Hello

This is my first post on the forum and I am seeking help and advice.
I have a website which is designed to help people looking for a house share or flat share, or specifically for new housemates or flatmates.
My target markets are student, graduate and young professional, but I am struggling to get my page ranked highly enough in the search engines on the key phrases, which are 'house share', 'flat share' and 'house share wanted'.

I'm using the company that built the website to help with SEO and we have a number of things in the pipeline which should help, but money is running out fast and I wonder if there is anything that I can do with sheer endeavor to increase the ranking significantly.

I have a google page rank of 3, but only return in the 230's for Google.co.uk and 70's for Google.com.

If you would like to offer any feedback on how to improve my site in general, in terms of the appearance, user friendliness and general appeal I would be very grateful to hear it.

Thanks for reading.

Lee

www.abodewithme.com

I have sent you a pm! Please check it when you have time.

PS one of the first rules for website owner is not to have your webdesigner do you SEO unless they can prove they know what they are doing with results in the search engines.

First of all, Shannon, that is dangerous advice. The days of dedicated internet SEO companies are very much numbered as people realize that the people who practice it exclusively have almost completely forgotten how to build a user-friendly website.

This also isn't the time to go PMing a guy either. Whatever you have to say, say it here...unless you're pitching yourself, which he clearly wasn't asking for.

Having said that, Lee: your biggest problem right now is that you're getting screwed by your web design company and moreso your SEO company (and no, I'm not saying that because I want your business...I'm not even taking new business on). No web designer worth their salt will put their hyperlink or claim credit at the footer of every page, nor will any SEO (looks like you're using two companies).

In particular, the automated link exchange: it's gotta GO. Just kill it. Get rid of it. It does your users no good and it doesn't help with search engines, either. This is a silly trick pulled off by a silly SEO company with its silly head up its silly ***.

Second: why aren't your listings showing? This is the best way to gain search engine traffic...publishing unique, user-generated content that will create more internal links and therefore more links pointing back to other pages on your site (in particular, your home page).

Third: "Forgotten" is misspelled twice.

Fourth: the code for this site is a sick Dr*amw*av*r joke, and the designer should be ashamed of him/herself. It also doesn't appear to address the accessibility requirements your homeland has.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-fr...irements.shtml

Fifth: rank checking is useless, at least partly for the reason you came up with (different datacenters generate different results). The other part of the reason is that the same datacenters can generate different results, depending on things such as personalization. The only thing that matters is the traffic you're getting from those keywords and phrases (which sounds like nothing).

Simply put, Lee, people are jerking you around and gotten you away from what you should be focusing on...building a site for your users in such a way that the search engines naturally follow (it does exist, you know.)

Hey Adam, I believe my advice is pretty basic. If you cant prove you can do it and do it well, get out.

Shannon.
This is NOT the "SEO Services Wanted" forum, if you want to pitch for work please keep it to the appropriate place.

Adam is right, Shannon is wrong. Designers have a much better knowledge of what they are doing than the average guy.

There are plenty of blackhat tricks, but these are in the long term worthless and dangerous. I'd trust the designer over the SEO crackpot

I have no need to pitch for work, and I did not say anything in this thread. Am I not allowed to PM someone with what I do? If not that doesnt seem like a very proffessional way of running a forum....

Reply PMed.

Originally Posted by theseokit

I have no need to pitch for work, and I did not say anything in this thread. Am I not allowed to PM someone with what I do? If not that doesnt seem like a very proffessional way of running a forum....

Look at it this way...if you told me that your car was getting bad mileage and you were looking for advice on where to buy a cheap fuel pump, would you want me telling you I'm a mechanic and I can fix the car cheap?

That's your answer.

Thanks for your comments so far.

Adam - your post was quite painful to read. It makes it sound like my site is the worst site ever produced, and there was me being quite pleased with the guys who built it. You're right about the spelling mistake for starters which is inexcusable and I should have spotted, so thanks for taking the time to look at my site and the code in detail.

One of the things that you mentioned was the links exchange. You don't seem to think very highly of this, and I've noticed from your comments in other forums that this is a common theme. Do you feel that rather than help with rankings they either have no effect, or a negative effect?

The company that built the site do have a decent track record of getting sites highly ranked in search engines, and I have several number one rakings for my site - for example try 'house share finder' in any of the major search engines. I think we just picked a bad phrase though - we are changing the text so that 'house share wanted' should be picked up. It was the marketing side rather than the web design side that actually drew me to this company so I'm pretty dissappointed of the comments that you made are correct, which I can only assume they are as from where I'm standing I can't see what your motive is other than to offer help.

I think that it's clear that I need to understand the SEO subject better myself. Do you know of any books that I could read that cover the subject in an up to date manner?

