Thank you SEO chat

I have posted with concerns and questions here as well as poured over the forums for hours on end and I just wanted to thank all of the users here...both the askers and the answerers.

I have put all advice to good use...(mostly)


MSN has my site at number 2 and number 3 in the SERPS for 2 excrutiatingly competitive keyphrases. (and I mean competitive)

I have beaten virtually every website in a multibillion dollar industry...I hope it holds

Now to see what happens w/ Google and Yahoo.

Patience is the key... just wait and you will enjoy seeing your websites on top.....

tenpin... congratulations! It does take work and a double dose of patience, but it is worth the effort.

EGOL:



We launched the site April 17th of this year and I am still updating/tweaking it.

I submitted to MSN in June.


The keyphrases I have gone for are "free texas hold'em"
and "free texas hold em".

I avoided other more highly contested keyphrases for obvious reasons and frankly, since that phrase best descibes what we are, it's working well.

I plan to add better fitting titles and headers to the internal pages as time goes on but loading the site with anchor text links is kinda difficult given the nature of the site.

The clicks aren't rolling in in the thousands (or hundreds) a day yet from MSN but the ones that are are converting at a 50%+ rate which is much higher than the conversion rates of the overture buys we've made for other more broad-themed phrases.

Any pointers/critiques you'd like to share would be greatly appreciated.

Congrats on the position! I don't want to discourage you but MSN is fairly easy to get a good ranking in. Google is much much harder but posibble. Google will also bring much much more traffic so is worth it.

Yeah, MSN is fairly easy. I have found that sticking to the basic SEO rules works for all 3 of the major search engines, with the most major differences being time and backlink quality (not neccessarily numbers).

Time is definitely an important factor with Google! Congratulations!

Are you selling orange clothes pins?

Don't take this in the wrong way, but PM me your legit KW's and I'll endorse your efforts, and recall my doubt. But at this point in any market...I doubt it...VERY much.

Did I say Very??

ps...not msn or yahoo either

Saying that it's easy is relative.
Relatively speaking, a well-targeted key phrase, will get good results if a person follows the basic SEO practices and puts forth an effort. It's easy because I have knowledge that many other webmasters/webdesigners don't have or utilize. They're main concern is a pretty site...

...and selling clothes pins is EXACTLY what I am doing.

Trying to get ranked for "widgets" is a lot more difficult than "purple widgets" which is more difficult than "handmade purple widgets". But if I am selling handmade purple widgets then that's what I am shooting for.
Why? less hassle and better conversions.
Right now 21.74% of the clicks generated through the keyphrase "Free Texas Hold'em" are converting. (signing up) I know I said 50% earlier but that was a single day stat..not cumulative.
That's what we are. That's what we do.
I don't wanna chase after gamblers searching the phrase "Texas Hold'em"...I don't have what they want....why waste the time and $$.



I know that Google is a real booger and the market I am in has SO many people competing for a piece of the pie that it's insane. But I am drilling down and specifically targeting the piece I am after.


Here is an real life example of what I mean.
This is a clothes pin example but you did say ANY market ;)

A former client is a Faux Finisher/Painter here in Atlanta.
Did I want to compete against every Faux Painter in the world, every faux finishing product out there, and every article on DIY/Home Depot etc on that topic?

No.

The general term "faux finishing" ranks this way for the site:
Google 188
Yahoo 244
MSN 79

That's not too shabby but why go for number 1 there? Doesn't do the client any good to have folks all over the world finding her site...and I don't need the bandwidth waste either. (big gallery) Look what happens when I drill down to her market area.

"Atlanta Faux Finishing"

google 8
yahoo 1
msn 1

"Atlanta Faux"

google 4
Yahoo 6
MSN 3

"Atlanta Faux Painter"

google 8
Yahoo 2
MSN 1

"Atlanta Faux Artist"

google nr
Yahoo 6
MSN 1


I know you aren't trying to bust my chops but there's nothing exraordinary about what I did for that site.

Gary he is right. It isn't numbers. The most important factor is the quality of your backlinks. 5 backlinks can bring you much more importance than 5000 of your competitors. And yes time is the other big factor. Time your domain has been around, give google time to accept you as important etc.
Tenpin listed two basic seo factors which are the two single most important factors.

The other factors will have a impact on your rankings to a cetain degree such as title tag, description tag, keyword frequency, keyword prominence, etc etc. But you aren't going to get any ranking without backlinks. And the quality of those backlinks means the importance google puts on your site.

Geewiz Gary hehe, he did list his keywords in his post, i think his 2nd or 3rd post. I find it highly believable that he has achieved that, epsecially within his field. We scored well quite quickly with our gambling site in MSN, it's very do-able.

Googlewhack...when I said "not msn or yahoo" I meant those are incredibly easy and no bragging rights are deserved there. I run many campaigns and not for purple faux widgets either.

I have #1 for terms such as car parts, costa rica vacations and so on.

I guess if the traffic you get from remote terms pays the bills...that's a great thing

Visio,

Back links and their valuation, and the weight google places on them are still a mystery.

Its like anything else, when the BH's start plagiarizing it, G will add it to their weekly algo and we'll have to find something else.

I have a client that dropped from 8k BL's to 785 overnight. They were all genuine...1-way links.

That's part of the BS we must learn to deal with.

I tell my clients (seems like daily) Google is just trying to deliver relevant search results, but they have to keep up with the BH's just as we do.

If the community would spend time creating genuine, relevant content 100% of the time our jobs would be a lot easier...but that will never happen so we are doomed to suffer the consequences of Google's efforts to filter black-hatters attempts to manipulate the "system"

Cheers

GaryTheScubaGuy