Nobody in this thread can give you any advice worth a toss unless they know the keyword.

On a long enough time frame and with unlimited resources it's possible to rank any site for any keyword.

The question is, is it worth it? Most of the time it isn't.

SEO is not free traffic as most imagine. If you do it yourself you have all the time spent learning, buying PR sites, hosting them, a myriad of different tools and pieces of software to pay for (monthly).

If you pay someone to do it you have the physical payment every month (at least 1k+), that will need to be paid indefinitely, because once you end your contract they will remove the PR links and down your website falls in the rankings. And if you're not in first position you're last. Then you've got the opportunity cost of the 3 months it's gonna take to rank any half decent keyword. Then there's the ever present risk it all goes tits up when G updates the algorithm. Then overnight your traffic source dies and so does your business.

SEO is fine if you are building plenty of sites. Like people who build 100's of sites for affiliating Amazon products. Or if you are doing SEO for other people, because in both cases you can shield yourself from the risk that you lose everything, that comes with every each Google update.

My advices is to focus on building an actual business and so instead of relying on a dodgy source of traffic like SEO, go for paid traffic. It's tricky to get right, you'll need to test a lot and probably lose a good chunk of $$ to begin with, but once you crack it you have a stable traffic source that's often very scalable and you don't have to wait 3 months to see results.

If you do still want to hire an SEO, you'll need to spend about 1k/month+ (depending on the number of the k/ws and the competition) with maybe 1k initial down payment, for anybody decent. You can find them. Not usually on Elance though.

Of course after that anti-SEO rant I would point out that I do SEO my sites and it can still be very worth it if you have low comp keywords combined with a large margin per sale (with a good conversion rate on your site).

For all you marketplace sellers, has anyone found a way to export amazon listings to eBay through a script or online service?

I have around 2,000 listings i need to import to eBay.

fattony7891,

Your anti-SEO advice seems to be very out of date. Nothing you said makes me think you are familiar with Hummingbird at all. Also, "if you are not first you are last" makes no sense at all. First position gets an average of 32% of the traffic for a given keyword, so if the keyword you are ranking for is high traffic, you can still receive plenty. Not to mention that you can do things such as using Rich Snippets that will increase your CTR when lower than 1st position.

Paid search is the exact opposite of what you explain it to be. It is great when no one else is bidding on your words, but it is by its very nature a race to the bottom, where eventually you will be getting your margin squeezed out by competitors.

It sounds like your strategy would be good for a sketchy business like fake weight loss pills or something like that, but for a legit business, SEO is going to bring significantly more longterm value than paid.

And I am a believer in paid traffic as well, because of course it does work, but the best strategy for someone brand new is to utilize a lot of paid up front while they build out SEO for longterm and eventually wane off of paid into more SEO focused online marketing.

You are right you can get some decent traffic from 2nd and 3rd spots. My comment was more tongue in cheek than hard fact. But as you said it needs to be a higher traffic keyword and that very often means more competition, which means even more time and cost to rank (and there's never a guarantee that you'll rank super high, potential worries about negative SEO on a new domain) which then again then starts to bring into question whether it's worth your time.

My main gripes with SEO are more opportunity cost, the time sitting around waiting for the site to get traffic and then the anxiety that comes from hoping your site and thus livelihood doesn't get flushed down the ****ter every single Google update.

Your point about PPC costs being pushed up over time due to increased competition is right but only up to a certain point (at least for AdWords, I dont know anything about FB ads). If you are dropshipping then sure because there's less to differentiate yourself on and people can easily just compare prices and go for the cheapest product. But there are many ways to beat out the competition with paid traffic for the long haul with a proper high quality product.

The great thing about AdWords is that you can't really just compensate for ****ty ads by outbidding people (only to a certain extent at least, and then you have to deal with your margins being hit)

If my product is better than yours (i.e. unique and thus has unique features and benefits), I should be able to make more compelling ads, my ads should get higher CTRs and Quality Scores (meaning cheaper clicks, my ads showing more often and in higher positions) and if my website and after sales funnel converts well, then I'm in play.

Again I'm not 100% anti-seo at all. I love the idea of SEO in certain niches and as I said I do use SEO on my sites. I just wanted to give people an idea of some of the pitfalls of SEO, because I fell people look at SEO with rose tinted glasses. As a long-term solution and only source of traffic, SEO is way too risky for me.

