We redesigned our site about a month ago and I decided to try to figure out how to get it better SE listings. We had adwords on for some time and other than spending $300 a month, I don?t think we were getting a lot out of it, but that?s likely my fault, for not spending enough time on it.
I figure we could hire somebody, but anybody that knew the stuff well would be too high-priced or working for themselves, and I was always curious with this stuff anyway
So I started reading some popular mainstream boards and think I got a basic idea for how SE works, other than the ideas I had from being on the internet 12 hours a day for 10 years so I started reading about techniques/articles/myseoblog.net, etc and a lot of things really got simplified in my head and I was able to structure a plan. It seemed that basically you have to act like, and mimic, that you?re a reliable, established business to get better listings than competitors, nothing tricky. Google is a big fraud system whose job is to show relevant links to their users.
Now I know companies normally keep this info in their vest, but I figure showing the first month wont hurt, as we will change/adapt in the future and there are not a whole lot of companies doing what we do anyhow
Ok, first thing I needed was a list of keywords/keyphrases that I thought people/businesses would type in when looking for our product. So I had to do some keyword research, basically by coming up with words and phrases like ?check issuing, check cutting, affiliate payment?, etc. and I came up with around 25 words or so that I thought people would use looking for our product.
Now, our site was basically just thrown up, not much thought went into the SEO initially, just what we thought sounded right, so I knew this had to be changed. I basically rewrote much of the site text to incorporate most of the words in my list, some several times. Then added the top 8 or so phrases to the metatags. I made sure the company categories we were hoping to get like affiliate networks, web programs, etc existed on the site.
At that point we began a routine of reading/posting on a slew of boards, now let me tell you its amazing how different each board is as far as information/personality and its amazing how much you can learn. So we basically just posted with a short message in the sig with a few of our keywords in there, with a logo when the board allowed it.
When we came across a blog, we would comment with a link to our site.
We submitted to DMOZ about a month ago. Good luck with that.
I tried to get our link on resource sites, but unfortunately, they wanted links back and I didn?t want to have anything but maybe links out to biz partners and clients on our site, didn?t want it covered with links.
I posted about our service on craigslist.
We have relationships with some affiliate network/program software companies and we got a list of a few more and are trying to get our links on their sites and vice versa.
We sent a press release individually to about 6 industry news sites as well as placing it on digg.
I did many searches for various keywords on google and when id find somebody talking about needed the service we would provide, on a board or such, I would get in there and try to drop a link to us (yea, I know with old threads, that?s sneaky). But those boards would have a high PR for certain words and I figured what the hell.
I would also look for places that talked about our basic product and tried to make an interesting comment with a link.
We bought a link on yahoo directory and a link on business.com directory.
Results for the past 30 days
Got on the first page of google for not very competitive words :
remote check printing and delivery
check issuing
webmaster payment
check issuing services
and got a higher listing on a few others
referral stats
http://www.webmasterchecks.com/keywords.pdf
keyword stats
http://www.webmasterchecks.com/referral%20stats.pdf