classa

Vital Stats

On the Web

Profile Information

I read a lot of Dean Koontz books, I love house boating (I have a 16' X 77' Horizon), I suck at golf, I didn't marry my sister, I am currently taking guitar lessons and own an Ibanez AES10E AES Mini-Jumbo Cutaway Acoustic-Electric Guitar, and I don't enjoy doing SEM for anyone except our own company. I have recently sold my web development business and our truck driver recruiting business and have retired at the age of 44.
UPDATE: After receiving numerous complaints from past clients about the new owners of the web development business I sold, I have decided to get started again on a slightly smaller scale. It sucks because the business I sold ranks really well for my key terms, but it will give me a chance to see if I am good at SEO or if I just got lucky before.

Full Name

classa

Display Name

classa

Additional Contact Info

jeff@bluesunproperties.com

Blog Comments & Posts

We only have that exact term in our meta keywords 1 time and nowhere else on the page. The word developers is only used twice on the page. Once in the meta description (flash developers) and once in the meta keywords (website developers).

We do not rank well for the following scenarios;

inanchor: website developersintitle: website developers

Google does not see website developers as one of the incoming links into our website per our webmaster tools area.

So, how do we rank #1 out of 105 Million results for Website Developers?

Combining intitle, inanchor and inurl gives you a good idea of how many pages are seriously targeting (with good SEO practices) a particular term or phrase. For example, a search for "intitle:student inanchor:student intitle:loans inanchor:loans" shows 83,600 results, vs. the general query "student loans" which shows a whopping 19.6 million results. I prefer to combing intitle and inanchor (rather than inurl) as many serious competitors don't use the keywords in the URL, however, using the inanchor can show you how many truly SEO-savvy competitors are out there.

I would have though it to be quite the opposite as adding more search qualifiers has a tendancy to manipulate the results, and most searchers dont search this way. Aside from that, my own results for my own site show a regular search for 'website design' without quotes shows in the number 4 or 5 spot based on datacenter

I mean no offense by this, just an observation from experience; Madisonville, KY can't be that highly of a competitive KW market, which makes it much easier to rank high and quicker for the keywords you target.

I also wanted to state that even though we are in Madisonville, and the market for realestate may not be heavy, our website design company does rank #4 on Google for the term website design and #1 on MSN for the same term. Reguardless of your geographic location, that is a tough market...

Thanks for the input. We looked into doing custom IDX for this client, but their local MLS isn't set up for the feeds yet, and they didn't want to pay for it either. Remember, this is Madisonville, Kentucky. We get electricity a day later than everyone else :)

We did outfit the website with a content management system, and they assigned someone internal to the office to prepare the content about community and condo complexes (longtails), but that person has yet to do anything. We weren't contracted to do the seo or content generation for the site, just the layout and LAMP development of the site. I mentioned earlier in my post above that we didn't put a lot of seo work into the site.

I will make sure Tina Downey (controlling partner of this realestate company) views this blog entry and your comments and others as well. Maybe we can push Madisonville into the future yet...

As always, it is an absolute pleasure interacting with the members of this site. Maybe I will get outside of Kentucky and come to a conference sometime as I would love to meet and collaborate with you all.

I apologize, but I really dont see why specific fields need specialized webmasters/seo's (realestate seo's, country club seo's, etc...)

We built a website for homes in Madisonville Kentucky and we have not spent a lot of time working on collecting links, but due to decent layout of content, they rank well for the searches that matter and those are the searches where folks are looking for homes in that area.

I was going to start this comment by saying I have never paid for a link, but realized that I am paying $299 each year for a Yahoo Directory listing. I can not throw stones, but I can say that I do not engage in link purchases (other than the afore mentioned) and we seem to rank relatively well for our terms. I agree that a new business just getting started should probably have to employ the link purchases, but I would highly suggest staying away from google ads or yahoo type ads as I believe they are rabid with click fraud and cost more maney than they bring in.

Not every site can offer great content, not every site can offer a free tool with a link back to the originating site, so that only leaves aggressive link exchange campaigns and possible paid links.

I did have someone offer to pay me a whopping $5.00 per month to place a link for a web development site on our site. I laughed so hard I peed a little... :)

"Well, maybe. But we've got to be willing to sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity to get it done."