(Of course I'm presenting a false dichotomy, in reality it's prob optimal to go for a combo of SEO and PPC long-term, that would solve all the problems.)

All fair points.

So over the past two years I've managed in excess of $1m in online marketing budgets, a large portion focused around SEO. Very little of that going to paid advertising (so mostly budget going to people/work). I think I can speak somewhat knowledgeably about the industry and value.

I think it's incorrect to think about SEO as somehow unique compared to other marketing mediums, imagine if you had a business driven by content marketing / PR before the internet. If you had great relationships with a couple editors or even paid them off to get preferential treatment in the press, you would outperform equally viable content that lacked these advantages. If you had a business structured to take advantage of this it would be immensely profitable.

The only real special thing about search engines as a marketing tool is that they brought down the cost of entering this market so drastically basically anyone could enter it. This paired with the very fast adoption and lagging sophistication meant it was particularly juicy for a time. But as with most things like this (think poker in 2003) it requires that you understand it in the moment ahead of the level of competition as it ramped up.

Anyways, at this point I don't see anything particularly special about SEO as a means for acquiring business compared to other mediums. It has it's strengths and weaknesses and is not applicable to every situation. If you came to me with a B2B enterprise software startup and told me you wanted me to do SEO (beyond the basics) I would say no and I would teach you how to call up mid-level managers, VPs and CEOs to help you build a B2B sales and referral driven marketing plan. Doing SEO would be probably be a massive opportunity cost waste until you've maxed out that well trodden path first. It could be potentially profitable but as an early stage startup you should be focused on your most scalable AND profitable marketing medium first and then consider other options.

Can you still make millions of dollars with hardcore SEO optimization? Yes, most likely it's still possible but I directly equate that to most other marketing mediums if you're the top top .01% of talent you could make a lot of money offering undifferentiated products, offerings or borderline/outright scams. If you're that good you have a serious opportunity cost question and in the majority of cases doing blackhat SEO is going to lose out to other opportunities now.

Can you carve out some $20k/month niche utilizing SEO and hardwork? Sure but I apologize I just don't really care about that, you can carve out a niche offering with a wide variety of strategies and you're operating off the back of a lack of competition and your sweat equity.

I guess the bottom line is if you're looking to build your own business the most important skill will be understanding how your product and general marketing work together and can be scaled. It's much more profitable to have a perfect product market fit and weak marketing than it is to try and market an inferior product. And if it isn't then you'll want a sales driven organization anyways.

If you're looking to work for others to get access to the executives of this world (to become one or get the access), you can leverage a technical skill like SEO to get in the door but eventually you're going to want to focus on your ability to pitch, sell, understand how business works and build relationships. You can pay for expertise as you progress and your technical skills erode.

If you're looking to build a grub stake and just get some cash in your pocket right now I would focus on social content promotion. You can get similarly cheap exposure to the early days of SEO although I don't think it's as juicy. Maybe take a look at big data as well. The key metrics here are the CPA and the premium on the knowledge.

SEO most often fits into the picture these days for companies whose core focus is away from SEO but because of their scale (and focus in other areas) have relatively straight forward SEO strategies still available to them that can be profitable to an expert SEO. This can be a very profitable endeavor but to put in context SEO is likely taking $5-$10k per month (speaking about dedicated SEO budget) out of a $300k+ per month marketing budget (there are exceptions when there's a great fit). It can be very profitable but it's relative importance to the rest of the company is usually smaller than other channels.

I forgot to mention that SEO is particularly effective for companies that do a lot of content based marketing, again though the key element here is the content as a business marketing vehicle and the value of the SEO will always be intrinsically tied to the effectiveness of the content for business objectives.

+1 for the above post ...

I've had an offer for a domain name I've held for five years. I've never put any real content on it. The name would make a good redirect for the site making the offer.

Any ballpark figure for value of something like that? I've only just replied with a 'what price did you have in mind' email.

Well the offer came back $300 which I think is pretty fair. Guess I'll counter tho. 500?

counter 6, then when he under cuts you again settle at 5.

I took $400 with me covering Sedo fees. Nice little windfall if this actually closes.

Can someone explain what a good impression/clicks ratio is for a poker site. I have a couple poker related websites that I have now had running for about 12months. Here are the stats for the last three months:

.................Impressions............Clicks

Jan. 2014........3,533..................26
Feb. 2014........2,953..................31
Mar. 2014........2,543.................18

Unfortunately the number of affiliate accounts that have materialized from these sites in nominal. Are there other means of generating revenue I should consider? Thanks for your help.

