SEO and attracting web traffic?

Is there such a thing as a Core77 discussion board for SEO and online marketing? It seems 90%+ of all links I can find on the subject leads to an annoying MLM scheme, or someone wanting me to spend $10 to buy a list they’ve assembled.

Any Assistance in the realm of SEO and/or online marketing would be appreciated.

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It’s all a scam.

Best SEO strategy I’ve found is to actually have useful content and sites that people visit.

I know a friend who does SEO stuff as their main business and I still cannot figure out what they actually do. That is, aside from having every page static and putting a whack of hidden keywords in meta tags…

SEO and good web page design are two different things…

I’ve never done any marketing myself, though am present on a lot of searches and get 3-10 emails a week from random people who’ve somehow found me online (though a majority are useless)), and I believe it’s still better than scamming your way into searches for people who don’t need your services.

Bottom line is (maybe a bit naive) I believe that if you do what you do and are good at it, the traffic will come. Esp. for a specialized profession such as ID, I don’t think the list-baiting and google-topping tactics have any use…

IF anything good ol’ network I think is far superior (or direct marketing/cold calling to potential clients)

R

I hear you RK…but it is more a fascination of mine more than something that I believe will get me more business. I have a couple of side experiments going on that allow me the opportunity to test this out a bit. I have to believe it isn’t all BS.

The only thing I’ve ever done to my site was to sign up for google analytics. Boom, first page!
It’s not any real guarantee but I think it’ll get you far more mileage than anything to do with meta tags. That and make sure your page has real and meaningful raw text on it, not just 100% flash.

I’d share the page but it’s a very dormant drupal template I’m going to redo. someday. you know the drill.

Also the name I thought up is rather close to a large electronics manufacturer but I haven’t found another “safer” name I like yet.

I’ll agree with pretty much everything Richard already said. Good fresh content will drive traffic. You can trick people into visiting your site, but when they don’t find what they are looking for, they leave, so what’s the point? (unless you are only trying to make $ off ad impressions)

This is a good discussion, as I often see SEO pitched as a sort of “black art” though it is not. The challenge comes with the moving target. What used to work to drive traffic, won’t work today. There are some basic guidelines though, and we could start compiling a list of tips.

Also remember that the point of links and SEO is to get traffic. And traffic actually just means users. So optimise your site for ease of use.

Couple of useful tools to help with your SEO:

Google Webmaster tools: Helps optimise your site for google. Therefore helping better SEO and picking up errors.
Website Grader: looks at your website from a SEO viewpoint and gives suggestions.

Both are free. Hope they help.

Quick note: SEO is a black art known only to search engines. Anybody who promises a guaranteed service is talking poo-poo.

There are things you need to learn before starting to do SEO jobs. It’s a bit complicated though there are tutorials online that will surely help.

They KEY WORDS in your content matterly GREATLY in terms of how many people search engines point towards your content.

Search ALGORITHMS turn the WORDS in your content into a MATHEMATICAL SCORE.

You can often get better traffic by USING KEY WORDS in your content MORE STRATEGICALLY.

An example would be DELIBERATELY PUTTING A POPULAR SEARCH TERM 5 X TIMES INTO THE TEXT.

Repeating the term INNOVATIVE 4 to 5 times for example.

Its an art to do this without MAKING THE TEXT UNREADABLE.

I thought this was clever. :joy: