SEO

It has been a few months since this blog has been updated. So, where are we now? The short answer is that we have a good draft of our latest website up and functioning. National Outdoors is a site we have developed that is focused on Outdoors Recreation Gear, Outdoor Equipment Reviews, Outdoor Pursuits, and Outdoor Destinations. The site also has a National Outdoor Recreation Directory that we are integrating for the first time into one of our projects. The end result is that we are excited about the potential for the new site and looking forward to seeing what our visitors think about it.

I was using the Google webmaster tools when I decided to look at the their blog. I soon came to discover that posting on a Google blog requires that one sign up for a blogger account or establish a new blog associated with an already existing Google account. So I did and quickly proceeded to add a post to see how it would look and more importantly how it might work for cross linking. Nothing special, but here it is: http://vonkirk.blogspot.com/2007/11/it-never-ends.html

My true interest is in discovering how Google will treat links from within its own network. No doubt I am late to this party and many web promoters have already figured out the best approach, but it never hurts to try.

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.