hard to make any solid recommendations.
It sounds like you are in a situation where you could really benefit from a professional SEO but do not have the resources to fund one and I really feel for you with this. If your assumptions are correct it is very easy to see how in as little as two months getting the right SEO expertise to add value to your efforts could really pay for itself many times over as if $1000 or $2000 a month makes you an extra $200 plus a day it very quickly pays for itself.
-
You ask for no stories about guest posting, but at present I think this is one of the best weapons an SEO can bring to bear. I have had superb success with guest posting over the past 6-9 months which has resulted in top 3 rankings across all my main keywords.
If you shared your URL, we would be able to make some real critique that may uncover some underlying factors that are hindering our site.
Best of luck with which ever strategy you move forward with.
-
Justin my answer will be short and smile and i am pretty sure that you will not like it too much!
Now when you said you don’t have enough links, so you have two options left
- Similar to others you can also order junk links
- Or focus more on quality links pointing back to your website (that can and cannot be guest posting)
Move for option one will make your condition worst, you might even fall from #11 spot (dangerous option)
Moving for option two might take a bit of a time like (a month or more) but you will move to page one with stability and you will make more money from it.
The choice is always yours but keep yourself updated with the result of each option available.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
302 Redirect Question
After running a site crawl. I found two 302 redirects. The two redirects go from: site.com to www.site.com & site.com/products to www.site.com/products How do I fix the 302 redirect and change it to a 301 redirect? I have no clue where to start. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Ryan_1320 -
Question about spammy links to 404 Pages we never created ...
FYI I'm a beginner within the company, so this might be a basic question, but ...I was going through open site explorer and checking www.partnermd.com for opportunities to reclaim links and I found a bunch of 404 pages that we never created that had nothing to do with the business. Out of curiousity, I plugged in one of the weird links like this one:http://www.partnermd.com/images/2015-best-space-heater-best-wers.html into open site explorer and found several bad spammy links pointing to it. When I clicked on one of them I got a notice that the site might have been hacked.I did some research and it looks like Google doesn't penalize you for spammy links to 404 pages, but how do we prevent this from occurring in the first place if possible?
Technical SEO | | WhittingtonConsulting1 -
Meta Title Tags - Quick question!
Hi all, Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them. Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as: 'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter) This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages. A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of: 'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers' I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines). What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate1 -
301 redirect homepage question
Hi If i have a homepage which is available at both www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com// should i 301 the // version to the first version. Im curious as to whether slashes are taking into consideration Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
SEOMoz Crawler vs Googlebot Question
I read somewhere that SEOMoz’s crawler marks a page in its Crawl Diagnostics as duplicate content if it doesn’t have more than 5% unique content.(I can’t find that statistic anywhere on SEOMoz to confirm though). We are an eCommerce site, so many of our pages share the same sidebar, header, and footer links. The pages flagged by SEOMoz as duplicates have these same links, but they have unique URLs and category names. Because they’re not actual duplicates of each other, canonical tags aren’t the answer. Also because inventory might automatically come back in stock, we can’t use 301 redirects on these “duplicate” pages. It seems like it’s the sidebar, header, and footer links that are what’s causing these pages to be flagged as duplicates. Does the SEOMoz crawler mimic the way Googlebot works? Also, is Googlebot smart enough not to count the sidebar and header/footer links when looking for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | ElDude0 -
Back Link Question
Hi Folks, Our domain (www.alabu.com) has been around since 2000. We've accumulated a lot of back links over the years, many of which I don't recognize and didn't ask for. I've been reading on here recently about "cleaning up" back links. I do see a lot of ours that just aren't relevant and I don't know why they decided to link to us. We haven't gotten a warning from google or anything like that, but I wonder, how do I know if we could benefit from cleaning up our back links? Is there a benefit to it even if google hasn't warned us? Thanks! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
301 Redirect Question for trailing slash & index.php
1. Can you show me how to do a redirect for forhttp://www.exercisebiology.com to http://www.exercisebiology.com/ I want to add the trailing slash. 2. Also how to redirect from http://www.exercisebiology.com/in... to http://www.exercisebiology.com/. When I tried to redirect the index.php last time, I couldn't login to the forums. Everytime when someone tries to login to my forums, it takes them the to the home page. I did it through the hostgator CP. I am thinking someone could help me here. Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | anoopbal0 -
Site Architecture Question on Ties.com - Navigation
I'm looking at the navigation structure of Ties.com. They have various categories like color, pattern, length, brand, etc. Once you click one of the main categories you get the option to "Narrow Your Choices". The structure starts like this: (URL 1) ties.com/black-ties Then when you narrow your search you get this: (URL 2) ties.com/animal-print**+**black-ties (notice + sign) My question: how does Google see URL 2? Is it just like any other link?
Technical SEO | | ErikDster0