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

Zillions of $$ from google adwords

Hi Vicki.

I found a pdf online the other day, and eventually read it, it contained the formula for making a lot of money out of websites by having adsence on the site. It made pretty good sense to me, so I thought I would run it past you.

The basic idea, is to create a small website, that wasn't selling anything, just giving good advice on any given subject. Build a home page and say 5 more pages, with relevant information. Say the site is about SEO, and each page is about a specific keyword or key phrase to do with SEO, say one way backlinks, reciprocal links, linking text, search engine submission, and sigs on forum posts. Each page is linked to from the home page using anchor text from the home page article, then link each page first to second, second to third again using anchor text. .

The he recons outsource the job of submitting the home page to directory's, using good keyword based text links not more than 50 sites per week. meanwhile making your next 6 page website. On a different topics as long as the sites are informational and not selling anything.

Since the sites don't have any outbound links, they don't lose anything to other sites. Then link to the site from your main money making site. Once your site starts getting index, add another page at the rate of one page per week. (google see's there's changes which is good) once your PR starts to climb, then add google adsence to the pages, still keep the outsourcer adding your site to fifty directory's per week, and add another page per week. And make another website per week.

This guy says that the better the page rank of the page the ad appears on, the more you get paid to have advertisements on those pages...which makes sense.

He suggest you slip the adsence into your content rather than have it at the end of your page. And continue adding more backlinks to each site, by article submission, and other ways you know about, he again suggests you outsource this work, basically you keep making a new site each week, and adding one page to each site you have already built.

Realistically this would be a LOT of typing, but if you were writing about subjects you were particularly interested in, You could knock out one site a week for 10 weeks or so, and how much would it cost, the cheapest global domain names I have seen are $5USD. Say you made 20 sites in a year, that would be what $100 in domain names, hosting, well we can have as many
domains as we want, so that doesn't count, but renting a reseller domain costs sweet stuff all a month, and outsourcing the link building he quotes at $150 per site, $3000 per year, personally I think it would be more than that, the cheapest i have heard of, apart from the meat market, if .60 UScents per link, oh, thats right, there's one place that offer's 500 links for $250.
But this dude recons that within a year, the sites would be earning $10 per day per website, because of the high page rank of all the pages.

His figures were, $3600 earnings per website per year, x 48 websites = $172,800 per year, - 7200 for outsourcing = $165,600 profit.

I could possibly see how it could work, if you had nothing else to do but write content, and had a few grand around to pay an outsourcing place. It sounds good anyway....

Thinking as I do, I thought about the potential backlinks to the main site that could be gained once there pr had built up, and if instead of buying domain names, you were to make sub-domains with relevant names for the topic of these mini-site, as long as the main website name was also relevant. What I got from the articles was the sites should not be trying to sell
anything, but be purely informational, no fancy graphics, just good old well SEO'ed html pages.
It makes me wonder how fast a new domain could potentially build up page rank, using his idea. Makes me think about buying a cheap domain name, one thats keyword heavy, even if it is a long one, and try it out. I have witnessed, a pr3 in 5 months, with very little SEO work done.

With your site, I wonder if you had a subdomain with your articles on it, you have on the main site, if that would count as duplicate content. Would probably be best to have another domain name, possibly on a different server, I have to wonder about duplicate content, this dude, I'm doing the seo work for, had no less than 10 websites all with the same content, just the titles and metatags are different. And all his sites have a pr of 2 or 3. I guess it's one step away from duplicate content.

I've also been thinking about directories, and how to make duplicate directories. And how this may be the way some people can offer 2000 directory submissions for $100. If you had a domain name with say 20 subdomain names, and had a database driven directory, you could link each directory to the one database. So a link added on one directory would appear
all to sites in one hit. If you had a couple of hundred sub-domains, it could work the same, and since some database driven sites are massive, with huge numbers of people using them at once, think of some of the massive forums, and how many visitors are on one topic at a time. So it could be done, and if there were a few non database driven webpages on each site, to the content was somewhat different. It wouldn't take long to add links to 2000 directory's. If the directories ever became popular to actual people, rather than just search engines, you might have to make more than one database, but still.

Oh, if I could get a job, where all I had to do was think or research ideas, and someone else do the grunt work.....

Blogs.
I have a google blog, and with it you can post a posting by sending an email. So I could send this email to both you and the, and have another blog posting. Wish they had been around when Kym and I were emailing each other, it would have been fun to have a record of our friendship growing, and eight months of daily emails to read back on. Actually, I might just send the
email to the blog to see if it will work, sending it to you and it.

Regards Lynn Brown
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sooooo Busy.

Hi There. I have been busy, have been optimizing the life coach directory and running an adwords campaigns, and updating Best NZ SEO and, Natural Untreated Gemstones.... sound like I'm busy, I have also created cvs sitemaps for half the sites, good news is it's paying off. Anne the owner of life coach directory is thrilled at the way her brand new site is climbing in the local search engines for her top search phases. And our own site Best NZ SEO or canzdesign.com has doubled it's vistors two months in a row. Lynn