Backlinks and Google SEO

Hello,

I launched my website for my small business about 6 months ago and
thanks to the great education I've gained by lurking here (many thanks
to all the regular posters) I'm doing very well for my keyword searches
(Hawaii playground equipment) on MSN and Yahoo. I knew this going in,
but now I have first hand experience that Yahoo and MSN seem to be much
more concerned about content than Google is. I now need to concentrate
my marketing plan on addressing my relative obscurity in Google.

I know my back link quantity could be improved and unless someone else
could share another opinion, I am pretty sure this is why I am not
doing well on Google and I am doing well on MSN and Yahoo. I have only
submitted my site to relevant directories and other places where I
could gain relevant traffic (shouldn't this be the idea?). Since those
avenues are all pretty well exhausted, I've become convinced that I am
going to have to do "something else" to increase the links to my site
to increase my SEO for Google.

So here's what I have come up with:

1. Hire someone to sit at a desk and document all the back links to the
sites on the first 20-25 pages of my keyword search and submit my site
to them. The problem I see with this is the "reciprocal link"
requirement. I want to keep my site relevant and can't have a million
links that have nothing to do with my products and services.

2. Hire a SEO firm to do it for me. The downside of this is the lack
of control of who is linking to me and the cost involved.

3. Pay cash for links. The problem with this is cash and the fact that
I don't have an unlimited supply of it. I have a finite budget for
Internet marketing that doesn't allow me to pay $19.95 to $250.00 for a
link to my site.

4. Submit to the link farming services and cross my fingers. Until
now, I've tried to do everything above board with my site and I see
this as kind of a sleazy solution. However, looking at the sites ahead
of me, I am pretty sure they've used this avenue to gain SEO and I am
not sure I can amass the numbers I need with a more legit approach.

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net

I launched my website for my small business about 6 months ago and
thanks to the great education I've gained by lurking here (many thanks
to all the regular posters) I'm doing very well for my keyword searches
(Hawaii playground equipment) on MSN and Yahoo. I knew this going in,
but now I have first hand experience that Yahoo and MSN seem to be much
more concerned about content than Google is. I now need to concentrate
my marketing plan on addressing my relative obscurity in Google.

I know my back link quantity could be improved and unless someone else
could share another opinion, I am pretty sure this is why I am not
doing well on Google and I am doing well on MSN and Yahoo. I have only
submitted my site to relevant directories and other places where I
could gain relevant traffic (shouldn't this be the idea?). Since those
avenues are all pretty well exhausted, I've become convinced that I am
going to have to do "something else" to increase the links to my site
to increase my SEO for Google.

So here's what I have come up with:

1. Hire someone to sit at a desk and document all the back links to the
sites on the first 20-25 pages of my keyword search and submit my site
to them. The problem I see with this is the "reciprocal link"
requirement. I want to keep my site relevant and can't have a million
links that have nothing to do with my products and services.

2. Hire a SEO firm to do it for me. The downside of this is the lack
of control of who is linking to me and the cost involved.

3. Pay cash for links. The problem with this is cash and the fact that
I don't have an unlimited supply of it. I have a finite budget for
Internet marketing that doesn't allow me to pay $19.95 to $250.00 for a
link to my site.

4. Submit to the link farming services and cross my fingers. Until
now, I've tried to do everything above board with my site and I see
this as kind of a sleazy solution. However, looking at the sites ahead
of me, I am pretty sure they've used this avenue to gain SEO and I am
not sure I can amass the numbers I need with a more legit approach.

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

You need www.yourcan.com

On 10 Jan 2005 12:02:49 -0800, "troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com>
wrote:

snip

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net

As a side bar to this, I love to know how a new site, with pr=0, can
go about getting links from other sites. I have been told repeatedly
that web masters having sites with pr 5 or above don't want to link to
sites with pr=0.

Yet the fastest way to get a higher pr, according to everything I
have read in this newsgroups, is to have links from these sites.

If only sites with pr=0 or pr=1 will link to me, how do I advance?

Thanks for any thoughts.
Best regards,

Al
http://www.discountdrivingschool.com
http://www.bscinc.net

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:39:11 GMT, AF <bscinc3000 (AT) Yahoo_NoSpam (DOT) com>
wrote:

On 10 Jan 2005 12:02:49 -0800, "troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com
wrote:

snip

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net

snip

Whoops I forgot to add I agree with the sentiments of the original
poster. I find that more and more the results I get from searching
Google, when I use Google as a surfer not as a webmaster, are being
polluted by too many dirertories pointing to other directories.

