Finally asking for a review

Ok, I've gone as far as my knowledge (mostly acquired from this forum) will take me with my site. Would love an SEO review from ya'll. My target keyword phrase is ColdFusion Hosting. My site is ColdFusion Hosting Plans . The idea was that although there are lots of hosting directories out there, there wasn't much out there for people to find companies that do ColdFusion hosting. The big directories usually only list 4-5 companies. So I have been putting together a directory (with affiliate links to the companies) that focused strictly on ColdFusion hosting companies. I still have quite a few good backlinks that Google hasn't picked up yet, so hopefully, if and when they ever get around to updating backlinks, my rankings will improve. Until then, however, I have been tweaking the site. Any tips for bettering my position (currently in the 50 - 60 range for that keyword), or for any content to add would be appreciated. Thanks in advance to all.

Nothing wrong with your site as a site, however it could do with more content.

Your focus is way too narrow because you are only targetting 1 keyword. I'm not too sure on your topic but surely you could add pages on asp hosting, php hosting ...etc...etc...

The more related keywords and phrases on your site the better. Many content based affiliate sites don't initially score highly on their main keyword but they get scores of visitors that found their pages through hundreds of related keyword combinations.

Check your web stats and find out which keywords are finding your site and concentrate on building more pages. Web-Hosting affiliate programs are widespread so finding partners for your content won't be too difficult.

If you're wondering what a decent amount of pages is, then think of 50 good pages that are full of good content but are each targetted on one or max. of 2 keywords per page. Make sure the page file name is your keyword-separated-by-hyphens.htm.

Submit each page to each of the search engines seprately.

Not sure about the ratings idea, your web hosting merchants should be able to make the sale conversions that are necessary and if not, drop the weak ones and concentrate on the higher converting ones. Too much choice is as bad as not enough choice.

I also have no idea what coldfusion hosting is, and a heap of tutorials would bring in a heap of visitors (like me) looking to find out more.

Give your target visitors more information than they need A) They'll learn better with repitition B)They'll learn to trust your recommendations C) They'll get bored of reading and click through to your merchants and hopefully make a purchase.

Hope that helps, if you want to rip my own efforts to shreds then pm me for a url to an affiliate site I'm currently building.

Thank you very much for your comments. The reason I don't have ASP hosting, PHP hosting, etc. is because there are tons of places to get that information already. I was going on the assumption that by focusing on ColdFusion hosting, I could get targeted traffic and that it would not be quite as difficult to rank highly for this niche topic. ColdFusion programmers have a hard time finding hosting for their sites (ASP and PHP programmers do not have this problem). ColdFusion hosting is hard to find, and those with affiliate programs are even harder to find. I like your idea of ColdFusion tutorials. I can do that fairly easily, although I didn't know if that would distract from the goal of sales - too much content, etc. My thought process was...If a Coldfusion developer needs to find a webhost, then he/she is probably ready to buy and is frustrated trying to compare hosts. So I thought that I had a found a niche, targetted market that, if they land on my site, then it means they are ready to part with cash, and would be grateful to have nice comparisons at their fingertips. Am I off-base?

I understand what you're saying, you want to be the expert in your niche......great idea. That's what you need to do...be seen as the formeost expert on cold fusion.

At first giving away tons of free information will not give you sales, but once you become poular and widely regarded as THE place for cold fusion word of mouth will spread and you will be rusted for advice AND recommendations which will bring you money.

Read and review cold fusion books and hosting providers and everything else to do with your niche. Start a newsletter and eventually you'll want to add a forum for all your other "experts". Try and figure a way to make your own related product/s ie. a paid membership site, web templates or an e-book or anything that you can make money from.

As I said previously I have no idea what coldfusion is perhaps I would want to know more if it would help me in some way. I have a website and I don't know about it, try and find new users (like me perhaps) looking for this kind of information to benefit them.

The possibilities are endless.

But there is a downside in that you mention that it's only a small group of people looking for this kind of hosting, perhaps a little widening of your niche might not be a bad idea. Perhaps "coldfusion anaroaks" need to know more about asp etc... You are assuming too much and not testing any theories.....

But as I said before you need to brainstorm and come up with more ideas. Informational sites are a great niche to be in right now with the advent of google adsense......

Good luck

P.S. This is the kind of thing I had in mind:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey.../tutorial2.html

http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq/

There would be a lot of coldfusion keywords from that lot!!!

Do some word tracker research:

http://www.wordtracker.com

thanks 100 Priests! i will be working on your ideas. anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions?