I would like to go up in the rankings and I know next to nothing about this sort of stuff. So if anyone in here could give me so solid advise or help me out (I might be willing to pay). I would be pleased about it. My target key words – I’m looking for something like church media designer or church web designer. Thanks.

Only because you've given examples of search phrases you want to be found for, I would suggest doing some thinking about the keywords you are targeting. You can use keyword research tools (like Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker etc) and also your intuition to find terms to target that people are actually searching for.

Are you sure that the terms you mention are going to get you any traffic? My intuition and Keyword Discovery suggest not. Both might be wrong though

Never mind traffic, do you really want to be designing web pages for churches? It's all good to want to help out your religion and all that, but you're barely going to be able to make a living at best working in that niche (unless you pull the Christian web hosting stunt and overcharge for services by 300% just because you're "Jesus approved."). Even if you do catch lightning in a bottle and have people find you under those phrases, are those customers you really want?

This isn't a comment against your religion or anything. Whatever you want to believe is fine with me. I'm just pointing out that you'll either struggle to make ends meet or you'll have to go the route of the religious exploiter.

You can do it by yourself, just follow the strategies for link building! I have a religious site that I want to develop too so good luck!

Well the reason I chose that is because I know I don’t have a chance in hell (no pun intended) to get ranked with just web design. I’m not limiting my self to church web design but I would like to be ranked highly with them so I can get good business with them and the secular world. But thinks for all the tips and I will try to get something going.

Im currently working on articles that will help you with that and alot more. There are many ways in which you can do this cheaply and easily. I will post a link when i get the website running!

Okay, "Church Web Design" is one, but as the web gets bigger, it seems people are doing more and more regional searches. You can do web design for someone in another continent, but clients are happy when they get face time, and when you're charming with your delivery as they raise questions.

I do a little bit of portrait photography as a service, mainly candids. My domain is Seattle-Portraits.com because you get some bonus for keywords in your URL, particularly in the domain. Someone in Ukraine looking for a photographer will have no interest, so I'm trying to pick up traffic from searches like "seattle portraits", "seattle people pics" and basically any permutation of having your picture taken, but with my city ( and occasionally state ) attached.

So if you have a knack for religious web sites, that's great, and you should take advantage of what you can get, but I think if you put your location in the game plan, that would (1) be easier to target and (2) bring you more qualified traffic.

ForrestCroce you are spot on, it doesnt however always need to be the location but that is one very good example!

Rep coming!

Thanks. I will defiantly think about that. Since I already have this domain what if I got a domain alias for kicks lets say Georgia-webdesigner.com. Would that work or would I have to make that my main domain? And mmggaa that’s great I’ll be looking for it.

You could pruchase a few different domains and market them i.e. get domains that you might get searches for and link them all to a main website. Its also a thought that you should make a few websites that reach your target market and promote them via review secitons on forums and things. I know this isnt directly related to search engines but i think marketing your webdesigning is the main thing and not just search engines.


If you wish i could create a report for you on how to best market you website and do some research into what will work best for you. I can then present this report to you and you can follow it or i can market and optimise the website for search engines as well.

Please PM me as it will cost.

You may try to promote your site by ads or even creating an article and submit your articles, you can also promote your site to blogs!

To be ranked well for the tougher keywords you need to be an expert seo that is a notch above the rest. If you want to see how my seo got some very tough keywords ranked just pm me and i will send u his portfolio. This is a guy that used to do subcontract work for the seo companies but is finally(from my advice) going out on his own so they could stop getting free rides off of him.

He has many many sites in googles top 10.
Just pm me and i will send u his portfolio of real clients that you can call or emailto verify his work and his contact email. He is also reasonably priced.

I believe it's a good way to start ranking for the less competitive terms and who knows, your may find a good business with designing and promoting religious Sites, remember there's a lot of money in such business. Do a good keyword research, you will find a lot of good core terms for your site. Check this guide to keyword research, is a great PDF guide you can download, it has all the methodology you need to find keywords to optimized your site for:

Keyword research guide

If you really want to rank for these keywords it should be fairly easy.