Noob Domain Question

My buddy has a 5 letter domain that is a common word with some letters replaced by numbers - think 7even.

He has gotten some random lowball offers over the years and just recently got $550. He countered with $5500, not sure how he came to that number, and now the interested buyer countered with $1000. What should he counter with?

He says he'd be happy with $2500 but I also feel like $550 was a solid initial bid in terms of interest and to jump to 4 figures leads me to believe holding fast at $5500 might be +EV but im clueless at this **** and was terrible at poker so I may be totally off base. Also he knows he can get 1k even if the guy rejects $5500 counter so why not just go for it all.

What should his counter bid be knowing he would be super happy selling it for $2500.

In terms of negotiating/game theory - what is the most optimal counter to maximize $$ and minimize risk of ending up with $0.

Anyone with experience creating data feeds from Shopify -> importing to Adwords merchant center? PM please!

I have s/w a few SEO wiz's and their common denominator is that they want at least 8-10K+ to start a campaign for me. Just out of curiosity, if my meta tags are fairly updated, and my social media bases are already covered (partly - my FB and Twitter accounts are pretty legit and regularly updated), what in the world could a wizard do for me in 3 months, if I did pay them $3333 per month / 10K total?

I understand nobody is going to say, "Well, an SEO Guru would do A, B and C...", but someone absolutely has an idea of what would be done for my 10K? Not going to say my site name, but it gets minimal traffic (50 unique visits a day) and it has about 1K pages indexed with Google. It seems like Panda / Penguin (I forget which one), buried sites that have paid links / spammy links / unnatural links. So is building backlinks still a viable option? It seems like the only tangible work I can think of that would justify 3K+/month or w/e I end up spending on SEO. What else is there besides back-linking, regularly updating website and making sure you have a strong social media presence?

***Ranking highly in Google (organically) is v v v imp for my site. I understand it isn't necessary for some.

Meta tags have nothing to do with anything. It's tough to say without seeing your site, but he'd be properly optimizing your existing pages, finding better opportunities for backlinks, adding new content to the site to increase organic traffic, etc. Building backlinks is always a viable option. If you have a balanced and natural looking anchor profile, you'll be fine.

Recently launched our new store for our website:
https://www.scirra.com/store

If anyone has any comments about how we can improve it in any way would be interested to hear! Sitemaps not yet done as a few things are still changing but it's basically all there now.

This thread is pretty old and right now a bit OT, however I'd like to ask OP only one question

What changed in these years? I mean what advices you gave a long time ago that aren't useful right now?
Since I'll read the whole thread I'd like to know what to skip...

ty in advance

One big change is that a TON of web traffic has shifted to mobile. That's bad news for webmasters because now you have to support more platforms with your site, and the ad rates on these new platforms (mobile) are not as lucrative as desktop.

If you can figure out "native" advertising for your site, that could help counteract this.

Anyone have current recommendations for outsourcing article/content creation? I've got my first good/unique domain idea in a few years, and want to get the ball rolling. In the past I've always created my own content and setup the sites myself. This time I want to try outsourcing everything from content creation to site setup.

http://www.iwriter.com/
https://www.textbroker.com/
https://ineedarticles.com/index.php

According to my own experiences ranking sites have become a lot harder. Try to build a website that offers legit good content and/or a legit product. The days of marketing a ****ty product and making a lot of money is still possible but it's a lot harder.

In fact, I think it's better than ever to buy abandonded websites with good link equity. Even if the site doesn't produce income you can make a great deal by buying a website that's worth a lot less than the "value" of the link equity. As usual 90%+ sites for sale on flippa are junk so you still got to weed out all the crap sites.

I often use static HTML templates for a couple of my purely content-driven small niche websites. These days, You'll find a plethora of new designs and layouts at http://www.templatemonster.com/html-templates.php or any other popular template marketplace. There are a few obvious benefits for me in having a static HTML site over a WordPress site, when it comes to SEO. As for content creation, I’ve dealt with plenty of outsourcers on Fiverr and freelance platforms, but it’s a massive task. In my experience, many content writers are incredibly unreliable, and have even been known to disappear without a word in the middle of a project. Besides, you need to be clear about the value of outsourcing so that you can see the potential outcome right at the beginning.

Don't use sites for outsourcing content. Search and interview candidates and develop relationships with them. It's much more reliable and you'll get what you pay for.