New here please point in right direction.

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hopeful

New Member
Hi all, I am new here and looking to learn a little about SEO. Well that is not true, I don't actually want to learn SEO as I am so confused by it all now, but my site needs it.

I have read the SEO made easy guide and am more confused now than I was before.

Where would be a good place to start? I mean start real simple and work my way up the ratings.

Alternatively if anyone is happy to help me for a little pocketmoney my pm is always open.

Mods, if this is in the wtong forum, sorry, I was not sure where to put it.

Thanks
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Welcome to the forum :)

If you could let us know what your site is we might be able to offer you advice
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Thanks Blacknight, the site is Moneytalk.ie - Irelands Financial Discussion Forum At the moment I am having to pay for google adwords to get hits.

Yahoo and Google tell me the keywords I am using are not hugely popular, as long as I refer everything to Ireland and Irish, for example there is no competition for "Irish mortgage calculator" but if I were to choose "mortgage calculator", there are people paying up to €9 per click.

I am only interested in the Irish users so don't want to be big on google.com but do on google.ie if that makes sense.

Any help, hugely appreciated.

Thanks
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
First off - the site takes forever to load and pinging it I get:

Code: 
Pinging moneytalk.ie [209.85.14.6] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.85.14.6: bytes=32 time=172ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.14.6: bytes=32 time=168ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.14.6: bytes=32 time=167ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.14.6: bytes=32 time=169ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 209.85.14.6:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 167ms, Maximum = 172ms, Average = 169ms

Compared to:
Code: 
Pinging irishwebmasterforum.com [81.17.240.200] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 81.17.240.200: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=60
Reply from 81.17.240.200: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=60
Reply from 81.17.240.200: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=60
Reply from 81.17.240.200: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=60

Ping statistics for 81.17.240.200:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 23ms, Maximum = 32ms, Average = 28ms

In terms of the SEO you have two basic choices:

1 - Stick with phpbb2 and hack it to pieces
2 - Invest in vbulletin and vbseo
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Thanks Darknight, funny you mention V-bulletin my intention was to use a vb forum but it has developed a bug which makes it take forever to load (intermittently) your pinging would need a calander to time it. It is here:
Money Talk - Powered by vBulletin

Would you have any ideas how I look for the bugs in it? A friend was helping me and ran validot on it and once it said there was a <br> error on line 712 but there are only 512 lines, then when run again no errors were reported. Tis driving me nuts.

Any idea why the PHPBB is running slow? is that just part of the parcel? I haven't noticed it taking a long time to load myself though.

Thanks again for the help
 
R

RedCardinal

New Member
As 'Darkhorse' (sorry Michele, just couldn't resist :D) mentions, try using a set up similar to the one you find on these boards.

In fact you could probably learn a lot from this board. I'm sure Michele wont mind me mentioning that he gets tonnes of Search Engine traffic (organic not paid).

You might get some ideas about keywords from either Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery (both offer free tools). Also have you built pages that specifically target those words? Do you actually have a mortgage calculator?

Looking at your index in Google I can see that many pages are stuck in the supplemental index. You really need to get more links pointing at your site, and in particular deep links pointing at inner pages.
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Hi Redcardinal, I do indeed have a mortgage calculator. I have been trying to build up links but it is all through crappy link exchanges and they all just point at my index page.

Any suggestions for getting these links required?

Thanks
 
R

RedCardinal

New Member
Off the top of my head? Probably not.

Avoid the link exchanges unless you have plenty of other links. If nothing else try submitting to directories (human edited only). Are you a hack? Could you put together something like a calculator that others could put on their sites? Widgets could be nice in your space.

Maybe post on related forums and add a signature. Deeplinks is going to require good content. Can you write articles? Article submission might get you some easy deeplinks (don't spam though).

Cause a fuss - do something controversial. But don't break the law :)
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Ok some food for thought there Red, cheers. As for my being a hack, no, I'm a muppet lol. I am bumbling around the net picking up tit bits of info here and there lol.

I'd love my vb site to go live but it is driving me crackers as it intermittently hangs which will really bug people.

Cheers
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
RedCardinal said:
In fact you could probably learn a lot from this board. I'm sure Michele wont mind me mentioning that he gets tonnes of Search Engine traffic (organic not paid).
Click to expand...

RedCardinal - I think you've still got access to the Urchin account for this site, so feel free to give examples
 
W

webdream

New Member
your mortgage calulator is in fact a loan calculator I would say.

for an example of mortgage calculator I would follow this example maybe , Monaghan Property Sales

It doesn't seem to be very useful if the visitor has to type in the interest rate to me.
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Webdream our mortgage calculator is a loan calculator, you are indeed correct. But it is also a more detailed mortgage calculator than the one in your link. We had one just like it but upgraded to the present on. You are right the monaghan one in your link does not even allow for different interest rates to be put in. That renders it useless for checking different banks rates.

We are looking at a slightly modifying it so rather than inputing months you input years but still get the detailed results as at present on my site... Which I have to add you will struggle to find a similar free detailed calculator on the net, showing you a capital/interest breakdown throughout the term of the mortgage.

However that is beside the point I think the thread got kinda sidetracked there.

Where I am at the moment:

1. A VB site that I want to use but can't because it is broken.

2. A PHPBB site that I have to modify to hell to promote

I don't think things are looking up for me really.
 
W

webdream

New Member
ah , don't get downhearted hopeful. I just wanted to add a link to that site, that's all. It only went online the other day.

(edit - sorry forgot to mention, that mortgage calc. i link to uses realtime interest rates from a mortgage finance compay. No need for user to put the rate in.)

Mind you, it did make me think uno, because that calc. of mine could quite easily be adapted for more detailed output. Actualy, it wouldn't be bad combined with a stamp duty calculator.

If a decent resource like that can be offered as a free website plugin, maybe people would use it, or link to the resource - and indeed help the page rank of the supplying site. Most of the mortgage calcs. on property agents sites are fairly poor or inacurate.

I didn't have a huge look at your site, but for what it's worth, if you wrote some good detailed information on stamp duty etc. I could probally get it linked onto 4 or 5 sites for you. Mind you it would have to be a good info resorce tojustify the links.
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Fixing VB shouldn't be an issue. If the forum isn't in active use a clean install might fix it, though from looking at it I couldn't see what was broken
 
S

Seodude

New Member
Seo

hopeful said:
Hi all, I am new here and looking to learn a little about SEO. Well that is not true, I don't actually want to learn SEO as I am so confused by it all now, but my site needs it.

I have read the SEO made easy guide and am more confused now than I was before.

Where would be a good place to start? I mean start real simple and work my way up the ratings.

Alternatively if anyone is happy to help me for a little pocketmoney my pm is always open.

Mods, if this is in the wtong forum, sorry, I was not sure where to put it.

Thanks
Click to expand...



if you are have problems understanding the fundemetals of seo read my blog post more is on the way when i get around to it

BuyandsellSeo: Seo for newbies
 
H

hopeful

New Member
Thanks for that guys. Webdream, I may take you up on your offer of the stamp duty article.

Blacknight, it is an intermittent problem with IE only and it causes the site to hang and sits there with the page loading for hours. It won't happen with firefox.

I am loated to clean install as it took me so long to get the site to that stage.

Thanks for the support though guys in my gloomy time of despair lol. oh except Webdream is going to steal my calculator design now lol
 
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