Hi Lee,

Adam is spot on with his criticism of the linking scheme this web design company has got you involved in. This company seems to have an array of web sites they have designed, and has got them all linking to each other. This doesn't help visitors to these sites, and has been put in place purely to boost rankings of those sites. This is just the kind of thing that search engines don't want and if detected will affect your rankings negatively.

If you want to read more about SEO there is a beginner's guide here and a newb's guide here. It's been a while since I visited the last link, but it used to have pretty balanced and informative discussions about SEO in the forum's there (as are present here of course ).

If you are thinking about what search phrases to target, you might want to do a bit of keyword research. Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are tools I've used in the past (the free trials) that give you search counts for specidic and related phrases, but you could even just get away with doing a huge brain storming session to come up with terms you think surfers might search for. "house share wanted" doesn't seem to be searched for much as far as Keyword Discovery reports, though.

Everyone has a different approach to SEO, I firmly believe that Adam is quite successful with his SEO.

That said, I am also successful and have proof of my success. That doesnt mean I am by any means the best in the business!

Originally Posted by theseokit

That said, I am also successful and have proof of my success.

This is not the place to proclaim your 'success'. Keep it on topic

I was not claiming that here friend, I was simply stating a fact about what adam said

Shannon, since you've already diverted the conversation from it's original topic, can I take a moment to ask why you call yourself the rep master? If you are talking about rep as in reputation, then I think you've got a fairly poor ratio - 989 posts to 45 TP points (currently). Just a question

Lee: there's a reason I made it painful to read. I figure if I sugar-coat an answer, and don't give you the straight-up, I'm doing you a disservice and I'm not telling you what your site and its users are telling you in an indirect manner. I'd rather be blunt with someone than kiss their ***...that way, either I get real respect from real people (as you seem to have given me...thanks for that, by the way!) or I find out in a big hurry who is just paying me lip service. And yes, offering help to you (and to others who may be reading this) is my only motive.

gringo answered your question to me in pretty well the same manner I would. Look at it this way: would you rather have one-way traffic to your site or two-way traffic to and from your site? Once you know the correct answer to that question, you'll also know the correct answer to the link exchange question.

You might also want to read this page from big G:

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66356

And this one:

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769

These are the two single best primers on the Internet for those who are new to SEO and issues associated with it.

Basically, it boils down to a few things:

Design your site in the cleanest, best, most user-friendly way possible.
Tell the right people.
Make sure you provide as much useful content in as open a fashion as possible.

You do those things, the rest will fall naturally into place.

As far as the company you selected goes, I'm not even sure if "house share" is a phrase you should be targeting, never mind anything that's an extension (or longtail) of that. I realize that's ultimately what your site is about, but yours is the type of site that, if built and SEOed correctly, can attract organic search engine traffic for hundreds of words and phrases, including words and phrases you never even thought of.

This is actually the reason I stopped using WordTracker and Keyword Discovery: the longtail market is growing quite rapidly and most of the keyword research tools don't capture or understand that.

whooooos..Guys be gentle.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

As far as the company you selected goes, I'm not even sure if "house share" is a phrase you should be targeting, never mind anything that's an extension (or longtail) of that. I realize that's ultimately what your site is about, but yours is the type of site that, if built and SEOed correctly, can attract organic search engine traffic for hundreds of words and phrases, including words and phrases you never even thought of.

No, but it's probably an easier phrase to rank for, which helps an unscrupulous SEO company show artificial productivity to justify their price.

What I'm saying is my site ranks #1 in Google for the phrase The Truk Islanders, and Gut Feeling but that doesn't mean I'm worth paying to SEO anything for anybody. This is a really extreme example, but I think the phrase "house share finder" sounds like a less extreme example of the same thing.

It doesn't matter where you come up in whatever search - it matters how many people Google and Yahoo and MSN Live are sending you. And whether those people are using your service. An SEO is a marketer, a sales person. What you want from them isn't a #1 rank for a particular phrase, it's more and better traffic. That's why most SEO companies will only work for a fee, instead of a % of the increase in revenue they provide - because most of them can't provide that.

Adam is a well respected guy around here. I would take pretty much any advice he gave me about my site and follow it without question.

I am sorry to get off topic, actually that title was given to me automatically I did not put it in. So I dont know I have alot of posts prolly a user rank.

Guys - thanks again for your comments.

Adam - I can see what you're saying about the longer phrases rather than targetting specific short phrases. The only problem is knowing what they are so the key must be to build lots of content in the site so that many variations will be picked up.

Also, thanks to Adam and Gring for the links to read up on SEO. I think that I need to find out a bit more myself and start to develop a more coherant strategy.

Cheers
Lee