However, just think of what your target audience would use as search terms. They might not look for "christian web designer" because they might assume that this does not exist.

Maybe they won't search on Google at all.
They might even ask other people they trust if they know somebody who can do this.
You might have more success looking in church forums and get in touch with your target audience there.

Originally Posted by Cheshire_cat

Well the reason I chose that is because I know I don’t have a chance in hell (no pun intended) to get ranked with just web design. I’m not limiting my self to church web design but I would like to be ranked highly with them so I can get good business with them and the secular world. But thinks for all the tips and I will try to get something going.

Have you thought I targeting "macon web design" instead? It's much easier to target locally than just using "web design".

One thing I did notice about 'macon web design' in google is that the adwords are not flooded with 100's of companies like a search on 'web design' returns.

Try these:
article submission
directory submission
forum / online groups posting
social bookmarking
advert submission
blog
link exchange only on those site who has a high page rank

desperate? hire a seo expert

If you want to increase your rankings for your website, first of all, you should research keywords that will match your website and that people actually search for. Probably optimally you would want to run a PPC campaign before doing seo so that you can find out what words convert into sales & optimize for them, but if you "might" have money for seo - PPC is probably not an option. Of course, if you're not familiar with PPC, then you really shouldn't start out with 'web design' keywords anyway.

Keyword research is important so you're not spinning your wheels on terms that aren't searched for or optimizing for terms that have too much competition.

Some keyword tools:

http://wordtracker.com ($28/week - a good start, I like the results)
http://digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ (Free)
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ (free)

Proper optimization starts at home, meaning with your website. Having proper titles for your pages is very important, not only for keyword purposes but a good title will increase your clickthrough rate from the serps. Other than a good title, you really should have a good internal link structure using descriptive anchor text (keywords) within your linking structure when you can as long as it looks & feels natural (no < a href= somelink.htm >web hosting cheap design affordable website php</a >, that's not good).

"Rising to the top" for serps involves both onsite factors & offsite factors. There's plenty more to proper onsite optimization than I have listed.

You could simply grab a huge amount of low-quality links (as was stated above) & it'd raise you in the serps temporarily, but simply getting a lot of incoming links isn't a long term solution to your "problem".

If you don't know what you're doing - do not do link exchanges. Someone linking to your website is not what can hurt (likely), it's who you choose to link to. You can cause yourself issues by linking to the wrong website or sites.

Because a website has "high" or "decent" home page pagerank, this does not mean it will supply you with a quality link nor is pagerank really a true indicator of the value of a particular website, in my opinion.

If you want your site to rise to the top and stay there - you have to work on it. There are no "quick solutions" if you're looking to build long term popularity for your website.

I think for your type of website that article submission would do well. I'm not talking about submitting to 300 article directories - only a handful. I've gotten a few prominent links from article submission in the web development field. A sidenote for article submission: don't optimize the article you are submitting with the keywords you're trying to rank for.

Everything here is my own opinion, and I do not operate a seo company; I'm a "back yard" web developer. What you're likely to find when asking for "seo help" is a bunch of well intentioned people floating you advice without any real knowledge about the long term effects of their suggested methods. While some of the methods that are suggested will help, some will do almost nothing for you & others might even hurt your website.

That again, is my opinion. Probably the worst thing you could do is to take everything that is said in a general webmaster forum regarding seo as gospel. If you're really looking for solid advice - I would advise consulting with a seo professional, find one that offers a free consultation & hit them up for steps to improve your ranking. Then, when you've had a chance to hear some input from a professional - find someone else & do the same thing. Get a consensus. Even if you choose not to hire a seo, at least you've gotten input from a professional as to what you should do. I'm not suggesting that you waste a seo's time, either.

maybe you can wrire articles about design etc submit it to various article center ...this is one of building baclink tips maybe works