Good luck

[stinknugget]

Ive put myself into major debt trying to promote my websight and never even got on the first 20 pages of any search engine. My wife has left me and took our 3 yr old son with her. What was a small business venture soon erupted into a horrible rabbit hole of one companies promises and lies after another. Please heed my advice, in this business if it seams to easy or cheap to be true......It absolutely is. Nobody helps anyone unless they are helping themselves in the process. This is a sick and twisted game that has ruined my life.

[mugshot]

Are you generalizing website promotion or basically looking for advice, sympathy, or just venting? This industry is no different from ANY service industry. You win some, you lose some. Sorry to hear that you got burnt, but that was the risk you, a businessman/entrepreneur should have assumed and took. Sorry if I sound harsh, but if you are a true businessman, you would have calculated the risk and done research before embarking on such a life-endangering venture.

[stinknugget]

It's hard to calculate risks in areas you don't understand. Web sight promotion is amazingly complicated (for me anyway). I have been tossed bone after bone and have paid dearly for it. To be completely honest my post was not only to vent my frustration but also to ask for help. I have read about as much as i could find and still don't understand even the most basics of these concepts. I have heard that getting your page sucessfully noticed could vary from being free to well over 30k.

[Randolph]

Please elaborate a little more, and perhaps you can find the guidance you seek on these boards...what industry were you in, what was the site, what have you done that failed?

(rumor is, a few of the people here are pretty good at this....AND nice people)

[stinknugget]

My websight www.tacticaltoyshop.com has been up for about six months now. Instead of going the overture route like i now believe i should have, i took the advice of idiots who led me from one registrant company to another. After reading some valuable info on this sight i realize alot of what i paid people to do i could have done myself for free. Then the wonderful meta tag experience. One company said that it was because my meta tags werent correct. So i paid them to fix it. Weeks later no result and no reply from the company. Now after reading info from this sight i found that meta tags are just a piece of the puzzle and not the "holy grail" i was promised.

[mcanerin]

<moderators hat off>

Anyone telling you that the key to fixing your website/getting rankings/etc is "fixing metatags" should be shot, pissed on, and run out of the industry (not necessarily in that order)

<moderators hat on>

Your metatags are so wrong I'm not sure where to start - I'd demand my money back. The good news is that they won't affect your rankings - meta information doesn't, as a rule.

This is a good place to get advice. Since you've already shown a tendancy to believe what con artists are telling you because you don't have enough information to refute them, I would strongly suggest learning as much as you can from this place and other reputable sources.

You may want to hire a professional to do the job, but before you do, you need to know enough about the job to choose the right professional.

One piece of advice - you have almost no backlinks, and the ones you do are not related to your industry (pets? real estate?). This appears to be the result of a poorly done linking campaign. You need another one (done competently)

Do This (or have someone do it for you):

1. Do keyword research
2. Get either AdWords or Overture (or both) This will also help with keyword research.
3. Take the keyword research and properly optimize your site's content, links and titles with it in mind. Maintain a good user experience throughout.
4. Do a linking campaign
5. Once they get to the site, provide your visitors with a good product they want at a price they want, with good service and followup.
6. Watch your business grow. :)

It's really that simple (the devil is in the details, of course!)

Good luck

Ian

[Jill Whalen]

I have read about as much as i could find and still don't understand even the most basics of these concepts.

I would suggest you get out of the online biz and try your hand at something else then.

[stinknugget]

I have been looking into overture and i think i am going to give them a shot. with a customizable budget per month it seems like the road i should have taken to begin with.

[stinknugget]

ok so as far as the meta tags go just delete them since there no good anyway? also what is a backlink? i remember someone mentioning that word before but i forgot what it was all about. Your absolutely right, my lack of information has led me to fall into a number of traps, and i do appreciate any help to dig myself out of this mess.

[Chris Boggs]

stinknugget...don't get me wrong, but the very first thing you should learn is that it's a website, not sight. Writing "sight" is probably what got you into trouble with your META tags, which as Ian pointed out, are horrible. someone "saw you coming a mile away." They are actually possibly the worst META tags I've ever seen. Also, your site content needs a little optimization...you should use some keywords like "replica shotgun" instead of "shotgun" etc...on the text links found on your home page. It is very hard for any search engine to figure out what you are selling, which will make it hard for them to rank you.

