August, 2007

In August, Von Kirk Enterprises successfully sold All Digital Frames , the niche e-commerce website for which this site served as a blog. As a result, the focus of Digital Media Stream will be transitioning away from its original sole focus on digital picture frames to a broader focus on trends in digital media.

I learned about SEO about 18 months ago as we started to develop a couple niche e-commerce sites for drop shipping. We had moderate success promoting our sites, but I have come to realize that the world wide web is a medium in which only an SEO practitioner can succeed. The concern I have is that I’m not very good at it, especially the off-page link building that is so important. I’ve read a lot about it and understand the concepts of how I should be promoting my sites, but the truth is that there are a lot of other web developers out there that do it better than me and I’m not entirely willing to pay for the SEO I need. I would be willing to pay a small sum, but the problem is that I have found no solution that everyone can agree is worth it.

I can get better at SEO, but the real problem I see is that a small cross section of successful web promoters are out there setting the bar higher and higher. When I do searches now I have a very skeptical reaction to the top ten results from Google, thinking “I wonder what they did to get there.” I know I have to keep playing this game in the SEO dominated world of the web, but it does seem that the search engine results that we all crave are starting to mean less when you consider how an insignificant site can rise to the top with excellent SEO help while an incredibly relevant site could be missed entirely, not because of content but because of a lack of artificially inflated inbound links. It is an SEO world, but is that truly better or what is really needed.