The idea of Google to give more wait to links has led to the situation
where I can search on a term and find lots of links about that term
but not find the web site I really need.

I have started using Yahoo more and more.

I am not saying this to flame Google or to start a comment war on
google, but to point how distorted the results can be from using
Google.


Best regards,

Al
http://www.discountdrivingschool.com
http://www.bscinc.net

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:39:11 GMT, AF <bscinc3000 (AT) Yahoo_NoSpam (DOT) com>
wrote:

On 10 Jan 2005 12:02:49 -0800, "troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com
wrote:

snip

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net


As a side bar to this, I love to know how a new site, with pr=0, can
go about getting links from other sites. I have been told repeatedly
that web masters having sites with pr 5 or above don't want to link to
sites with pr=0.

*some* webamsters won't give a site with PR4 or below a second look;
this is not _all_ web masters.

I have non-reciprocated links from PR5 pages in my sites. I look at
content - not the green bar display - for linking. James, bless him,
used to provide one-way links from his site as a courtesy to help some
folks out on their PR.

Some webmasters are short-sighted and get all hung up on the green bar
display so limit themselves to thoughts of "PR4 or above only"; a
thought I have never agreed with even when PR played a larger role in
ranking on Google.

Yet the fastest way to get a higher pr, according to everything I
have read in this newsgroups, is to have links from these sites.

If only sites with pr=0 or pr=1 will link to me, how do I advance?

If sites with PR0 and PR1 start to link to each other - does their PR
remain at PR0 or PR1? Now if they get a couple of PR2 or PR3 pages to
link their way - do they not gradually advance in PR? How does PR grow
to begin with?

Yes, I agree with the notion that you will need to get lower PR pages
linking to you to make up for the fact they are not PR5 or higher. But
is a link from a PR5 page that has 60 links shared on it sharing more
PR with you than a PR3 page with only 10 to 5 or so links, due to
being snubbed for having a low PR, on the page holding a link your
way?

Carol

get the following headings into your page:

Children's playground equipment

Playground equipment kids love

The line "Our Unique Approach to Hawaii's Playgrounds" could mean anything
from golfcourses to whorehouses or just lazing around on the beach.

Contact your local Better business bureau, your customers, and your
suppliers and see if they will add your site to their pages.

When you put out a printed brochure you are limited by the costs of paper
and printing as to what you can do.

On your website you can afford to expand and tell people more than they
thought they ever wanted to know about slides, swings, and see saws etc

Ask everybody what search terms they use to find your site and work those
terms into your script.

The more pages and information you have on your site, the more likely it is
that the search string that you would never have thought of will bring your
page to the top of the lising.

Don't worry too much about page ratings of zero. I have pages with a PR of
0 that get found and get a #1 listing.

Your webpage is only ONE way of promoting your business.
"troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com> wrote

Hello,

I launched my website for my small business about 6 months ago and
thanks to the great education I've gained by lurking here (many thanks
to all the regular posters) I'm doing very well for my keyword searches
(Hawaii playground equipment) on MSN and Yahoo. I knew this going in,
but now I have first hand experience that Yahoo and MSN seem to be much
more concerned about content than Google is. I now need to concentrate
my marketing plan on addressing my relative obscurity in Google.

I know my back link quantity could be improved and unless someone else
could share another opinion, I am pretty sure this is why I am not
doing well on Google and I am doing well on MSN and Yahoo. I have only
submitted my site to relevant directories and other places where I
could gain relevant traffic (shouldn't this be the idea?). Since those
avenues are all pretty well exhausted, I've become convinced that I am
going to have to do "something else" to increase the links to my site
to increase my SEO for Google.

So here's what I have come up with:

1. Hire someone to sit at a desk and document all the back links to the
sites on the first 20-25 pages of my keyword search and submit my site
to them. The problem I see with this is the "reciprocal link"
requirement. I want to keep my site relevant and can't have a million
links that have nothing to do with my products and services.

2. Hire a SEO firm to do it for me. The downside of this is the lack
of control of who is linking to me and the cost involved.

3. Pay cash for links. The problem with this is cash and the fact that
I don't have an unlimited supply of it. I have a finite budget for
Internet marketing that doesn't allow me to pay $19.95 to $250.00 for a
link to my site.

4. Submit to the link farming services and cross my fingers. Until
now, I've tried to do everything above board with my site and I see
this as kind of a sleazy solution. However, looking at the sites ahead
of me, I am pretty sure they've used this avenue to gain SEO and I am
not sure I can amass the numbers I need with a more legit approach.

