I have spent literally 100's of hours researching how to get my website onto the first page of search engines. What I have found is that there are no big SEO secrets to search engines and website rankings. The SEO companies charging hundreds and thousands of dollars are ripping people off big time by outsourcing the time consuming jobs of website promotion and linkbuilding to workers overseas making just a few dollars per hour. Let me tell you that SEO is fairly simple once you get a few things figured out, but very time consuming! By the way, for those of you who are wondering, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Justin and I started our first online store selling lake products in the spring of 2007. When we started out, we had absolutely no online experience whatsoever. However, our motto has always been: If someone else can do something, SO CAN WE! Our store
www.hbpondmanagement.com (and our knowledge of the internet) has grown by leaps and bounds every month since then! For those interested: I am going to explain a few of the things we are doing to promote our website, raise our search engine standings, get people to our website, and make sure they come back!
Keyword rich content integrated throughout the pages of my website was an absolute must. In the beginning I was always wondering why my website would not come up under google search terms like HERMAN BROTHERS POND MANAGEMENT, ILLINOIS POND MANAGEMENT, or ILLINOIS GUIDED FISHING? Then one day researching I figured out that I simply did not have those words in the text of my website! Search engines can't read minds, they need the text! Now, I go through my entire website about every month and look for places I can nonchalantly insert necessary keywords. Think about what you want your website to come up for in search engines and make sure those words are in the text of your website! Just yesterday I realized I did not have the word AQUATIC written anywhere on my website. How could I expect my website to come up when someone typed in aquatic herbicide, if I don't have the word aquatic anywhere in my text?
I have also learned that another important step to gaining website traffic is to make sure that I always have content on my site that will bring someone back once they do find it. Why would someone want to visit my site regularly if it was always just the same boring information about what products and services I provide? Now I update my site regularly with fishing reports, articles, photos, and videos to keep people coming back. I also am constantly adding new products. For my website, my goal is to bring clients and potential clients back on a regular basis. I want repeat visitors to be thinking about me and my products as often as possible!
Another key SEO tool is the power of writing and publishing keyword rich articles on my website. This lets my clients get to know me and my knowledge of fish, gives fresh content for them to come back to my website for, and also often times that is how someone initially finds my website using search engines. My articles are typically full of my keywords for the search engines to pick up on. I also publish all of the articles that other people have written about me and my business. I make sure to put my contact information and website link in my articles. That is important because now quite a few other websites and online magazines are using my articles on their websites! Having my content all over the internet brings quite a bit of direct traffic and backlinks to my website.
Justin and I published our first video on YouTube in October of 2008. It didn't take us very long to figure out the power of YouTube videos! Just type HAND FEEDING SMALLMOUTH into google! 7 of the first 10 google listings are of our video we made while scuba diving! Tons of other websites are linking up to it almost daily, and people are coming to our website to look for other videos and also just to find out who we are and what we do! What we found out is that YouTube is actually connected to Google, and the keywords we use in our titles and descriptions come up on Google's first page in just a matter of days! We are now in the process of making YouTube videos for all of our products and fishing trips! If your not convinced, just type in PORCUPINE FISH ATTRACTOR, my YouTube video comes up on the first page of google before my website does. Lastly, type in VERTEX WINTER AERATION; I just added that video 5 days ago, and it is the very first listing on google!
Another aspect of SEO that we just learned is that Google is also connected to Blogger. We started a blog called
thediaryofalakenerd.blogspot.com to document all of our fishing trips with photos, videos, and stories. Originally we were going to use it as a monthly fishing report linked to our guided fishing page, but again we found out pretty fast that Google picks up on my blog titles and posts faster and better than my actual website. We are still using the blog to post our fishing pics, videos, and stories; but we are now also using it for SEO by strategically making posts about our products, articles, and press releases. For example, head over to google and type in Pond Boss Magazine.
Linkbuilding is a very important aspect of SEO. During our first year, our website was completely standing alone. We did not start showing up in search engines until we started linking up to other websites. Now we have thousands of other websites, directories, forums, social networks, and blogs all with links pointing to us. The more links our website has pointing to it, the higher it will rank with search engines. Also links pointing towards our website send traffic directly to our site! Here are some steps we took to get linked on other websites:
1. Exchanged links with friends, distributors, blogs, etc.
2. Did quite a few things worthy of making the local newspapers and media. Oftentimes they posted our link in their online articles and magazines.
3. Manually submitted our website to 100's of the search engines and website directories (this took tons of time, but paid off big time!)
4. Joined industry related forums and posted our photos, videos, articles, advice, and website links when given the chance.
5. Joined social networks and made good comments on other peoples stuff (especially the popular blogs)
6. Submitted our articles and press releases to websites that are looking for content. I always made sure our articles had our contact info and website link in them. (this could be a full time job, but gets serious results!)
We are constantly finding new ways to get people to our online store, and once we get a customer, we don't lose them! We take pride in the fact that many of our online customers are repeat customers. We package and ship all of our orders in our free time, usually the very first thing we do every morning when we get to our office. UPS comes and picks up our packages every afternoon at 3 pm. In 2008 Justin and I processed 736 online orders for lake products and supplies in our spare time.
There it is, these are the steps that we took and are constantly taking to get our website listed on the first page of search engines for all of our keywords. We now currently rank higher in seach engines than most all of our competitors (the big companies) that have been around for a long time. For the first half of 2008, we did not even show up at all on search engines. In 2009, its a whole new ballgame!
