Hillcrest SEO San Diego

Have my first SEO job in Hillcrest, San Diego as an SEO, I've been here since the 15th Sept, and spent the first week getting used to the different weather in the United States and getting used to the different life here. Found the job on craigslist, I love that place, could quite easily spend the whole day there. After writing this post, I'm going to make a few posts of my own, and look for more work both webdesign and SEO work here in San Diego. I have to say I love Hillcrest, being in a suburb that has so many openly gay businesses is a very new experience for me. It's really cool to see males and females walking around holding hands without feeling they have to be careful whose around. I'm really going to enjoy being the official Hillcrest SEO :) Lynny help1@seobyCanz.com > SEO & Graphic Design Website Best SEO Blog SEO hints

Learning SEO the hard way...

I had someone track me down through this blog today, and ask me how I learnt about SEO, and did I have any certificates to prove how good I was. (i think he doubted me)

Anyway, no. I didn’t learn SEO from a school, I learnt it by trial and error, but thought you might be interested to know about my humble beginnings.

I first started learning about SEO almost 7 years ago, before I knew it had a name.

We owned a Stock Photography Bank, and I noticed that if words were repeated on a page several times, that that page was like to appear higher in search engine results, the more times the word was repeated the higher it would appear in search engine results.

Through my interest, and inquistive nature, I realised if the title of the webpage - the bit that shows at on the top bar of your browser - had the same keywords, the page didn’t need to have the word repeated so many times and yet it would still appear high, and sometimes higher, in search engines.

Time went on, and I learnt how to read the code that makes up any webpage, and found there were other places that, if the keywords were repeated, that the page would rank even better in search engines.

Through applying what I learnt, and I have to admit making a few mistakes, I managed to get our Stock Photo Bank, ranking right up on page one of Google, often higher than the world’s largest stock photo banks like Corbis and Getty.

Once I saw this happening I was hooked. I found out about website statistics, and how to find out how many people were visiting my website, where they were coming from, what browsers they used, even what time of day they visited most, and then noticed how visitors rose at the same time my website started ranking well, and that each change I made that increased our site visablity, increased the amount of visitors. Now I was an utter addict.

I also found that changing the words slightly on every page, I could get the website listing higher for many different search.

Whats this SEO thing?
Somewhere about here, someone told me about SEO, and how it sounded like pretty much like what I was doing.

I joined a few forums, and mailing lists (about 50 different things). And yes, that's what I had been doing. I found though that many of the SEO big wigs were giving people information of how to do things, and the information wasn't true. It sounded good, but from experience I knew better ways of doing it.

I started adding my comments to posts and got a few people's dander up: who was I, an uneducated hick from New Zealand of all places, telling them what to do... I didn't tell anyone what to do, I just suggested different ways.... and when I pointed out the SEO was so new, it was, and still is hard to get an education from anywhere, I was barred from a forum.

I still belong to a few forums, that aren't owned by SEO gurus, but usually withhold my comments now or at least the ones I make on forums. Anyway back then....

I had the coder that kept the photo gallery running, and had him add SEO features, and so were the beginnings of a SEF CMS. I didn’t know then 6 years later I would eventually build a Search Engine Friendly, Content Management System.

We started building website for other people. And I applied what I knew to their sites, not realizing others could see the skills I had. Then someone wrote to me, about our stock photo bank, and asked why they always saw it in search engines, for every search they ever did for photos and stock photos. He asked me if i could do the same thing with his site, and offered me $1000.... wow this was cool, getting paid for something I would have done for free!

And so it went, I wouldn’t and won’t take a job unless I knew I could make a difference, and until recently websites that were database driven were a challenge I couldn’t rise to - I didn’t know how to edit codes for these sites, as it was very different to sites that where html.

Recently I met a coder, who is now working for me regularly, that will add coding to database driven website, opening up a whole new world be me, so now I can do SEO on any website I’m presented with.

To date I have done SEO on over different 40 websites, and am currently working on 7 sites, I have a personal limit of 10 sites at a time, as I like to give each site the time it deserves.

I now have 4 people working for me, doing the more time consuming aspects of SEO’s like directory submissions, and finding linking partners, but I always do the important work myself as I like to know exactly what's going on.

I understand that people coming to me for my services are in need of help, and often wonder if the investment I’m asking them to make will be worthwhile, when I know they have tried so many other things, and are dubious about this working. The least I can do is make sure it works, and the only way to do that is to do the work myself.