Don't do it, period. Those landing pages are an abomination and an eye sore.

I also appreciate SEOmoz allowing us to take a brief look at your landing page make-over review. We have been tooling around with landing page optimization, but suffer from analysis-paralysis.

With our landing page optimization exercises, we are hoping to increase the number of quotation requests that we receive daily, thereby hoping to improve our sales as well. Improving our sales and closing techniques is a whole other story.

Thanks much for answering my question in a way that I could digest it. I made a blog entry at my site entitled Google's Real Estate Link Penalty Explained and I have cited you as the inspiration for the blog posting. I have conducted a search and I can not find a link to a website or blog of yours in any of your profiles. If you have a site or blog, please let me know where it is and I will add the link in my blog posting and give you props for the inspiration

Maybe I am slow this month, but I still haven't read anywhere where anyone is speculating on what the infraction was that warranted the penalty. I can't believe that the penalty is just from participating in reciprocal linking, so is it because of too many reciprocal links in a short period of time, or links from irrelevant sources, etc?

Scott Harris made a posting on our blog about grey hat seo and also touched on reciprocal linking and how sites like phpbb have literally thousands of new reciprocal links added daily. So, I believe that would dispell the threshold of links per day theory.

When designing for our clients, we always try to adhere to the old 3 click rule for finding anything on a website. I absolutely hate clicking multiple times just to find what I am looking for, so why would I design a site any other way.

By the way, had a hard time connecting earlier, glad to see the site back.

I made a short and sweet blog entry over at my site called "It's All About The Links" looking for an explanation concerning a website that has made it into the top 10 for a highly competetive search term. A search on Google for “website design” (without quotations) produces on average around 548,000,000 results. A quick review of that site shows;

Relevant Title Tag.

No Description Tag.

No Keywords (noone really uses them anyway).

22 Images and not a single alt tag.

No CSS Sheet because all of the style information is viewable (gasp).

No Headings tags to give relavance to a particular keyword.

A measley PR4.

82 Total words in the file.

SEOMoz Page Strength of 3.5 (Not a major player).

Domain Tools SEO Text Browser SEO strength of 66%.

Now that I have read the article that you guys put together, I am more convinced of my initial assessment of how that site is ranking.

Forgive my ignorance here. While I understand most of everything posted above, I have a question concerning Keyword Cannibalization.

I have always believed you should treat each page as a separate site with its own theme, title, description, etc. Also links going to internal pages should be linked to from external sources with different anchor text.

But, when you mentioned "spreading out anchor text", are you referring to internal site navigation, or are you referring to external off site links to the inner pages of a site using relevant anchor text?

By the way, I am nowhere near being considered a Search Marketing Expert. I do well with my own sites and business and that is where my interest in Search Engine Marketing comes in. we do own a web development company, but my core focus is high end development, not SEO/SEM.

I understand that traffic increased and kudos to you guys for getting it done as it was very impressive, (almost as impressive as the five seo excuses example) but it seems to me that it was not targeted traffic and I would truly be interested to see how it impacted your client's bottom line.

We have been building sites for quite some time, but I have gone into this web 2.0 reluctantly dragging my heels and never got around to launching a blog till much later than everyone else.

We try to post useful information, and we have even invited guest bloggers from another web forum (webproworld) and my posting was deleted (they want everyone blogging for them only).

Scott Harris used to work over at webProNews (Ientry) and is now my lead programmer/developer here at CAD Website Design. He has contributed a great deal of articles over the years, but now I have him busy applying his programming and design talents here.

Based on your advice for increasing blog traffic, I would like to invite anyone from here to be a guest blogger at our blog. Links back to your own content will be welcome.

I have a website (classadrivers.com) that has 62,100 pages indexed by google right now. We do not use a google site map for this site. Another website that I own (cadwebsitedesign.com) shows 2,390 indexed pages and we do have a google sitemap for that site. The odd thing is, we have over 5000 pages in that site right now (news articles, etc...)

Both sites perform equally well for our desired search terms, but I see some merit to not using the google site maps.

I did, however, find a great inexpensive tool that helped me generate the sitemaps at xml-sitemaps.com If you just have to have a sitemap to submit to google and the whole sitemaps.org movement, this one was worth looking into.