Halleluiah!!!!!

[luvdavy]

You folks are not going to believe this. Most miraculous thanks to Jill and Doug and some of the rest of you that I've followed and studied and listened to!

I took over a pretty big vacation condo rental company's website and have been slowly but surely optimizing their pages by what I've learned from you FINE, TALENTED folks....(can you tell how ecstatic I am????)

Our main keyword was Myrtle Beach condos. I optimized and probably almost over-saturated the front page with that, and added a lot of text.

We went from number 48 on Google 3 weeks ago to number 5 today!!!

:cheers:

Now how much better can you get? But here's some weirdness.
I did all the optimizing with the plural value of condos. If you ever wanted to see how much difference that makes, here it is.
If you type in "condo" instead of "condos" we drop to #30.

Can you believe this?

<a href="http://www.condolux.net">Condolux.net</a>

Jan

[scottiecl]

Congratulations Jan!

:cheers:

[Advisor]

Way to go, Jan!

:cheers:

Jill

[luvdavy]

Scottie and Jill, thank you both. And Jill, it mostly came from your newsletters that I've scoured and read for about 2 months now.
You are indeed the queen of SEO..:D

I would have given anything to be at your seminar in Atlanta.
Could you perhaps schedule something here in Myrtle Beach?
I'll guarantee you you'd draw a crowd. I've already had a professional contact me to ask if I would look at some of his client's sites. This place is murder for all the condo and motel places, and they ALL have websites. Doug needs to expand his advertising up this way. I don't think there are any SEO companies here.

I have found some anomolies with our area though. There is one big company who has managed to make about 100 or more websites for different companies. They are ruling Google through sheer numbers of links. I've looked at the pages, and they are not a bit optimized. They're just all intertwined and it keeps them on the top. One motel that belongs to it told me the company charges them $1000 a month, but they stay right up there.

*****, doesn't it?

On the other hand...remember the Dick's Pawn website? I found out last night that ONE page of my site there had made number 3 for it's keyword. Three out of 456,000, as a matter of fact. And it has NO links and is not optimized at all. I haven't had time to go back and work on those pages yet. So I'm beginning to think there is an element of luck in there that nobody can explain.

Anyway, thanks again to both of you. I'm so excited now it's going to drive me nuts until I get his other pages done. And what a job that is! Jill, please try to set something up to come here. I'll show you the sites and you can get a bit of vacation in at the same time!

Jan

[gongzi]

well that is great.
congrat !

I have been doing for 3 months but still page 2 #14.

can you summarize what you did?
How can you get all the backlins in 2 months.
I am in atlanta, where and when is the seminar??

nice weekend...

[ihelpyou]

A little late..... but great job Jan! :cheers:

Welcome to the forums gongzi! :hi:

[luvdavy]

can you summarize what you did?
How can you get all the backlins in 2 months.


I took over his site that was already big and had been there quite a while. It just wasn't optimized for Google at all. There were meta tags...and like I used to think, they were for single words...like Myrtle Beach, condos, condominiums, real estate, etc.
Completely worthless due to the competition. Honing in on phrases is the first thing I learned from Jill. So I honed in on "Myrtle Beach condos" primarily. I had it in the text about 8 times. I used H1 tags and used it. I used alt tags and used it.
The old page had acres of javascript and junk on it in the beginning, and no text at all. I added as much text as I could and put the phrase at the beginning of the page as much as I could.

He had quite a few links that he paid for with all the Myrtle Beach "directories" there are here. Google didn't show them, though. I would find the links and submit those pages to Google every time I found one. I don't know how much that paid off, but I'd like to think it helped some. I added his link to the other 4 sites that I maintain....but they haven't been indexed yet. So I'm hoping that may help too.

Basically the original designers had done a nearly blank homepage with nothing except graphics. All the other pages are like that too....that's why I've got so much work ahead of me.

