newbie questions

[inthedark]

Hi all..I just build a stock trading forum site as my hobby is trading...now ive become quite interested in seo...

I have a few questions

I am indexed in google, have a yahoo directory listing, somewhat decent page seo (followed advice of a program for seo), about 10 good inbound links so far

if my site has been indexed by google for about 3 weeks how long should i wait to see if my seo efforts were useful?

thanks
Frank

[Marcia]

It's taking several months now for new sites, unfortunately. Keep looking for good links, and find some more directories to list in.

[seobook]

I am indexed in google, have a yahoo directory listing, somewhat decent page seo (followed advice of a program for seo), about 10 good inbound links so far
when you say program do you mean software? lots of seo software gives tips on exact keyword densities which is probably inaccurate and makes you write pages that do not read well to human visitors.

if my site has been indexed by google for about 3 weeks how long should i wait to see if my seo efforts were useful?
you are probably going to want more than 10 links, but the full feedback loop in google can take about 3 or so months. if your particular target market is less competitive then you can see results quicker.

[AussieWebmaster]

You should start with a little PPC and push for optimization for Inktomi... doing that with the Yahoo directory will help in Inktomi (and if you can get it) try for DMOZ

[inthedark]

thx guys! a few months is more than i was hoping for but what can ya do :-)

do these bot visits look encouraging:

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 10) - Full list - Last visit
12 different robots Hits Bandwidth Last visit
MSNBot 270 16.53 MB 09 Nov 2004 - 13:24
InternetSeer 198 222.44 KB 09 Nov 2004 - 14:41
Googlebot (Google) 149 7.73 MB 09 Nov 2004 - 12:43
Alexa (IA Archiver) 113 5.69 MB 08 Nov 2004 - 21:01
Inktomi Slurp 85 4.92 MB 09 Nov 2004 - 13:30
LinkWalker 6 408.50 KB 04 Nov 2004 - 10:41
ZealBot 4 0 08 Nov 2004 - 09:00
Jeeves 1 81.00 KB 09 Nov 2004 - 00:11
LinkChecker 1 85.19 KB 06 Nov 2004 - 02:17
Unknown robot (identified by 'spider') 1 80.95 KB 08 Nov 2004 - 19:33

[Marcia]

decent page seo (followed advice of a program for seo), about 10 good inbound links so far
If you followed the advice of a software program for on-page optimization, like keyword density and meta tags, which I assume it is, then an awful lot of what you need for Google is missing.

You need links, but keywords in the anchor text of links pointing to the pages is important, and also - optimizing the internal navigation which is too often overlooked. Only a percentage is actually on-page, a good part of it is the "relationship between pages."

[inthedark]

thx, actually i paid more attention to page title, h1 headings, number of links containing keywords, text at the start and end of page and such rather than keyword density as it is a php page and the text will change quite often...

am i allowed to post the link here at let folks take a look?

fr