Well that's true for anything in business, you would be crazy to rely on only one type of advertising method or revenue stream. You must diversify. Your problem may very well be that your reading too many books on it rather than getting the practical experience to make a better judgement about what works. Free traffic is great but the way Google keeps altering it's algorithym the whole thing is just too unrilable to scale.
Help with SEO
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Well that's true for anything in business, you would be crazy to rely on only one type of advertising method or revenue stream. You must diversify. Your problem may very well be that your reading too many books on it rather than getting the practical experience to make a better judgement about what works. Free traffic is great but the way Google keeps altering it's algorithym the whole thing is just too unrilable to scale.
A bit doubtful, more likely your budget wasn't enough and your targeting too broad. Their IP is logged when they click on your ad, they can't just sit their clicking until your gone. Google actually automatically refunds this if it's happening. By them clicking on you it's actually helping you in the long run because it increases your CTR and that drops your bid price.
We are in the web and IT services game and have a pretty good understanding of the Google adword and page rank determination process. In this case it was not doubtful - we know who the competitor was and how they were doing it, its not hard to do when you have access to a few hundred clients internet services with differing IP addresses. They also left fake negative reviews on google maps and business location services which while they can be replied to as the business owner, still show in the business profile as negative ratings.
The competitor was known to do this to any competition to ensure their adword placement for the core target suburbs.
Cool, it's not for you then. Imagine the damage this competitor could do to your organic ranking though :O
Its quite saddening that people resort to such tactics rather than compete on ablity. A lot came from theh fact they lost a number of clients to us due to their incompetency, and blamed us for this and set about similar things for anyone who took their clients.
Yep, it's getting really bad on the net for this. We had a competitor use automated software on our site to creats 10's of thousands of spam backlinks that done a lot of damage to our rankings. Internet marketing has turned into the wild west.
Hoping someone can help here.
I've registered with Elance. I've asked for someone to help with the SEO and have selected a fellow that sounded like he knew his stuff, but wasn't overly expensive. All good so far.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Not really knowing what these guys do, I've been a little surprised by the reports that have been coming back to me. First up was stuff that was done on the site. OK, don't think I can complain there.
Next, he's gone off site and established accounts with all kinds of Social Media. He's just registered, added a bit of comment & gone again. Those sites will never be used. How helpful is that? I would have thought that this was spam and would not be of much help at all.
When I got the report, I looked at all the places. Stupid places like dating sites, gaming sites, and others like Bebo, My Space etc. I'm not happy, but don't know if this is what they all do or not. I've told him to delete half of it because I'm not happy with the particular places he's added me to.
Now he's gone & registered me (well the business) with a stack of forums. Places like this that have no relation at all with skating. It doesn't appear that he's made any posts, just registered. Again, is that what they all do when doing SEO? Sounds crap to me.
Is there something - anything - that I can ask him to do for his remaining hours that does not sound like it's the wrong thing to do? Or am I just totally out of my league here, and he's doing the right thing?
I've registered with Elance. I've asked for someone to help with the SEO and have selected a fellow that sounded like he knew his stuff, but wasn't overly expensive. All good so far.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Not really knowing what these guys do, I've been a little surprised by the reports that have been coming back to me. First up was stuff that was done on the site. OK, don't think I can complain there.
Next, he's gone off site and established accounts with all kinds of Social Media. He's just registered, added a bit of comment & gone again. Those sites will never be used. How helpful is that? I would have thought that this was spam and would not be of much help at all.
When I got the report, I looked at all the places. Stupid places like dating sites, gaming sites, and others like Bebo, My Space etc. I'm not happy, but don't know if this is what they all do or not. I've told him to delete half of it because I'm not happy with the particular places he's added me to.
Now he's gone & registered me (well the business) with a stack of forums. Places like this that have no relation at all with skating. It doesn't appear that he's made any posts, just registered. Again, is that what they all do when doing SEO? Sounds crap to me.
Is there something - anything - that I can ask him to do for his remaining hours that does not sound like it's the wrong thing to do? Or am I just totally out of my league here, and he's doing the right thing?
He is going for a shotgun/link scatter approach to generate links from high ranking websites back to yours. Essentially you are paying a professional spammer such as the ones that post spam links here on SS and then get deleted.
