I am confused beginner..

[Caiaphas]

What this guy is saying works! Don't judge books by their covers or so it goes!

[charlesh]

No better tool than SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer. Check out your competition's backlink strategies. Look at the directories your competition is listed in from the root page tab - and make sure you get listed in those directories too.

Small example - I noticed one of my competitors was getting a ton of linkage from wordpress.org, which is a highly credible site. I did a search on wordpress for the company and it turns out that the owner of the company had created a wordpress theme (not a very popular one), but by having his profile in the wordpress site with a link to his company, Google indexes his company higher in the natural rankings because wordpress is a highly authoritative site and trusted, so that company goes higher. It's not so much about quantity of links as it is a combination of quantity and quality links. If you pay for submission and sudddenly your traffic goes way up, Google is going to red flag it and may penalize you. Any link strategy should be carefully built and over time. The pops get you in trouble from what I've heard, so try to avoid those.

It's interesting, and I know everyone isn't going to create a wordpress theme to get higher in the rankings, but stuff like that and thinking outside of the box and hard work (2 hours a day min) will improve your rankings (Er, uh, so I'm told - slowly but surely for me, anyway)...

[Matt]

What this guy is saying works! Don't judge books by their covers or so it goes!

Hosting companies have an interesting dilemma. How do you make a video that is interesting to people when you are talking about something like web hosting?

No better tool than SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer. Check out your competition's backlink strategies. Look at the directories your competition is listed in from the root page tab - and make sure you get listed in those directories too.

Small example - I noticed one of my competitors was getting a ton of linkage from wordpress.org, which is a highly credible site. I did a search on wordpress for the company and it turns out that the owner of the company had created a wordpress theme (not a very popular one), but by having his profile in the wordpress site with a link to his company, Google indexes his company higher in the natural rankings because wordpress is a highly authoritative site and trusted, so that company goes higher. It's not so much about quantity of links as it is a combination of quantity and quality links. If you pay for submission and sudddenly your traffic goes way up, Google is going to red flag it and may penalize you. Any link strategy should be carefully built and over time. The pops get you in trouble from what I've heard, so try to avoid those.

It's interesting, and I know everyone isn't going to create a wordpress theme to get higher in the rankings, but stuff like that and thinking outside of the box and hard work (2 hours a day min) will improve your rankings (Er, uh, so I'm told - slowly but surely for me, anyway)...

GlowHost actually did something like this a few months back. We made a Spam Firewall for vBulletin forum systems. Not too sure if it is helping or not but 3000 downloads already should help get the brand name in front of people's eyes.

[charlesh]

Nice, Matt!

We're both in competitive industries...

One of my clients called me yesterday and said that Facebook is going to be launching a Groupon type thing and that he was chosen as a launch test in the ATL area. Can you imagine the traffic? Plus, all those likes and follows are good stuff too, even when the deal is over. Just think how many people in ATL sit there all day on Facebook...

[whitney01]

Search reviews to those sites that you said. So that you can prevent loosing your money..