Tossing the Dog a Bone – Death of a Website

Want to fail in Internet marketing? Just ‘toss the dog an occasional bone’.

Most website owners will spend big money on their website. That’s like paying out top dollar for a pure bred dog with papers. It’s a beautiful site with matching branding, pretty graphics and maybe even an award or two. They paid good money for it and they’re justly proud.

After site launch they’re surprised when the site doesn’t bring in a stream of new business… sales… profit. Their web designer mentions site submissions and optimization, so they throw one or two hundred dollars after it to get the traffic they hoped for. That’s just like tossing a bone to a dog that doesn’t seem to love you in appreciation for how much you spent to buy it.

If all you do is toss it an occasional bone you’ll be burying that pedigree dog very soon. The same goes for the many ‘dead’ websites that stink up the Internet.

How do you gain your dog’s undying love and reap the rewards for your investment? You select quality nourishing food and put out fresh filtered water twice a day. You groom your dog. You get all its shots and make sure it is protected from fleas and other parasites. If it’s sick you take it to the vet. You buy it toys, a leash and collar, a dog house or basket… and the list goes on. You hate to see your dog so alone, so you put it in doggy day care when you’re at work. In no time at all the cost of your dog is many times the original purchase price. You take it for daily walks and spend time playing with your pet in the park. Your reward is an energetic, healthy dog that jumps out of its skin with happiness to see you. People compliment you on what a fantastic dog you have.

Apply the same devotion to your web site and you’ll have a flood of visitors and a large percentage of them will convert into customers. SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing are very time consuming disciplines.

You can learn to do it yourself, but expect to invest a staggering amount of the time you currently put into your business and personal life. SEO training and keeping up to date, plus day to day marketing, tracking results… it’s a big job. Or instead, you can leverage time by hiring seo professionals. The life of your online marketing and business are in their hands, so this may not be the place to look for a bargain.

If you give your dog two weeks of intense love and care and then neglect it for a year the results will be less than satisfactory. Websites also respond best to ongoing love – analysis, tweaks and fine tuning by an SEO. Search engines look for regular articles, posts and page additions and an ever increasing list of theme-related sites that back link to your site.

The purchase of a dog is only the beginning of the investment. If all you do is toss it a bone after the purchase, it will die and stink up the neighbourhood. Continue to invest into it and you will reap the benefits for years to come. Web site owners who realize that the original design of their website is only the beginning and continue to invest into their site each month with will receive the results they were hoping for.

Related Post: How Much Should You Pay for SEO?

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[tags]bad seo, ineffective seo, internet marketing failure[/tags]

Shorten Your Time in the Google Sandbox

Not everyone agrees, but the Google Sandbox does exist. Any seasoned SEO professional will have noticed that a brand new domain is not going to respond to optimization efforts as quickly as one that’s at least six months old. I’m not going to get into that debate here.

The Google Sandbox is an algorithm filter that appeared about March 2004. Your site may be indexed within a few weeks of submission, however, it likely won’t rank for any keyterms for several months. This waiting period is what SEOs refer to as the sandbox.

Google is protecting the interests of established sites with quality content and backlinks. If any upstart website could topple the content kings in any given month the Internet would be a very volatile place indeed

Google loves sites where fresh, relevant content is added on a consistant basis. A new domain/site has no track record for content development. Google also takes ‘votes’ from other sites, by way of one-way links, into strong consideration. A new site is unlikely to have very many legitimate back link votes within a month or two of launch.

With a new site there are a few shortcuts. While developing a client site, providing budget permits, we create and place five to ten pages of quality content on the site. We want to show the search engines that your site is about quality from the start. We believe that the design of your site should be a secondary concern and that design can always be tweaked later on. Google wants to know about what you have to offer them in terms of content, so we show them.

We then begin devoping backlinks to the five to ten content pages. We write and publish articles about topics related to your business and website. We write articles that will help build backlinks and advertise your site at the same time. The article links will contain anchor text that promotes your keywords and deep link to your original content pages. We then begin distribution of the articles to theme-related websites, blogs and article resources.
It is important to time our submission to Google right after a PageRank update. Planning a time frame for your site’s indexing is important. Updates happen roughly every three months. We plan your site launch and indexing for the time immediately after an update. If we launch in the middle or towards the end of an update, we’ll miss out on any links we have worked on. It will be at least another three months before we can earn some PageRank, so we need to plan your site launch time wisely.

It’s best if Google finds you site by way of a link from a high PR site. We locate a site with a good PR (4, 5 or 6), that doesn’t have many links going out and get them to link to your site. Google will then index your content pages as fast as we can post them. How do we get a high PageRank site with your theme to link to your site? In most cases we must pay them. SEO is advertising and advertising costs money.

Another strategy for getting a top-5 ranking for site launch, and bypassing the sandbox, is to buy a mature domain that’s indexed well. We Google your keywords to locate a website with a great name, quality backlinks and good PR. We then look into the site’s monetization and projected conversion. If the site’s not making much money for the owner chances are they’ll be very open to a reasonable offer for their domain. Where possible, we develop the new content with the same URLs as the previous site to capitalize on the past owner’s hard work.

Related:

The Sandbox – It’s Existence and How To Reduce Your Time Inside

[tags]google sandbox, mature domains, aged domains, seasoned domains[/tags]