Free SEO Advice
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- leewilson780
that is interesting, i'll not worry about it for now.
- SteveJobs0
looking for general advice on good starting point for SEO.
current scenario:
i have a company which sells software that incorporates 'Foo' technology. for instance, maybe foo is a type of file compression technology or something. I even named my software Foo Bar Pro, or whatever.
my problem is that my competitor's product 'Compressamundo' also uses 'foo' It's been around for over five years and is become the de facto tool for anyone out there shopping for foo-related software, even though it's actually kinda shitty compared to my offering.
the obvious problem is that since every site out there is linking to my competitor already and googling/binging 'foo' by itself has them ranked almost #1 where i'm 10 PAGES IN!!
somehow i'm not sure sprinkling related keywords in my title tags throughout my site is going to help me here. i have a superior product, but i'm up against this colossal catch22 of a problem where my propsective customers can't even find me.
what should i do?
- i googled foo and couldn't find the company, your SEO sucksjanne76
- SteveJobs0
^addendum:
just to be clear, if it isn't already painfully obvious, i want the keyword 'foo' to list my site above or at least near my competitors. is this possible?
- trooperbill0
@stevejobs firstly lol... secondly work on getting independent reviews and comparisons on your site that way you can legitaimately mention your competitors products... you could also do a feature comparison and use any other justified means for mentioning your competitor just make sure theyre impartially backed.
secondly work on building your own brand (more long term strategy) work on promoting the killer features of your products and getting your community to bolster your brand.
if its pure SEO then do the usual backlink checks and approch people linking to your competitors and see if theyre open to discuss your products on their sites, then build links to your site using the foo anchor text ibn addition to adding the foo term to selected page titles... its probably best if you think about creating a foo section using the comparative/impartial content mentioned first.
- attentionspan0
Hey trooper, thanks for last answer one more
So like i said i have www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com
in webmastertools i want to use mydomain.com without www.Now in robots.txt should i set disallow www.mydomain.com ?
Or is this wrong and would result in both domains not getting indexed
- trooperbill0
you're overthinking it still
just put www.domain.com in GWT and tell it that you're preferred domain is domain.com (no www) google will stop listing www. shortly after
i'm pretty sure you can do something similar in yahoo and microsoft webmaster tools.
- attentionspan0
hm yeah alright, ive done that but now indexing is just messed up tbh.
If i look at indexed pages its really messed up, alot of duplicated content, on www. and without, more pages are indexed on www. part, also google wont allow me to remove indexed www. pages ive tried i get this"Your request has been denied because the webmaster of the site hasn't applied the appropriate robots.txt file or meta tags to block us from indexing or archiving this page.
Please work with the webmaster of this site or select an alternate removal option from the webpage removal request tool."
Just trying to clean up this mess as fast as pos
- patience my young padowan
unfortunately you cant rush these things...trooperbill
- patience my young padowan
- janne760
Can one 'be' an SEO?
Are you a Search Engine Optimization?and btw,
what's a ballpark $$ range for a basic SEO campaign?
- attentionspan0
Search Engine Optimizer?
Search Engine Engineer bit lol
- trooperbill0
@janne76 these things are usually down to your budget... seo like ppc will simply gobble up any budget you throw at it... in the end you're buying time and expertise.
dont be fooled by some of the seo superstars out there, theres many who used to be at the top of the game who are simply riding their fame without keeping up to date with the nuts and bolts required.
i know for a fact that one of our competitors pays £5k per month for their seo which for them includes blog spamming, crappy link network administration and buying posts on junk blogs
not the kind of seo a site needs in the long term however the risk is yours to take.
if you're getting quotes and want an unbiased eye let me know ill give you my verdict and some questions to ask for clarification.
- i see. it is still a strange science to me. but cheers for explaining!janne76
- trust me it aint no science tho it is getting there of sortstrooperbill
- trooperbill0
@attentionspan you can only go as fast as google indexes so theres no point in doing lots of work that with every change, increases the amount of time it takes to reindex your site
- trooperbill0
and whoo! this threads going really well i think! thanks for giving me the opportunity to flex my little grey cells guys :D
- Nightshade0
1) I've put the hard work in and doubled my inbound links but still have a pagerank of 2. How long does Google take to update pageranks?
2) Is there a way to determine how many inbound links competitor websites have?
- trooperbill0
pagerank is only used by people who wantg to sell links (at least the little green bar is) i wouldnt worry about it as ive had pr2 sites outrank pr9 sites for major terms, its more important how releant your site is to a topic
use yahoo site explorer and/or dogpile as both these display high numbers of IBL for a site (both cater for nofollow so you might need to manually filter these and DMOZ repeated listings out of the lists)
- doctor0
Does anybody use meta keywords anymore?
I include them because the Web Content Accessibility Guide recommends it, but do I have to pay attention to them SEO wise?
- trooperbill0
meta keywords are proven to help with yahoo, but now that its (moving to) bing it needs retesting... otherwise no.
- johndiggity0
great thread bill. any good reading/links for an seo/sem/ppc newbie? a co-worker is trying to learn more and it's obviously hard to find reputable sources. any blogs you are reading daily?
- trooperbill0
mainly sphinn and blogstorm, i frequent seomoz and seobook but both are becoming a bit thin on actual evidence for stuff nowerdays.
if you need any help im writing a guide for an in-house seo n00b which you may find useful (for a friend) as usual any q's read my blog or email me or post here :)
- ********0
Trooper... domain names q.
Say I have mauva.co.uk as my main domain.
If I add mauva.com, that should that redirect to .co.uk right? So I avoid having two identical pages indexed under two domains?
And what's the best method of redirect?
- Stugoo0
Nice, id like to see that document. I think i build well enough for SEO but recently accpeted a job offer where SEO is part of the role.
so... ill be poking back here for reference!