Any SEO experts out there?

While I am familiar with the basic SEO guidelines, would love some feedback from people who do this stuff for a living Anyone who finds CocoonTech seems to be very happy with what it offers, the problem is trying to get more people to find this site.

So many times, I find people posting on other sites/forums asking home automation questions that no one there can answer, while there are plenty of folks on CT who can. So I really need to make the site more visible.

I'm not an SEO person by any means, but you may want to look at a few things on Google's site:
1. see http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf for their "starter guide" that contains basics of good site practices.
2. Google's webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en). if you verify ownership of this site, you can get info about how google sees the site, get info about any crawl errors, get html suggestions, etc.
3. in addition to #2, you may want to set up Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) to get info about visitors and how they're ending up here (search engines, referrer sites).

Unlike the usual sites in need of SEO help, CT has no shortage of high quality, useful, and unique content. So it's about making sure people who are looking for this content can find it.

As I said, this isn't my area but from what I know here are a few things you could consider:
1. You could look at those sites where users are looking for and can't find good HA content: do they show ads? do they show ads from any of the major ad networks e.g. Google Adwords? if so, you could consider experimenting with some keyword-based ads and see whether any of them give you a measurable return
2. Look at some of the more active areas on the site (the tutorials, manufacturer subforums, show reports, Premise downloads, etc) and work on promoting that content specifically: you could experiment with keyword ads as above, or provide more explicit pointers to some of this content via Twitter and facebook (i see CT has a presence on both Twitter and facebook, but i didn't see any recent Twitter content, and the facebook wall appeared limited to summaries of recent posts; you could also post pointers to content that a casual observer may not easily find on the site). And, of course, you could also join Google+, they recently added support for businesses (previously was limited to individuals).

At any rate, there are probably other folks here who are more experienced in all of this, but I hope this helps.

Here are some links to guidelines I found helpful in designing a site that has ended up dominating the search results.

EDIT: Didn't mean for the video to end up being displayed in the thread.

http://www.hallamint...reat-pages.html
http://www.cbsnews.c...?tag=bnetdomain
http://www.searcheng...ould-love/6760/

There are a multitude of businesses out there that do search engine optomizing. I have hired several of them in the past. They all claim to be experts, but I think few of them are. After going through a few and wasting a lot of money, I seem to have found one that has actually moved my website to the top up in a competitive market. It does cost thousands of dollars and keeps costing because they have to keep changing the site or google tends to get bored of it. And google keeps changing their algorithm so what is "perfect" today may be way down the list 3 months from now.

A forum may be different, however since its content is constantly changing with the user posts.

I would be happy to share the name of the co. that is doing my optomization if you like.

Obviously to pay for seo, you would need increased advertising revenue or increased sales of goods and services. So you have to decide if it is a cost effective decision. Advertising revenue is probably more predictible since traffic directly affects it. Selling product still requires the people to be impressed with what they see when they get there.

I would encourage you to do as much of the "free advice" stuff as you can first. But, it is really a full time job to keep a site optomized. And of course it depends on what your "competition" is doing.

js19707 said:

Unlike the usual sites in need of SEO help, CT has no shortage of high quality, useful, and unique content. So it's about making sure people who are looking for this content can find it.

Click to expand...

You hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the problem I am having. Plenty of people really appreciate site, community and content, but not enough people are spreading the word. Judging by my research/referral logs, this really is the only way the site will become more visible.

Deane Johnson said:

Here are some links to guidelines I found helpful in designing a site that has ended up dominating the search results.

EDIT: Didn't mean for the video to end up being displayed in the thread.

Click to expand...

Great links, contained some useful info which I wasn't aware of.

Lou Apo said:

There are a multitude of businesses out there that do search engine optomizing. I have hired several of them in the past. They all claim to be experts, but I think few of them are. After going through a few and wasting a lot of money, I seem to have found one that has actually moved my website to the top up in a competitive market. It does cost thousands of dollars and keeps costing because they have to keep changing the site or google tends to get bored of it. And google keeps changing their algorithm so what is "perfect" today may be way down the list 3 months from now.
...
I would encourage you to do as much of the "free advice" stuff as you can first. But, it is really a full time job to keep a site optomized. And of course it depends on what your "competition" is doing.

Click to expand...

You are right, most of the SEO companies out there are just winging it, using off-the-shelf software, and don't know what they are doing. I am sure there are a few good companies out there, but investing in SEO is something that doesn't make much sense for this type of site. I'll just have to work on more content which might also appeal to social networking communities such as reddit, stumbleupon, etc.


Thanks for the responses so far, keep them coming, every little tip helps!