Now for the stats:

February showed 155 visits with 558 page views.
March showed 435 visits with 967 page views.  That’s a 180% increase in visits for one month!

If we can get another month of 180% increase April should have 783 visits.  Not to bad for 4 months work.  I think we should actually see a higher increase because we will be going from 100 businesses listed to 300.  Therefore I predict that your visits will be over 1,000.

So how many visits do we need to make some money?  My son is working for a cell phone.  The phone is $100 and the plan is $26.50 per month.  Because he gets 1/2 of the profit of the website we need to generate $250 in profit.  I think we are a few months off from that – unless we can get a sponsor or nice local ad contract.

Check out the site at:  http://saginawbusinesslistings.com

Search Engine Optimization Help?  SEOmoz.org!

I love this wsebsite.  The free tools are great and the information is fantastic.  I’m looking forward to the day that I have enough income off my website to purchase a pro account.  Some may say that the pro account would pay for itself, but we’ll see.  Anyway – if you have a website and want to get it on the search engines this is the #1 site that I recommend.  After logging in each day the first thing I do is read the daily blog post and see if I can implement any of the ideas on one or all of the websites that I work on.

In the off chance that someone at SEOmoz stumbles across this link I would be happy to receive a free pro account for 90 days to prove that SEOmoz can give me the tools needed to  make my site profitable in 90 days.  And of course – I would blog about my progress every step of the way!

This person that I was speaking with was explaining that this “experts” suggestion was to make sure that each product listing contained at least 400 words.  This was very difficult to execute because of the nature of the products.  This word mandate would require garbage verbiage just to meet the word count requirement.

Based on all the knowledge that I’ve acquired over the past 10 years of working on websites and having recently watched the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training DVDs this didn’t add up for me.  I thought that I would check out this website.  Here are a few conclusions why the word count is bunk and why this company should look for a different search engine optimization consultant.

• There was no meta-description tag on any of the pages of the website.
• The meta-title tags were exactly the same throughout the site.
• Most of the images had no alt tag.
• Most of the text links had no title tag.
• The shopping links were through paypal and all had alt tags that was promoting Ebay and had no product or company keywords in them.
• The site contained little to no H1 tags.
• The site contained little or no bold or stong markup for product and industry keywords in the pages.

This is SEO 101!  Don’t even think about telling a writer to change product descriptions if the basics are not covered.

Looking for a search engine optimization expert that will get the job done?  Click here to contact me.

So far I’ve only gotten through the first and 2.3′s of the second dvd’s.  Aside from some blatent advertising the SEOmoz’s pro features there has already been enough information to make the DVD’s worth the money.  But buyer beware.  This is not basic SEO.  If you are not familiar with SEO, web-design and site architecturethis is not the DVD for you.  My wife, who I put through the agony of talking about this stuff, said that the portion of the DVD she listened to sounds like a foreign language.

Here is what is included:

Disc One

• SEO for Content
• Site Architecture
• Advanced Keyword Research

Disc Two

• Linkscape Tactics
• Alternative SEO Tools
• Local Search Strategies
• News & Image Search
• Strategies

Disc Three

• How to Design a Link Building Campaign
• Good vs. Great: Why Some Startups Make the Leap

Disc Four

• History of SEO
• Future of SEO
• High ROI Social Media

Disc Five

• Researching the Algorithms
• How to Win SEO Budget
• Conversion Rate Optimization

Disc Six

• SEO Business Strategies
• Avoiding Search Engine Penalties

Within another week I’ll have viewed all the DVD’s and made my list of actions for the websites that I currently work on.  Looking for an SEO website design specialist in Saginaw?  Contact me for more information!

This is where an SEO specialist can help.  I’ve been designing and modifying websites since 1991 and each year it gets increasingly harder to get the websites to the top of the search engines.  Sometimes its a task just to get listed.  This is the case with a site that recently contacted me.  The site is a few months old, has a few hundred people on their email list and need to get found.  This will be a great test because this site really isn’t listed yet.

Do you live in Saginaw, Bay City or Midland Michigan and ever wondered what is happening in the area?  This is the place to visit:  http://www.greatlakesbayscene.com.  But there is more to come.  Currently Great Lakes Bay Scene is working to have the most complete listing of restaurants in the area!