[Grumpy]

Wwhat you don't know is you can jam as many keywords as you want onto any and every page. Change the font color to match the background color and resize the font to 1px so it doesn't take up any room and still get good ranking with a beautiful looking site.

You can sign up with many of the search engines to be sponsored listings and come up first.

Another tactic is to have multiple pages with basically the same content but multiple changes to make each one unique and geared to a different key word. Don't make these pages visible to the public, but hide the links somewhere on your pages where people won't find them but search engine spiders will. They will show up in search engines but will be redundant if people see them. People will see them only for entry pages then click one of your links on the page. The more pages you have the more chances of getting seen by the search spiders.

Another trick is to create multiple web sites with similiar content but very different URLs. The content can't be exact or many spiders will ignore them as redundant links. It's only useful to promote one of these sites on your business cards. The others are ghosts for site ranking. It's always a good thing to create links back and forth between sites. Search engines sometimes give higher rank to sites that have links to other high ranking sites.

If you want to target people in your area, put up a page with nothing to do with roofing but a history of your city. A nice 1-3 page history of the city. Maybe a story about the trials and tribulations of the local little leage team. Another thing I do, is put up guides for home owners on how to choose contractors. I put up guides for home owners on how to get low life contractors into trouble. All inormation is regionally specific. Again hide the links if you only want search spiders to find them.

The key is the more words you have the more chance of being seen. web position gold is a program that will analize a web page for you and compare it to the top ranked pages on various engines then tell you what to do to get top ranking.

Database driven web sites run with sql backends are useful for creating multiple pages easily.

Don't forget to plug your manufacturers. You'd be suprised the number of hits we get from people looking for hardie siding.

Our web site, on average, gets 90 hits a day (not all are local). We get even more when our sponsored keywords are active. Like I've said multiple times: almost all of our leads come through e-mail.

 

[hatchet]

Yikes.. most of the items at the top of your post will get you a penalty from Google if reported or they change their algo so the spider sees it. I don't do any of those things and I get around 19000 hits a day. Hits are really a composite of how many images that load on every page so I like to look at unique visitors and visits. I get around 600 unique visitors a day and around 700+ visits.
Pretty sure contractortalk does better than that even.
I'm not hacking on you for your message just your methods. In my experience you are much better off getting inbound links, and when you get enough of them go get some more. Make sure the anchor text has your keywords in it - in different configurations. So if your targeting "home construction" your link could be "home construction", "home building" ,etc.

 

[Nathan]

I was going to respond but then I realized everthing I know came from Hatchet (Rich) so I decided to shut up and let him respond! :Thumbs:

 

[hatchet]

LOL. The methods that Grumpy states have been used with good success. There's no question that they work. But the search engine algorythms are always changing to help find those types of things. Better to be safe than sorry.
I mostly optimize sites for Google only - as they are the most used search engine and they typically provide the best results. The other search engines closely match the abilities of google but results are most often a little different.
If anyone wants some general guidelines here they are:
1. Put the correct page titles that relate to the actual page. Don't put the sitename before the page title. Instead of "Bob's Widgets - blue widgets" put "Blue Widgets for your home" or something like that.
2. Use <h1> tags for your on page titles and use CSS to make them look like you want them too - because h1 tags are pretty big and typically don't look very good. But Google puts more importance to a h1 tag than standard bold text.
3. Increase your keyword density in the copy of the page. So if you are targeting widgets as a keyword you will want to have that within the content of the page every so often. Don't spam though.. This isn't good "Today we are going to talk about blue widgets, green widgets, widgets in general, tofu widgets, shoe widgets, etc"
4. Setup a links page to exchange links with other sites. Try to get links without exchanging links as much as possible. The more incoming links the more Page rank you get. The more outbound links you have the lower your page rank.
5. Setup your internal link architecture to reflect where you want the highest page rank to go. So if I have a page that I'm targeting I will put a footer link on all the other pages to that page. In essence funnelling page rank to that page.
6. Make a sitemap so you still cover general page rank on all the pages.
7. Get more links.
8. Get more links.
9. Get more..... etc.

 

[hatchet]

I should say too that there is talk about Google going to an "expert system" where they will weight pages that provide content on certain subjects to users. So ContractorTalk will rank higher than someone trying to sell something - all other things being equal.
So try and target content type sites that closely match your site in content. Get links from directories - dmoz.org - they also provide the database for Google's directory. Typically they have a PR7 or PR8 for their pages.. that's an excellent link.
Oh and when you think you have enough same site links - get some off topic links.
When you think you have enough of those - get more on topic links.

 

[hatchet]

And you can hire me to do all this stuff for you
Or someone else - some hints. Don't use an SEO that says they can get you #1 rankings for some keywords. Typically the keywords/keyphrases they target are 4-5 keywords. These are considered low competition and will typically not be searched for all that often. Such as "construction"
construction
has 50million+ results. That's highly competitive.
But this
construction companies in east los angeles
only has 390,000 results - low competition.
These "search engine optimization" experts will typically charge anywhere from $2000 (not a bad price depending on depth of optimization) to $20000+ (run Forest run).

 

[Grumpy]

Hatchet you track hits differently than I do. A hit is a single person looking at your site, pageviews are something else. A single hit can have hundreds of page views image downlaods etc. Googles bots can't see your cheating if you use CSS to hide it. If you use font tags google can see you cheating.

Also I don't focus on result competition as much as I focus on keyword popularity. I don't care how many people are competing for one key word, unless I am paying for that key word. The other thing is since we are a local construction company I do my best to target regionally specific keywords like "Chicago roofing". Appearing #1 for "roofing" means nothing to me beccause I don't want people in FL or TX calling me.