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net

Colin,

I value any outside perspective, thanks very much for yours. I
hesitate to change the content too much because a) I rank so high on
Yahoo and MSN (top three placements) and b) I am focusing on Google who
seems to be more link orientated. However, I do think you have a point
on the wording "Unique Approach" as it might be hard to discern from a
whorehouse or a golf course. I would sell them play equipment if they
wanted it..another subject altogether of how they might use it .

Humph. This requires that I put ads on my site. Thanks but no thanks.

On 10 Jan 2005 12:02:49 -0800, "troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com>
wrote:

Hello,

I launched my website for my small business about 6 months ago and
thanks to the great education I've gained by lurking here (many thanks
to all the regular posters) I'm doing very well for my keyword searches
(Hawaii playground equipment) on MSN and Yahoo. I knew this going in,
but now I have first hand experience that Yahoo and MSN seem to be much
more concerned about content than Google is. I now need to concentrate
my marketing plan on addressing my relative obscurity in Google.

I know my back link quantity could be improved and unless someone else
could share another opinion, I am pretty sure this is why I am not
doing well on Google and I am doing well on MSN and Yahoo. I have only
submitted my site to relevant directories and other places where I
could gain relevant traffic (shouldn't this be the idea?). Since those
avenues are all pretty well exhausted, I've become convinced that I am
going to have to do "something else" to increase the links to my site
to increase my SEO for Google.

So here's what I have come up with:

1. Hire someone to sit at a desk and document all the back links to the
sites on the first 20-25 pages of my keyword search and submit my site
to them. The problem I see with this is the "reciprocal link"
requirement. I want to keep my site relevant and can't have a million
links that have nothing to do with my products and services.

2. Hire a SEO firm to do it for me. The downside of this is the lack
of control of who is linking to me and the cost involved.

3. Pay cash for links. The problem with this is cash and the fact that
I don't have an unlimited supply of it. I have a finite budget for
Internet marketing that doesn't allow me to pay $19.95 to $250.00 for a
link to my site.

4. Submit to the link farming services and cross my fingers. Until
now, I've tried to do everything above board with my site and I see
this as kind of a sleazy solution. However, looking at the sites ahead
of me, I am pretty sure they've used this avenue to gain SEO and I am
not sure I can amass the numbers I need with a more legit approach.

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net

Google's algo is bolloxed, there's no doubt about that. However,
there's a ton of things you can do to improve the visibility of your
site.

Get rid of the Flash intro. No arguments, just get rid of it.
Your first visible proper page doesn't seem to make any mention of
Hawaii or equipment in its content. Why not?
<meta name="Language" content="English">
<meta name="Rating" content="General">
<meta name="Robots" content="ALL">
They take up space and do nothing so you can lose them.
You could get rid of most of those keywords as they just take up room.
Where's the big H1 tag saying Hawaii playground equipment?

I'd attend to those problems first.

BB



--
www.kruse.co.uk SEO (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
home of SEO that's shiny!
--

Big Bill wrote:

On 10 Jan 2005 12:02:49 -0800, "troar" <TheRaideronaRock (AT) aol (DOT) com
wrote:


Hello,

I launched my website for my small business about 6 months ago and
thanks to the great education I've gained by lurking here (many thanks
to all the regular posters) I'm doing very well for my keyword searches
(Hawaii playground equipment) on MSN and Yahoo. I knew this going in,
but now I have first hand experience that Yahoo and MSN seem to be much
more concerned about content than Google is. I now need to concentrate
my marketing plan on addressing my relative obscurity in Google.

I know my back link quantity could be improved and unless someone else
could share another opinion, I am pretty sure this is why I am not
doing well on Google and I am doing well on MSN and Yahoo. I have only
submitted my site to relevant directories and other places where I
could gain relevant traffic (shouldn't this be the idea?). Since those
avenues are all pretty well exhausted, I've become convinced that I am
going to have to do "something else" to increase the links to my site
to increase my SEO for Google.

So here's what I have come up with:

1. Hire someone to sit at a desk and document all the back links to the
sites on the first 20-25 pages of my keyword search and submit my site
to them. The problem I see with this is the "reciprocal link"
requirement. I want to keep my site relevant and can't have a million
links that have nothing to do with my products and services.

2. Hire a SEO firm to do it for me. The downside of this is the lack
of control of who is linking to me and the cost involved.

3. Pay cash for links. The problem with this is cash and the fact that
I don't have an unlimited supply of it. I have a finite budget for
Internet marketing that doesn't allow me to pay $19.95 to $250.00 for a
link to my site.

