Greetings, a bit about me and some General questions...

[nehpets]

Hi there,

I've been lurking around as a visitor for a few days, trying to absorb as much as I can. I am a complete beginner to website design, improvement, buying and selling so some if it sticks, and some doesn't!

So, a but about me - I'm 32 and live in London. I have a full time job but to be honest it is not very taxing (or amazingly well paid) so I find myself with quite a lot of time on my hands that could be beter utilised doing something to better my lot. Actually I am not new to making money online - For a couple of years I have been spending some of my time doing online surveys and am signed up to about 40 diffent companies and clear about £1K a year doing this but it is soooo tedious it is mind numbing so I am trying to branch out and see if I can make some money through website ownership.

I have started a couple of blogs, simply to get my opinions out really, and due to the non existent barrier to entry. I have adsence on my blogs and have managed to attract several hundred visits in the last few weeks but this seems to have earned me exactly zero with my adsence account. Not sure if this is normal or if I have managed to break it somewhow I am blogging through Google blogger and don't find it all that userfriendly so in looking for another platform, I came accross Weebly.

Last week I used Weebly to construct a website around quite a small niche - I guess it's cheating really as it was very easy! I purchased my own .com domain name from Go Daddy which included my two key search words hyphonated and decided to use this Weebly website to practice trying to improve the SEO of the site in preparation for a "proper" site I built myself on a platform that is not going to take 50% of my earnings. I guess this leads me on to my first question - how long after you start trying to build more SEO would you expect to find your website on the front page of Google given a narrow niche and relatively little competition? After a week my website is lurking back on page 12 and does not have any visitors, apart from those that I drove their through facebook. This has left me a little disheartened but am I completely getting my time scales wrong here? Or am I being completely unrealistic thinking I can do this myself? I don't have any advertising on the website btw, if I do manage to get some organic traffic I might bolt on an affiliate link.

So, that's where I'm at now. If I make a success of my goals with this Weebly site I will pay out for a proper hosting service and perhaps try and build something from scratch.

Sorry this is a bit of an essay, I was going to just say "Hi, great informative site" but I got a bit carried away

[fabdomains]

Hello there
I've been a member of this site for 18 months but only recently created the time in life to give it a good read - hence I know that newbie member feeling!
I'm not a newbie to SEO however, and hopefully I can offer some advice here. I really think SEO is something you have to do a few times before you work our which techniques work best for you. From there you'll begin to work out how long things take you to rank. As a rough guide, I speculate on 3 months worth of SEO to make a new site rank for a low competition keyword.

The techniques I use for SEO are mainly content driven, ie I write, or have written, lots of relevant articles on the website topic, publish these on my new domain or high authority sites. Usually I then seek places to have these articles republished. For example, a slight reworking of a good article originally intended for a blog can easily become a great press release. In short, write great content, ensure some of your keywords are nicely embedded in it and then seek to use that content efficiently to create as many good links back to your site as you can. I believe quality is the key both in content and in backlinks.

[Kay]

Hi nehpets, and welcome to Experienced-People.

Don't be disheartened about things not happening quickly enough for you. It's typical for a newbie to be impatient for results and to see something happen for them. I remember when I was starting out I would look at my traffic stats every five minutes to see if anyone had visited. It takes time. It's my guess that a lot of newbies will give up because they're disappointed not to see instant results. Just plod on and they'll come - in time.

If you're concerned about ranking better in G, then you might want to look at strategies to boost your site's "authority", ie how G perceives it as a trustworthy source of information which is useful for people searching on G. (I think that's the theory of it anyway.) Impoving your site's authority by increasing backlinks to it is one way of doing this. But don't pay for some shoddy service to do that for you! Just approach the task as a person rather than someone with dollar signs in their eyes.

Anyway, ranking well in G isn't the only way to bring in traffic. We have a great thread about improving traffic here:
http://experienced-people.net/forums...etting-traffic

So, keep reading and if you have any questions, then feel free to ask.

[crabfoot]

Page 12 inside a week is good!
Given the way that the panda has been working, that's a good start - I've got over a dozen sites that have gone into reverse on Gargyl and are still plummeting even closer to the depths of obscurity.

Now, before you get into thoughts of monetizing that site, look at the opportunities an unmonetized site presents. You can use it to apply for the eBay partner program, Adsense, and Amazon. You might even try to get it listed on DMoz if you can find an appropriate category.

Don't rush to use one type of advertising if you still have applications outstanding from the other places. Leave it until you have decisions from all, yea or nay.

You don't want to try joining other affiliate programs until your traffic gets higher, over 12 visitors a day or around 400/month - don't ask why, I've said it before (read the site).

Here's some useful numbers from the days when I was doing telesales for a business consultancy, which actually work in the passive website biz. If you get one clickthrough in forty from your traffic, you're doing the right things. Get that down to one in twenty and you're selling ...

[nehpets]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I'm hertened to hear that it can take so long to become ranked on the first page, I'll keep plugging away. I have already asked for links (or a link exchange) from two similar sites and created a page on facebook, which links to my domain - is this the kind of thing I should be doing more of?

So, other ideas for backlinks? Should I write a blog about the new craze that my website just happens to cover? Not sure anyone would read it...

I have just used the google keyword thingy to check the popularity and found there are 720 searches a month - maybe I should have checked that before!

So, when I get a bit more traffic, what would be my strategy for applying for advertising? This is going to sound very ignorant but do I have to apply for anything specific or can I place an adsence banner on the site and it will happen automatically?

Thanks again so far, I'm really impressed by how helpful people seem to be on here.

[eddiebooth]

Hi,
like the others say dont be over concerned about where you are on google at the moment. I have a small number of self-built websites and most of them are only on page 1 of google for long tail or localised searches, although 1 site went to page 1 for my top keywords within 4 days and has stayed there ever since.
Having said that, this site is the one bringing me least revenue so doing well on Google isnt everything!

[Kay]

So, other ideas for backlinks?

You could start a new thread to discuss backlinking strategies in the Website 101 forum

For starters, I'd tell you that I think link exchanges suck. (No doubt someone will be along soon to disagree with me. They often do.)

Tell me why would anyone would want to do a link exchange from their well-established site to your born-yesterday site? Maybe another newbie site would be willing, but then the backlink isn't of much value anyway, so why waste your time?

I'll not expand on the topic here as I think it would be better to have its own thread.

[Slowdive]

Hello Nehpets.

Always nice to see some one join up who has already taken the first steps. I would definitely suggest taking Kays advice and opening a new thread to discuss traffic generation and SEO basics. Finding this forum probably saved me a year of research and I often results in me getting things right the first time. Trial and error is over rated ;-)

[crabfoot]

other ideas for backlinks?

A straight swap is a weeny bit obvious to the search engines. Link swaps work better if you can "distribute" them, or at least make them triangular - but you need another site in the same niche for that. Triangular? "You link to my site widjits1.cok and I give you a link back from my other site, widjits21.cok" - get it?

I often spin page text as I go along so that I can set up another site in the same vein. That can be useful.

Nothing to stop you from rewriting your site to give you another ...

[Clinton]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I'm hertened to hear that it can take so long to become ranked on the first page

My single piece of advice: stop thinking about Google. For a new site with long term plans Google's is the worst type of traffic you can set out to build.

Welcome to experienced-people.net.