 

[hatchet]

What you call a hit is what I call a visit. A unique visitor is someone that has never been there before. What I call hits is the same thing awstats calls a hit - any hit to the server whether it be an image, file, or other.
I agree with you on targeting regional keywords. I was giving an overall method of optimizing a site. So the site I mentioned in my first post is being optimized across the US - (not regionally - because it's like Contractor Talk - content driven) and my stats are as follows for March 1st..
737 Visits (your hits)
618 Unique Visitors
2065 Pageviews
19164 Hits (server hits)
78.74 MB of bandwidth used
Page Rank of 6 by Google with 125 visible backlinks (pr3 or higher) 1250 backlinks by AllTheWeb.

And as far as using CSS to hide it - yes that works. But why? Is it really giving you a benefit? Is it worth losing those leads and possible income through your website/email if an algorythm changes so that Google (or any other SE) can see it and you get penalized? I use my websites for additional income and I guarantee I don't want to lose it - especially if my company relied on it.
I'm not here to tell anyone how to optimize a site. I'm just giving general guidelines that can give results without penalty. Hiding text is a very small item - there are many other things that can temporarily increase placement in search engines - doorway pages, cloaking, etc.

 

[Grumpy]

I dislike awstats. garbage IMO. I use Sitemeter.com for tracking visitors/hits/pageviews/entry and exit pages/etc...

You need to work on sticky content if most of the people going to your site don't come back.

Is it worth the benefit? Yes! I can busy 100 keywords with it, that I couldn't otherwise put in my page. Is it worth the risk of losing rank? Yes because I wouldn't have the rank to lose in the first place if I didn't use this trick.

I did suggest other things but your only commenting one one method I had suggested.

 

[hatchet]

I'm not going to argue with you on how to optimize a page. I'm saying that I can get more traffic without doing things such as hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, doorway pages, duplicate content, or paying for inclusion. My methods have been proven time and time again. The methods you mention (most of them anyway) are targets waiting to get shot down by search engines. That is also proven time and time again.

 

[Floorwizard]

(ducking for cover)

 

[hatchet]

hahaha.. no offense or anything taken on my end. Everyone has an opinion about stuff - and I respect that.

 

[easymoney]

so how are you 2 doing now? (5 years later)

 

[MJHimmel]

Making sure your site is compliant helps a lot! We have a great web company for that. Here are some links to check your website's compliance: validator.w3.org/ , cynthiasays.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe , uitest.com/en/check , websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze *

 

[texan1]

Unique visitors are usually the ones you want to keep. They are noobs to your site, and depending if they like what they see, have the power to ultimately refer people back. So, you want to try to attract the people that have never been there before. At least that's what I aim for. As far as search engine rankings, be careful about your meta tags. If you use words that have nothing to do with your site, or use the same words over and over again in your meta-tag keywords, you could be flagged by different search engines. Just make sure your meta-keywords and description actually have something to do with your site. You can run your site through SEF and SEO analyzers that give you feedback on your site. Lots of different methods. Not too sure if there is an absolute 'correct' way to do it.

 

[renet2]

Hatchet,

Thanks for your SEO Tips. What is site are you optimizing across the US? I did not see the URL in the 1st post and I'm thinking it is different than the site in your sig. file.

 

[HPE]

I wasn't sure if this post was a joke or honest help. Unfortunately, most of what is written is dead wrong, and like mentioned above, will get you banned from Google outright. It's called black hat SEO strategy, and these things worked when I started doing this stuff 10 and 15 years ago. But today, these will get you removed from Google faster than anything.

 

[HPE]

Grumpy, a hit is actually anything that is downloaded from the web server when a page is visited. A single page with 7 images, a css file and 2 javascript files attached to it will provide you with 10 hits every time someone loads a page. That's why people in the industry don't use "hits" any longer. It has no value. What hatchet explained is correct in that the only thing that matters is a unique visit, and more importantly, a conversion. Your tactics are what we SEO pros did back in the mid to late 90's. You can't rank well nowaday for it. You may be ranking for things, but I'm sure they are not competitive phrases and are because of other factors, none of which you mentioned. You need things like domain name, page titles, H1 tags, etc. to rank well. Not any of the stuff you mentioned.

 

[Ed the Roofer]

I wasn't sure if this post was a joke or honest help. Unfortunately, most of what is written is dead wrong, and like mentioned above, will get you banned from Google outright. It's called black hat SEO strategy, and these things worked when I started doing this stuff 10 and 15 years ago. But today, these will get you removed from Google faster than anything.

Grumpy, a hit is actually anything that is downloaded from the web server when a page is visited. A single page with 7 images, a css file and 2 javascript files attached to it will provide you with 10 hits every time someone loads a page. That's why people in the industry don't use "hits" any longer. It has no value. What hatchet explained is correct in that the only thing that matters is a unique visit, and more importantly, a conversion. Your tactics are what we SEO pros did back in the mid to late 90's. You can't rank well nowaday for it. You may be ranking for things, but I'm sure they are not competitive phrases and are because of other factors, none of which you mentioned. You need things like domain name, page titles, H1 tags, etc. to rank well. Not any of the stuff you mentioned.

Hey guys.

This topic thread is from the year 2004.

It was still on target 5 years ago, but to a lesser degree now.

From personal knowledge of Grumpys sites, they pull in conversions extremely well.

Ed

 

[HPE]

Thanks, didn't catch the original date. Saw it had a new response. Definitely not something to attempt nowadays. It was even a bit shady five years ago.