So our company has been up and doing business for around 7 months now but we barely get any traffic. We do voice over IPservices along with webhosting.

I don't have the slightest clue where to begin in order to bring in more traffic. We have submitted our site to a number of search engines but so far have not seen the traffic increase. Of course it would be nice to have our website optimized for search engines but we cannot afford to have it done for us from a certified SEO company.

So my question is where do you think I should begin as far as advertiseing goes to promote the company I work for. I have created business cards and flyers already but so far have not seen much in return.

Also how can I affiliate with bigger sites that actually obtain traffic when those sites want nothing to do with mine because of the lack of traffic I recieve. I'm just looking for some help along with some answers if there are any.

Originally posted by TCHQ-0wn4g3
So our company has been up and doing business for around 7 months now but we barely get any traffic. We do voice over IPservices along with webhosting.

I don't have the slightest clue where to begin in order to bring in more traffic. We have submitted our site to a number of search engines but so far have not seen the traffic increase. Of course it would be nice to have our website optimized for search engines but we cannot afford to have it done for us from a certified SEO company.

So my question is where do you think I should begin as far as advertiseing goes to promote the company I work for. I have created business cards and flyers already but so far have not seen much in return.

Also how can I affiliate with bigger sites that actually obtain traffic when those sites want nothing to do with mine because of the lack of traffic I recieve. I'm just looking for some help along with some answers if there are any.

Think back to the first time you ever set up a website. Where did you go to learn about setting stuff up? When you were thinking about setting up a website, which sites did you visit? That's how I started looking for advertising partners, and I've gotten some pretty good advertising that way.

Unfortunately, most hosts aren't that willing to reveal which sites they advertise with, besides Google Adwords and a few of the other *obvious* websites.

have you identified your target market? If so they make a list of the types of sites they would visit and try advertising there. IF you haven't identified your targets.....do that now

Head over to Scriptlance (http://www.findafreelancer.info) and get someone to SEO your site for like $20 theres lots of desperate web developers there who need some cash lol.

lol @ Mercifull, i might try that myself! :)

Here's a search engine optimisation tutorial I have written. It just outlines the basics of search engine optimisation. This applies to any site and not specifically for web hosting sites.

Don't expect results tomorrow though. If you don't want to pay $5 per click to advertise, I'd say it is your best option.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Probably the most important aspect of search engine optimisation (SEO) is your web site's content. Providing unique content and making it accessible to the search engines is the key here. Search engines are hungry for textual content. Textual content in contrast to graphics containing the content is a vital difference.

You might also want to read through our how search engines work tutorial before reading this, as it gives an insight on search technology used by most engines. Google for example takes into account more than 100 factors in order to determine each web site's PageRank. An interesting read is Google's Technology overview. However since trade secrets are involved, you will only find general guidelines there.

Choosing the right keywords

The ultimate goal for a successful optimisation is to increase ranking and to make search engines send targetted visitors to the web site. The most important factor is link popularity. However the content of the web site is quite important as well. Consider a web site selling printer consumables. If it ranks high for the keyword "printers" and ranks low for "printer consumables", this results in the wrong traffic being sent to this web site from the search engines.

Therefore it is very important to choose the right keywords for the web site. Visit our free web marketing tools page and start using the keyword suggestion tools available, in order to determine which keywords are best for this site.

After the right keywords are selected, all important "entry" pages must be optimised for those keywords. Be carefull not to overuse your important keywords in each page, as this will get your site penalised for keywords spamming.

The general rule is to use the keywords once in the title of the page, once in the meta keywords and description tags, once in the first headline and once in the first paragraph of each page. Do not use the keywords more than 6-7 times in a single page as this will get the web site penalised. Read further for more information on the important HTML elements for search engine optimisation.

Use the keyword density analyser featured in our free web marketing tools page. It will help you determine what keywords will get you traffic and also it will suggest either increasing or decreasing the number of times those keywords appear so that you won't get penalised. You can also determine if the right keywords come out and if not make some changes to the content.

Web site Architecture review

If your web site employ's Flash content, mostly graphic content, frames, Javascript navigation menus, dynamic content with session ID's embedded in the URLs and very little HTML text content, you just make it hard for search engine robots to understand and properly spider your web site's content.This can result into getting penalised and also making it impossible to get qualified traffic from the search engines.

Pay attention on how your content is organised. Categorise the content into "logical" sections and distribute the content into the relevant sections. You might think that this is part of the web design process, where in fact it is viable for search engine optimisation.