"Back links" means you should go out and get links back to your site from other sites that have something to do with your industry. Here are some examples of candidates that will probably help you, if you can get them to exchange links with you: click here (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-12,GGLD:en&q=airsoft+gun). Look for directories in your industry to submit to or other sites to try to get links from using a list like this one: click here (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Aairsplat.com&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t-234&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8). That should give you a few to look at...remember only use the ones that you see that are related to your industry!

It is not too late for you to perform in this industry...any professional SEO that is legitimate (most of the ones in here are) could get you ranked top page for "airsoft gun" within a few months on the "big three" search engines.

There are plenty of people out there like you that have had to try and try again to get it right. Maybe if it's "the site or your family," you should quit now...but don't blame all your troubles on one thing, I always say...seriously though...good luck and I hope that your situation gets better...

[Chris Boggs]

I would suggest you get out of the online biz and try your hand at something else then.

Or hire a consultant with good references and have them manage things, if it is a dream to sell products on the Internet. There are plenty of people worse-off knowledge-wise than stinknugget I think (I deal with a few of them...maybe you do too, and that's why you posted that, Jill? ;) )

[mcanerin]

I would take your current keywords metatag list as a starting point for some real keyword research. After that, toss it.

Generically, a header order should look like this:

<!doctype html public …..">
<html lang="…">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" ……">
<title>….</title>
<base href="http://....."> (optional)
<meta name="description" content="…">
<meta name="keywords" content="……">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://….."> (only if you use CSS)
<link rel="shortcut icon" href=http://..../favicon.ico> (optional)
<script type="text/javascript"......</script> (only if you have a script)
</head>
<body>

Yours looks like:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css</style>
</head>
<script> blah blah blah</script>
<body>
<title>Your title</title>
<meta name="keywords" content=" A really, really big list of keyphrases">
<meta name="description" content'"your description">
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<title>Your title</title>AGAIN
<meta name="keywords" content=" A really, really big list of keyphrases">AGAIN
<meta name="description" content'"your description">AGAIN
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">AGAIN

Note that I've bolded the <head> tags. Your meta information is supposed to be in there, NOT after the <body> tags. You will note that you actually have a title, but if you load your page it just says "Title". This is because it's typically ignored if it's not in the <head> tags.

Also, the repetition of the title, keywords, description and robots tag are argueably spam, though really probably just bad, bad coding. If someone charged you for this, I would really consider suing them or demanding money back.

I could go on, but I'm not trying to pick on the site, I'm hoping to steer you in the direction of someone who can help you, or to help educate you. There are 3 websites, seopros.com (http://www.seopros.com), seoconsultants.com (http://www.seoconsultants.com), and semlist.com (http://www.semlist.com), who list SEO's that have shown at least some skill (checked by an independent party) that may be a good list to start with, though keep in mind that there are a lot of good SEO's that are not listed in these sites, so they should not be considered definitive. They are a good start, though. Also, many of the active SEO's here on the SEW forums are very good.

Unfortunatly, it's not really our policy to make specific recommendations, so I can't be more helpful than that - I will tell you that the basics are not rocket science, and you should be able to find a fairly good company if you look around and are careful. I know so many great SEO's and SEM's that I'd have an impossible time making just one recommendation, anyway. Take some time to educate yourself on the basics, first.

Backlinks are website that link to you. The more and better the websites linking to you, the more trustworthy you will appear to a search engine (there is a lot more to it than this, of course, I'm simplifying). It's harder to get good links if you have a bad site, and that's the point.

So far the (free) advice given to you in this thread has been excellent - I recommend reading it carefully and following the links provided as a start. See? We are not all incompetent rip-off artists... ;)

:) Cheers,

Ian

[stinknugget]

I do appreciate all the help, this has honestly been the best experience ive had with the whole venture yet. Thanks for the template. I just figured out how to view that information, now i have to figure out how to fix it and change it. There is a wealth of knowledge here. Once again i truly appreciate anyone taking the time to reply. Thank you.