4. Submit to the link farming services and cross my fingers. Until
now, I've tried to do everything above board with my site and I see
this as kind of a sleazy solution. However, looking at the sites ahead
of me, I am pretty sure they've used this avenue to gain SEO and I am
not sure I can amass the numbers I need with a more legit approach.

Lastly, and off topic to my question...I think the fact that legit
businesses being forced to focus their Internet marketing plan in this
way is eventually going to be the downfall of Google.

If you have a moment, here's my site:
http://www.islandrecreation.net


Google's algo is bolloxed, there's no doubt about that. However,
there's a ton of things you can do to improve the visibility of your
site.

Get rid of the Flash intro. No arguments, just get rid of it.
Your first visible proper page doesn't seem to make any mention of
Hawaii or equipment in its content. Why not?
meta name="Language" content="English"
meta name="Rating" content="General"
meta name="Robots" content="ALL"
They take up space and do nothing so you can lose them.
You could get rid of most of those keywords as they just take up room.
Where's the big H1 tag saying Hawaii playground equipment?

I'd attend to those problems first.

BB



--
www.kruse.co.uk SEO (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
home of SEO that's shiny!
--

First of all, I think that you have done well by getting some of your
pages near the top of the serps for your chosen keywords. I will address
your topic but first, you asked us to take a look ;-)

I mostly agree with Bill's comments, with some slight differences and/or
additions:

If you take a look at the serps, the pages of your site that are doing
well are not your index page. It is /approach.html and /contact.html.
Your home page, in my opinion, does more harm than good, both from a
search engine point of view and a visitor point of view.

visitor's point of view:

I think that the most clicked-on link on the internet is "skip intro".
If they click at all. Mostly, a flash intro will simply lose visitors.
Look at your logs and see how many people visited that one page then
left.

If your site wasn't so new, and you had more visitors, it would become
more of a problem. Most of the visitors to a new site are probably
those that were asked to visit, so stats may be distorted right now.

Instead of getting rid of the flash intro completely offer it somewhere
that people have an option of viewing it, rather than force people to
download that and turn them away.

Search engine point of view:

There is no content on the intro page. Also, there are four links from
that intro page to the rest of your site. All of those links are
relative and point to /approach.html.

When you do find links to point to your site, through exchange or
whatever, it is most probable that they will point to
http://www.islandrecreation.net. That page, the index page, will
transfer some PR to /approach.html, but the rest of the pages of your
site are on a lower tier. Having a site map can't fix that problem.

By adding the flash intro without navigation to other pages of your
site, you have created another tier that weakens the rest of the pages
of your site and strengthens the one page that has no content.

One other minor thing - you could put the java script into a file and
access it from the head section. That is not a real important thing in
your case, but it won't hurt your site and may help in a highly
competitive serp. It appears to only be on your intro page anyway, so
if you banish that page to the outer fringes of your site, then it is
not an issue at all.

Your approach page could probably be broken into more than one page -
that is a lot of text that a visitor isn't really drawn into. Use
headers more extensively.

Is there a reason to have links from that page to the other pages of
your site open a new window?

Could you add some testimonials to the /hawaii_installations.html? That
would strengthen its marketing ability.

About links

If you have links on some directories, then you are just going to have
to wait patiently for the search engines to recognize them.

Yahoo shows 5 IBL's to your index page, but 19 (12?) to /approach.html.
The links pointing to /approach.html are all internal links. It is
internal links that should allow you to develop enough strength to get
to the top position in your chosen serp.

External links pointing to your site and internal links are not
consistent. They focus on two different pages. Make /approach.html
your index page and alter the internal links to point to
http://www.www.islandrecreation.net - not ...net/index.html.

When you change the name of that page, you may take one step back in
Yahoo to take 10 steps forward in Yahoo and Google and MSN but worth it.

About Google

Your website appears to me to have enough strength already to get to at
least the top 10 or top 5 in Google for that serp. It is not highly
competitive. There must be something going on unrelated to your
efforts. I would say that you should just continue to focus on getting
links - you won't need a lot to get to the top.

If possible, focus on quality links pointing to your site, rather than
volume. See if you can get just a couple more links from a supplier or
somewhere that has high PR - at least 4 or 5. If they were on a page
with few OBL's then that's better. Then wait. While you are waiting,
keep seeking links.

In your case, I would try to focus my efforts on option #1 above, but
not hire someone, just do that yourself. It will take some time, but
you don't have to do it all at once. Your site will be at the top of
that serp soon.

MM