Jan

[luvdavy]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
A little late..... but great job Jan! :cheers:

Welcome to the forums gongzi! :hi:

Thanks, Doug!
Did you catch what I said about you trying to advertise your services to the north? Myrtle Beach needs you!

Jan

[gongzi]

Thanks Jan for sharing your ideas. I surely will re-re-reread your post and use the points for my site.

Nice weekend....

[Advisor]

I have been doing for 3 months but still page 2 #14. #14 isn't bad!

Remember, all this optimizing stuff isn't to necessarily get your site to #1. It's to get into the top 20. Some months you may be number 5, some you may be 14. Some maybe even #1.

But your position is never static. It goes up and down just like a roller coaster. It's all part of the fun!

If you want a particular position, then buying PPC ads is a better way to go. If you want consistent top 20 positions, SEO is the way to get it. Just don't worry when you go down a few places.

Certainly, make sure you've optimized the pages as much as you can optimize them. And continue to make sure that other sites will want to link to yours. Make sure they find out about your site and understand why it's something they're visitors will like.

But once you've done all you can do, you are basically at the mercy of the search engines.

Always, always, always have other ways of attracting visitors and customers. The search engine traffic should simply be gravy.

Jill

[Advisor]

I am in atlanta, where and when is the seminar?? You missed it. It was a couple of weeks ago.

Jill

[gongzi]

Thanks Jill,
My industry has about a million query result.

I did see my rank is #9 for a couple of days, then google seems start to use old data. So I fall back to #14.

We are relatively small, right now it seems free search engine traffic is the only way we can afford.

I have about 100 new back links. But now only show 3 links from google, dmoz and yahoo.
I am pr5. How many links will boost me to pr6?

[luvdavy]

Well now I have a question. I downloaded the Google toolbar...and I love it. But so many of you keep saying an exact page rank number that you are. How do you find that out?

Jan

[gongzi]

I heard you can find it from the google directory
you go to the google directory that lists your site.
and do a "view source"
you will see something like

green gif width 22 white gif width 18 total is 40 so 22/40 = 5.5

I am not an expert

[Bernard]

Originally posted by luvdavy
Well now I have a question. I downloaded the Google toolbar...and I love it. But so many of you keep saying an exact page rank number that you are. How do you find that out?

You have to enable the PageRank display on the toolbar. Click on the first button on the Toolbar (the drop-down that says "Google"). Then select Toolbar Options. Enable the PageRank feature.

You will see a bar with grey, white and or green indicating relative ranks as you browse. Hover the mouse over it and it will display the PageRank as a number from 0 to 10 (or indicate that the page is not ranked).

[ihelpyou]

Hey Jan, let me stay in one of those condos,.... and I'm there!! :cool:

One hour or so away ain't bad.

[ihelpyou]

Oh, you are the pawn shop rolex lady. That's right! You are going to give me a deal on one of those watches too, right? :D

[luvdavy]

Yes, to the Rolex...LOL.

I would imagine if you come up here and offer your services to one of the condo places or motels for free, they'll accomodate you for 3 or 4 days....haha.

Seriously...if I were you and you need the business at all...look for some of the condo rental places that are down in the ranks.
Get their address and send them a brochure. I'll bet you you'll get some answers. Either that, or advertise on our local station called "Beach TV". The people that own that are likely to hire you too. They sell advertising, but they don't rank worth a flip!

On the other hand, whenever I take MY vacation, if you want to cat-sit we might can arrange something...;-)

Jan

[ihelpyou]

Naw, those condos would have to put me up for five years if they want the service for free. :D

[luvdavy]

Originally posted by ihelpyou
Naw, those condos would have to put me up for five years if they want the service for free. :D

You can always knock a thousand off your fee and add the condo into the charges...:-)

A two bedroom ocean front condo in some of those places goes for about $3000 a week in the summer, though...:-)

Personally, I wouldn't stay anywhere except an efficiency in a motel. I like having maid service and someone to squawk at if something displeases me...

Jan