Only 30 new members from 3 months of marketing

[GordonUK]

Hi everyone,

I have hired a company to do search engine opimisation on a social networking website i have just launched and i have paid them £900 over three months and so far i have only gotten about 30 new members and because im new to all of this i just wondered if this would be considered a successful campaign? Or if the company i have hired are simply not doing a good enough job to drive traffic to my website?

I know that they are listing my website in directories and creating blogs and on forums etc and when i have analysed the traffic that does come to the website there is a 63% bounce rate. Once again is this normal? And is this a good figure? And would i be better off finding another company to market this website?

Many thanks

[almostbob]

what website
what are you in competition with
are you good enough to compete ( does your site reach out and grab attention in the first 8 seconds )are you unique, original, funny, sexy or controversial
is the site fast, malware free, and correct

no matter the advertising,
nobody will return if the site and its, premise, reason for existence, is not functional or attractive
the actions taken, unless the places where the links and fake blog entries are added are relevant will have a negative effect, on potential users and SE

SEO optimizes Your site for search returns, none of the described actions is particularly useful
dumping fake links in other sites, faking blogs, gets the site blacklisted
getting back into google is much harder than getting into google

stick the site in the website reviews forum, and get ideas on anything that needs to be changed

use the W3C validators http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ CSS http://validator.w3.org/ HTML
to make sure the code wont crash
check the page for speed issues http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
run it through http://www.browsershots.org to see if it actually works in other people's browsers

and hope for a large portion of luck
so - good luck

[GordonUK]

Thanx AlmostBob,

I will look into all of these things. Our competition are websites like Bebo.com and Myspace.com who are of course very big competition.

The website looks very attractive and i have had positive feed back with regards to that. I just have a feeling (though im no expert!) that the company i have hired to do the marketing have not taken it that seriously. Most of the new members i have gotten myself by asking friends etc to sign up but of course for the website to get up and running properly it needs a steady flow of traffic and new users.

At the moment i believe its getting something like 18 visitors a day which of course i would like to improve upon. Would google adsense or adwords be the way to go? Or buying banner advertisements on other peoples websites which have similar content?

Many thank

[almostbob]

Use google 101
the guidelines on the webmaster site to get your site indexed properly, before there are any backlinks from other sites
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

an xml sitemap to submit to google
http://www.auditmypc.com/web-master-tools.asp

I have 300 pages of my (somewhat parochial small business) site in google index
we get sitelinks
we out google rank our province's big3 in this business,

by following the instructions, and they work in Yahoo Bing Ask

hope it helps

hope the Optimisers did it right,
and you get organic growth from good links planted over the last months
there are :
good results;
fast results;
but there are no good fast results

VBG

[GordonUK]

Thanks again Almost Bob for your sound advice.

I know that they have been signing my website up to directories does this mean that i will automatically have a lot of back links? And is the purpose of this?

And how important are back links in moving you up the search engines and generating organic traffic?

Many thanks.

Many thanks.

[almostbob]

page rank,
on quality of your page
on keyword density in page text,
keyword in meta tags
completion of code: alt title meta header descriptons
accessibility of your pages
number of inbound links(**times qualilty factor of inbound links**)
divided by outbound links
times a scaling constant to bring all ranks to between 0-10

If you have more back links you get a higher ranking
If you have backlinks from a higher ranked source page, the links may be valued as many links from less valuable sites
sites are downgraded for being link farms, and may have a negative effect
there is a large discussion on googles algorithms, all of which is somewhat guesswork, coz google dont tell anyone exactly what they are.

good code
good content
good links
& good luck,
and a bunch of other things that google yahoo bing havent told anyone about yet

( get a google webmaster account and follow the instructions)
website directories are link farms. effect <= 0

[GordonUK]

Thanx again.

As a complete novice this is all really helpful and gives me a better understanding of what it is i should be trying to achieve.

Thanks again.

[Joe55555]

Hey, there, I also want to say something, hopeing could do my part to help u!

Whenever you write up a nice post/article/FAQ or if you make a vid or whatever else you do to add content you can use social bookmarking like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com to share it with the world.

Don’t do this with other peoples content obviously only your own. You can Digg or Stumble good quality threads just like a blog post, just make sure theres lots of good content in whatever your sharing.

Make sure you don’t overdo it or you will get banned from Digg like what happened to me. I Dug too many crappy short threads with short first posts.

Remember, no content=no visitors

[Joe55555]

Thanx AlmostBob,

I will look into all of these things. Our competition are websites like Bebo.com and Myspace.com who are of course very big competition.

The website looks very attractive and i have had positive feed back with regards to that. I just have a feeling (though im no expert!) that the company i have hired to do the marketing have not taken it that seriously. Most of the new members i have gotten myself by asking friends etc to sign up but of course for the website to get up and running properly it needs a steady flow of traffic and new users.

Many thank

If u know that, that the company i have hired to do the marketing have not taken it that seriouslythen i think u should fire that company!

That kind of company is so so so unprofessional!

[redesignunit]

Thanks bob it such as good advice

[GordonUK]

Thanks Joe,

I will also look into Digg.com or stumbleupon.com too as they sound like good platforms to direct traffic to my website too.

And yes im already thinking about finding a new marketing company but will see how this one goes for a little while longer.

How would i go about finding a good marketing company though? What should i look for? Because they all seem to promise the earth.

Many thanks.

[ejtt7ciia]

Hey, don't be be discouraged or so!

U want traffic, then maybe u can try Posting at free Classified sites.

There are a ton of free classified sites out there today. Having said this we like to focus on just the top ones unless you have a lot of extra time on your hands.

Make sure you put the ads in the appropriate categories and follow the posting guidelines so you are not banned from these sites. The most popular free classified sites are:

- http://Craigslist.com

- http://Gumtree.com

- http://Kijiji.com

- http://www.google.com/base

- http://backpage.com

- http://Adflakes.com

- http://Adhysteria.com

[GordonUK]

Thanks very much ejtt7ciia,

I will definitely put some posts/backlinks on these websites. Just one question though. Do the ads/posts expire after a month or so? A

[almostbob]

most sites expire the posts, individual operators can set the expiry dates, and how they expire, whether deleted or sent to an archive of 'old' threads

we have multiple ads on sites, from the referrer there are links from old posts on blog sites, google still keeps indexed, after they have disappeared from the menu in the blogsite
((keep the "appropriate'' thing flying) everyone has seen replies in newsgroups from spammers that have the same reply to every post in the group, gets them killed out of SE instead of raised)
If your post and signature/link is not a woftam, of value in the thread, it should get your site noticed

[GordonUK]

Thanks for that AlmostBob,

This search engine optimisation and backlink creating is time consuming isnt it? lol

Your advice has been most helpful.

Many thanks.