Important HTML tags for the search engines

The Title tag:

Search engines give importance to the Title tag of the page. Your two most important keywords or keyphrases should be included there. The top keyword you are targetting for this page should be as close as possible to the beggining of the title. If you want to include your web site's or company's name, add it at the end.

The Meta Desctiption tag:

Most search engines tend to ignore the description and keywords meta tags. However there are still some engines which take them into account and many engines use the description on the search results page. Put some effort to make it keyword rich and most importantly make it enticing for web searchers.

The Meta Keywords tag:

This tag is ignored by nearly all search engines. However include it with your most important keywords.
Content considerations

It is very important to repeat your important keywords within the content. The most important elements in terms of search engine optimisation are the first heading of your web site and the first paragraph. Try to include as many important keywords as possible in these two elements.

As mentioned above, it is important to include your important keywords in the first heading and the first paragraph. But do not excessively repeat the keywords as this will get you penalised. All heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) are important in terms of search engines. Bold and emphasised text is also important to include your keywords.

When inserting images to your content, always use the ALT tag which is addressed for people with disabilities and text only browsers. Include your keywords there as much as possible. File and directory names are also quite important and they should use your keywords as much as possible.

Always use the keyword density analysers to determine if some of your important keywords are excessively used or if they are less frequently used. Make changes according to your observations. Including links to external web sites that complement your content will also give you a small boost in the search engines.

Using dirty marketing techniques, such as featuring content which is not visible to your visitors but is visible to the robots (i.e.: text with the same colour as the background) will get your web site severely penalised. Refrain from using such tactics. They will only hurt your web site.

Concluding, search engines are always looking for ways to improve. All that matters to them is to provide quality and relevant web sites to the web searchers. Having good quality and unique text-rich content is what they consider to be the best option for their users.

Give more importance to the content of your web site and how it is presented to your visitors and less on search engine optimisation. Having good quality content will also entice your visitors to stay on your web site.

I am really beginning to wonder how well the Search Engine Optimization programs work and the search engines themselves. I know quite often I have to go through several pages of Google or Yahoo search pages before I can find something remotely close to what I am looking for. Maybe someone needs to come up with a better way of making a search engine? LOL

Yeah, We currently have a flash site and all of our webhosting packages and voice over ip packages are html webpages. There are no meta keywords in any of the html files so thats our first mistake.

I also read some other articles that dealt with link relevance and some other topics. How do you recieve relevant links to your products and or content? Apparently if all of this Search Engine optimization can be done by the user it would in the end be like free advertiseing no?

An SEO representative told us that if we had a backend to use that would provide us with a content management system to store all of our links and news in, that spiders would crawl all over it and index the information. However we don't have a backend installed and none of our pages have anything to be indexed.

For 20$ what kind of SEO would you really do. You would be charging 20$ but this one company was going to charge us 700$. Thats a big difference but what sets both of you apart?

Originally posted by TCHQ-0wn4g3
I also read some other articles that dealt with link relevance and some other topics. How do you recieve relevant links to your products and or content?

There are many ways to do this. Either by contacting the webmasters of the sites you believe are complementing your content offering a linkback, or being listed free under the correct categories on as many web directories as possible, etc.

The scope of the article is about one SEO strategy and this is content optimisation and not link building or link popularity. There is far more you need to know to get on the top results.

Apparently if all of this Search Engine optimization can be done by the user it would in the end be like free advertiseing no?

Yep it is 100% FREE advertising (unless of course you count the days needed to get top ranking and maintaining it.)

An SEO representative told us that if we had a backend to use that would provide us with a content management system to store all of our links and news in, that spiders would crawl all over it and index the information. However we don't have a backend installed and none of our pages have anything to be indexed.

Depends on what website are we talking about. This SEO recommends you to issue company news/press releases and the like to various news sources around the web. You will need to be issuing news frequently cause if not it's not worth the hassle. Also how many news releases can your company issue within say a month? Will this number be sufficient and newsworthy to get editors include your release on their website?

For 20$ what kind of SEO would you really do. You would be charging 20$ but this one company was going to charge us 700$. Thats a big difference but what sets both of you apart?

Well what I provide is insight on how a website needs to be optimised for the search engines. I don't think I should charge for this article.

Generally, I think there is much more than you imagine. It is not such an easy task to get top 10 rankings on the search engines. Especially within the hosting marketplace where there are many thousands of hosts/resellers/etc.

It needs at least an hour a day to do it, especially when it is a new website. The same hours you need to maintain your top rankings and not dropped out on the next update of their index.

Many people do not want to go through the process of learning SEO and applying it on their website. In most companies I am aware of don't have the time or human resources for SEO and outsource it to an SEO company.