Search Engine Optimization
For those of you that don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. More simply put, the science and art of getting your website to the top of Google and other search engines. The SEO word has changed a lot of the years. The system was a game that could be rigged in ones favor to push a website to the top of Google with relevant keywords that would drive visitors and sales. It’s a known fact that the first few listings in Google take the lion’s share of the traffic. Being at the top of the rankings is very important for a website. These top rankings didn’t just come by chance, the computer program that created the ranking could be “gamed”, and the knowledge to play this game was valuable information and one could charge for it. It’s also a fair amount of work.
So how is the SEO game played?
In the very early days of the internet website, listings and search engines simply reviewed the content and keyword lists of a webpage to build a set of ranking. This system was quickly overrun by those that wanted pages associated with key words with value. What keywords have value? Well for my story the top of the list are “web design” and “hotel”. The web design one is obvious so I’m going to leave it out of this story. “Hotels” were one of the early industries to adopt the internet for e commerce. Sites like Hotels.com made it where any joe -six-pack could book their hotel room over the internet instead of calling a travel agent. The hotels.com of the word also had affiliate programs, where they enabled third parties like me to build website with our own brand, use their booking engine software, and if a sale was made they gave us 5% of the total sale. The trick is to get people to our website. So key words like “Discount Hotel rooms”, became like gold valuable for us. Now if every joker that figures this out starts putting these keywords all over the pages, the search results themselves get bad in a hurry. Google figured out you could rank websites not just based on their content, but their “Internet Popularity”, and a good way to gauge Internet Popularity was to see how many other website link to your website. The term in the industry in known as back linking. Backing was the driving force for SEO for many years.
Content is King
Every good SEO guy know content is king, and the back-linking is what grabs everybody’s attention. As we all figured out ways of programmatically generating our own backlinks, this system also go overrun by jerks like me that built millions of pages and links build by computer programs and large databases (like hotels.com listing of all the hotels around the word). You still have to have good content that is relevant to your search terms to rank well. Some of the other key factors are clean HTML code, updating your site frequently, and having links with your keywords in them.
Some of my best rankings over the years
DiscountHotelUSA.com
This was the first hotel.com re-seller site we built. For a while we were making good money on it. The industry has changed and glory days for this site are in the past. These were some of the rankings that made us cash.
“Hotels usa” in France
“Hotel Pets Allowed”
“Hotels with a pool”
Euro state words
Euro state key word combos, They mainly use 3 letter state abbreviations, Because of a programming glitch, we could not use the state abbreviation of “OR” for Oregon, or IN for Indiana, so we renamed the ORE, and IND. We started to notice we got a lot of booking ins Oregon and Indiana. We were one of the only ones that knew this trick, so we were ranked #1 one in Google for things like “Hotels, in Salem, ORE”, and we could tell from the email address and IP address it was mainly European traffic, Weeks later just about every state had a three letter name to it. It was like finding a pot of gold to hit that.
Social Media
Social Media is now an integeral part of any website traffic plan. For some sites it's more important than SEO. For some websites, a minor detail. One thing the two have in common is quality content is the key to sucess.
Recent SEO Rankings
New Clients - Dallas Sober Living
After a 4 year large contract, that turned into more of a job at somepoint, I'v once again started spending more time on SEO Consulting. So I'v started building back up a list of quality ranking for sites that I run.
ATX Fun - 12 in Google. Probably my favorite blog site. It's all about the fun in ATX. Recently it has shot up to #2 with after I'v published alot of great articles about the subject.
school bus dealers oklahoma - Ranked #1-3 in Google. The competition spends a good amount of money putting there paid ad just above this free listing.
Old rankings:
New Orleans Siding Company: #2 in the Free Listings of Google for a highly valuable key word. Squar Deal Siding has been a client for a long time, so the history points help this projects.
web design - for a brief moment in the 90’s I had a top 3 national ranking for web design on NBC’s (yes the TV station) search engine.
Oklahoma Entertainment – Okiesurf.com: One of my original local portal sits, this site is still on the top page of Google, but used to be #1 to #3 most of the time
NOLA fun – Nolasurf.com the little brother of okiesurf. The local portal marketing in New Orleans is far more competitive the OKC, so I went after NOLA fun. It’s normally top page on google to this day.
Hotel Pet Allowed – One of the spin offs of the Discount Hotel USA project. We made an entire website our of these keywords and ranking top 3 for many years, making good money at it.
Hotel Got Pool – Ditto for Hotel Pets Allowed
Discount Hotel China – I posted this top page for many keywords in the Hotel China market around 2003 -2006. Probably a little too early for the Chinese Internet market. We didn’t get many sales from it.
New Orleans gutters, New Orleans siding First page on google and first ranking on google for highly competitive home improvement key words. Square deal siding is a long term client
Moving Companies – I have managed online traffic systems for several moving companies over the years. This is one of the
Oklahoma Buses – RossTrans.com has been a long time customer and ranks well for all sorts of Oklahoma Bus Key words
Custom Chess Boards - Walker Chess ranked first page for Custom Chess boards for many years before shutting the website down. Many sales were made.