While it does somewhat work, it is counted as low quality referral and doesnt change page ranking very much.
The best thing to get organic SEO - content, content, content. Articles, news, blogs. The higher the content quality and frequency of change the higher "quality" your page becomes from a google rank point of view.
While it does somewhat work, it is counted as low quality referral and doesnt change page ranking very much.
The best thing to get organic SEO - content, content, content. Articles, news, blogs. The higher the content quality and frequency of change the higher "quality" your page becomes from a google rank point of view.
I second this.
If what Dave and Charttv say is right ... can you have a segment on your homepage that links to skating events around Australia and updated it daily/weekly?
What about a blog about what is happening at your own rink updated once a week? Doesn't have to be much but keeps the content changing.
I don't like the idea of what you Elance person is doing - sounds like a waste of time to me ... but ... it's also been a great learning experience. Did you have to pay upfront or can you hold some back due to poor quality of work?
What about a blog about what is happening at your own rink updated once a week? Doesn't have to be much but keeps the content changing.
I don't like the idea of what you Elance person is doing - sounds like a waste of time to me ... but ... it's also been a great learning experience. Did you have to pay upfront or can you hold some back due to poor quality of work?
what this elance person had done can be slightly dangerous. When you have someone creating accounts on your behalf demand the account details and passwords.
You should look to take control of each account ASAP because should they become disgruntled they may start posting damaging stuff and having your site appear in the SERPs for all sorts of unsavoury things. I've had issues with this in the past. It can be difficult to get accounts and content deleted.
You should look to take control of each account ASAP because should they become disgruntled they may start posting damaging stuff and having your site appear in the SERPs for all sorts of unsavoury things. I've had issues with this in the past. It can be difficult to get accounts and content deleted.
Sadly, I was kind of expecting this answer. Damn! OK, so how do I now get him to do the good stuff. I've contracted to him for 40 hours. He's done around 15. What should I be expecting him to do & how do I make sure he does it?
That depends on their skill set. What can they do other than create crappy ghost accounts? Can they write, animate, produce music, take high quality photos?
LOL! It doesn't look like he can do any of that.
I am not familiar with Elance hourly contractor arrangements but have used oDesk for hourly engagement. On oDesk you can truncate the hours by going into the contract and simply modifying the hours or even terminating the contract.
Did you read their reviews from previous jobs? This should have given some indication as to how satisfied previous clients have been with the contractor. Pay particular attention to negative comments.
All a bit late if they aren't doing what you want
but look at it as a learning experience and prepare for the next one.Cheers
Sounds like he is working mainly on off-page SEO/link building rather than on-page SEO which is what much of the advice in this thread has been around (ensuring you are using appropriate keywords, headings, URL structure, sitemaps, keyword density, internal linking, etc). See:
http://www.directtrafficmedia.co.uk/blog/on-page-seo-vs.-off-page-optimisation
But depending on the skills of the individual involved you probably don't want to let them loose on changing your site...
http://www.directtrafficmedia.co.uk/blog/on-page-seo-vs.-off-page-optimisation
But depending on the skills of the individual involved you probably don't want to let them loose on changing your site...
what he is doing is quite dangerous and google algorithms could punish the site for have lots of low quality links and very little quality content. As has been said you need good content updated regularly
as i said earlier u could get someone good who would only charge the actual costs of work ( materials to use a building analogy) and get their income form a % of increased sales so really no improvement very little cost and plenty of upside
as i said earlier u could get someone good who would only charge the actual costs of work ( materials to use a building analogy) and get their income form a % of increased sales so really no improvement very little cost and plenty of upside
Only goes to show that outsourcing to cheap labour is not necessarily a good thing ... think how much could be achieved if you'd paid twice as much and sat down with someone local (and good at what they do) for an hour to walk you through exactly what you need to do.
Sorry to hear it's not what you expected, Skater, as your website is really good - great learning experience for the rest of us.
Sorry to hear it's not what you expected, Skater, as your website is really good - great learning experience for the rest of us.
exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!
No, I don't want him changing stuff on there.
Well......last night he added the site to a heap of directories. That can't be bad, can it?
I've already sent him a message to say no more social media or forums that have nothing to do with skating.
Are there any great places to submit articles? I'm happy to write them, so long as he can submit them. At least that will give him something to do.
Roughly 20 hours to go.