I have noticed that other people I employ to work for me, just don’t have the instinct or gut feelings that are needed to be an SEO, and while they are happy to do the work, they just can’t see how important it is, that any payment they may get must bring results to the person that paid them.

My goal with SEO is to earn $2000USD a month, and with up to 10 smaller business paying me $200 a month on average, this is obtainable. Sure I should charge more than what I do, but to be quite honest, I don’t want to earn that $2000 and more from just one big company, but at the rate I should charge, I would only be working 20 hours a month.

I live on the computer, so could do 20 hours work in one sitting, what would I do for the rest of the month? I’d far rather help out 10 smaller businesses, and work for less, and give those 10 clients more results than they expect.

Why the hedgehog mascot? Hedgehogs are inquisitive, and nose into every nook and cranny, looking for interesting stuff to eat, they have very big mouths, and are really good at spitting out what they don't like.... that pretty much sums me up, I look around for all sorts of information and I devour anything that SEO related and spit out the junk.

Regards Lynny
An SEO from the
School of Mistakes, and Successes.

How directory submissions can work.

SEO in Action
Case Study Two


Optimizing a Large E-commerce Website for Google

Invest in SEO and watch the number of visitors to your site grow, and Grow and GROW

This site has been optimized for Google in particular.

The site sells gemstones; the average price for one gemstone is around $120.

When this client first came to us, they had had a website for 2 years, and
had not had a single sale.

We redesigned the website, making the buying process as simple as possible using PayPal, and made the site look very professional (trustworthy).

We also did some basic SEO work on the site as we were building it and built the site on a CMS so the client could add and change new products herself.
The client prefers to get us to design other pages on her website, as she knows she isn't a webdesigner, and wants her site to stay looking professional. Her site updates, as with any of our clients are done within 24 hours.

They had their first sale 1 month to the day after the new site was online.

Within 10 weeks they had enough sales to have paid for the site redesign and SEO.

The owner was very proactive, and went about finding link exchanges for the site, and promoting the website anyway she could.

Feb 06. 18 months later she asked me if I could do anything to increase the visitors to the site, they were getting sales, but the sales were irregular and they could easily manage to fill more orders.

At that stage they just gotten 1809 in Jan 06.

The client couldn't spend too much at that stage to pay me for my work, so we agreed to 1 hour a month SEO work.

Immediately there was an increase of traffic to the site of just over 600 visitors a month.

In November 06, I did 3 hours SEO work on the site, which resulted in an increase of 1200 new visitors that month. It could be said that Nov - Dec would attract more visitors anyway, however that wasn't the case the year before.

Since the New Year 07 I have been doing just 2 hours a month, and visitors have increased by almost 1000 that month by May 07.

Sales have increased threefold since January 06 at a steady rate.

In early March I submitted this sites details to 300 directory's since this is the type of site that people would look for in directory's.

Since the submission were all free, none with reciprocal links, the submissions were not accepted immediately, but directories always check the sites before acceptance them so the numbers increased artificially for that month.

April the submissions started being accepted, and I attribute some of May's visitors to those directory listings. April being Tax month, is historically a bad month for this and many other none essential products websites. If you look at the image to the right you will see the statistics for this site from Oct 06 to Oct 07.


But just looking at these statistics, you can see that the increase in hours and the directory submission has definitely paid off. 11220 Visitors in Oct 07

An Investment of $2500 over 19 months has meant in gradual increase to 9300 visitors a month

Get your SEO quote Now!!! Lynny@canzdesign.com

Look at the image to the right to see the key phrases that ranked #1 & #2 in Google.com.au sink. The site is owned by an Australian, and this is her preferred search engine to do well in, but she does just as well in Google.com for many of the same phrases.

Take a look at her site Gemstones and Jewellery

So you can see the search phrases are definitely the sort of products this site would sell and reasonably competitive key phrases.

I will run this test on any search engines you would like worldwide for $10 per 50 keyphrases per search engine. Just email me a list of keyphrases on a text document along with a list of the search engines you would like me to check, and paypal me the correct amount. Lynny@canzdesign.com If you would like to search more than 10 search engines, the price reduces to $5 per search engine after the 10th one.

EG: 20 search engines up to 50 keyphrases (the same ones for each search engine) $150USD

Cheers

Lynny
The Best SEO