Website Design

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I’m a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

W3C does not have anything to do with SEO and validating your site is not going to help you get traffic. You chances are better showing up at the Indy 500 with a 3 hp go kart than to make a living with traffic you get from validating your site.

Now on to the death of SEO.

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO’s. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

But I do believe SEO is dead

1.I’ve seen more than my fair share of people that are asking questions about SEO one day and the next day they have started an SEO business.

It has to be one of if not the easiest business to start. All you need is a website and to spend an hour on a couple forums and you have enough information to fake it tell you make it.

2.The guy that has just started his SEO business feels that he can charge $100.00 a month and get 100 customers and live happily ever after. This is not the case, in most cases SEO is a full time job and to get one site to rank can take you 60 hours a week for the next 8 months.

3.Most people want to promise the ranking for 10 keywords but to get the traffic needed to run an online business you need more in the range of 10,000.

4.The average Joe does not have the dedication to run his own business much less spend the needed time on your site to make it rank and get the traffic needed to run a real business.

5. The average customer is not going to wait for more than about 3 months without seeing the needed results before wanting out of the game.

6.The client agrees on getting so many keywords ranked in the top ten but when he finds those keywords do not bring in enough traffic to sustain his/her site they become upset and want more for the same price.

7.There are no guarantees, no matter how much you know or how many sites you have ranked in the past there are no guarantees that you will be able to rank the next one.

8.Doing it correctly means trying to rank the client for enough keywords that it will have an impact on his/her business. In most cases this means thousands of keywords. After making a list of the keywords you now need to build thousands of pages of unique text. After that you need to optimize those pages and start link building for each page.

I no longer do SEO, but have done it on and off in the past and have worked with customers who make in excess of $100,000.00 per month. I’ve also seen more than my fair share of so called SEO’s asking for help in finding clients and a lot of them do cold calling.

If the SEO’s are able to make you so much money than why do so many of them go to forums and cold calling to get clients.
Because their services do not work for themselves, yet they want to sell the services that they already can not make work to you.

Most of the SEO’s that have figured out how to make it work only do consulting or sell ebooks. They know it is both a pain in the ass and a huge responsibility to take on a client. By selling an ebook or only telling the client what to do they place a spacer between themselves and the responsibility.

I guess what I’m saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO’s do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.

Silicone Bracelets

I’ve been working with a silicone bracelet site for the last two months and I’ve had quite a time with it. The biggest problem is that none of the search terms will bring in enough traffic to amount to a whole lot. I’ve thought about this a good bit and decided to create sub-domain names and try and come up with a couple search terms for each of the sub-domain names.

A couple of the sub-domain names are a lot closer to being finished but I decided to start marketing the bracelet sub-domain name first because I felt it would be able to bring in more traffic then the others. Some of the search terms we came up with should be fairly easy to rank for like Buy Bracelets, Basics Bracelets, Attractive Bracelets, Create a Bracelet and many others.

I want to see if I can get the search terms showing up in the search engines in the next 7 days as well as get the sub-domain name to get 2,000 unique visitors per day in the next 7 days.

I was originally not going to post about this but I think I will now. When I first heard about PPP (PayPerPost) I thought what a neat idea. But the more I looked at it the more I decided I just didn’t like it.

1. Not enough money. It takes me around $6,000 a month just to break even, $10.00 a post with a limit on 1 or 2 post per day just want make the kind of money I need.

2. It looks to much like selling links, I’ve never been banned or gotten a site banned and I’m not about to start on something like this.

3. It ugly ups your blog with ads about companies I could careless about.

But let’s face it, finding good links are getting harder and harder to find and if you can pay someone to make some blog post for you I’m sure it’s worth the one time fee of $10.00.

I don’t fault John Scott for the idea. And he had a good idea on how to get some cheap links and told the people they could not tell anyone that it was paid advertising.

And John got some attention, as a matter of fact he got the attention of Google.

Now Scott claims that the links are undetectable

Contextual Links @ V7N are undetectable to search engines. Whether it be by human or algorithmic filtering, our links are impossible to detect. Additionally, an enforced non-disclosure agreement prevents both publishers and advertisers from revealing participating publishers and advertisers.

But he’s told everyone that wants to post these ads to let him know by signing up and posting that they have a blog and want to make some post for $10.00 a pop. They are signing up on his forum. Matt Cutts is watching this and some are even posting the blog address that are going to be using.

Hey John, it’s not undetectable anymore.

I’ve got a client that does around $100,000.00 every month, all from the Internet. This got me to thinking about my own business and trying to get it to do $100,000.00 a month.

The web design business I can do around $25,000.00 per month.

SEO, I can do around $10,000.00 a month.

I can start running the ads on my site again and can do around $10,000.00 a month with those.

At the most I can do around $45,000.00 per month. Now keep in mind that this is running wide open and there is a lot of over head included in this. We have employees but training people takes time and finding people that are trainable takes more time. I’ve hired many graphic designers that know how to use the programs but their designs were not up to the standards I’d like to have. SEO is the same way, if you’re truly going to take on a site and get it ranked then you need someone on it everyday and this someone needs to know what they are doing.

A lot of people only do one or the other, SEO or website designs and very few people have made $10,000.00 a month with ads. This means that there is by far more money in running a real business then in doing SEO or website designing. I have to wonder why there are so many people getting into these fields when they could use their talents on their own sites and make a lot more money?

I’m going to keep my SEO and Website Designing business and will be adding the ads back to some of my sites. But I’m also about to start some real businesses. I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to make the kind of money I would like to make it’s going to take a real business and I don’t feel that an SEO or website design business can make that kind of money.

I see people all over the Internet wanting to get your business ranked in the top of the search engines for $100.00. I’m wondering why they don’t take the time to start their own business and make all that money that they claim they can make for you themselves.

I’m working on a customers site. The idea is to build pages like this one for wristbands. From here I’ll write text for pages using keywords that have to do with wristbands like Advanced Wristbands and Affordable Wristbands

My thinking is that if I have 50,000 pages about wristbands set up for customers it is a lot better then only having one page about wristbands. But it is a lot of work.