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My experiences in DIY SEO

Or ‘why it is easier to pay for it, but not necessarily as satisfying as doing it on your own’

Mark Foreman

May 09, 2007

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Oct – I had an idea for a business venture and having had some successes with the main element of it, namely sourcing hard to find, unusual or just urgent building materials, I decided to go for it and progress it further.

To start I needed an internet presence, promptly purchase the domain source4me amongst others.

Great, a friend of mine is a computer programmer for Sky he will be able to offer up some advice, err No! apparently computer programming and html are like not the same thing? This was news to me and I am already giving away my ignorance.

I only had Frontpage on my machine so that had to be my starting point.

My first attempt can still be seen here on a free web page (of which more later). If you know enough to view the source code you already know more than I did when I made these pages. No alt tags, no meta tags, no keywords, wording not optimised etc.

Then the real blow – my brother thought it looked amateurish. Aargh my poor ego, I’d spent a month of evenings on it. Since then, more research.

So we lose the freebie web page as the search engines don’t like them and purchase a hosting package.

Dec – Having secured my father as my partner in this venture, I work on optimising the pages (all 6 of them). Keywords, alt tags etc, we are crawled a lot but still not indexed. Yes I did submit the URL to the major players (which some schools of thought think is a bad idea).

So we have cost per click with Google! A week later I realise that this will cost more than our combined mortgages, not very realistic.

Feb – Limited indexing success, but showing up for all the wrong search terms. More research required.

Work on wording within pages to optimise with keywords and phrases.

March – Some unique content at last and more indexing (we have a page rank of 1 no less). I’ve added some calculators to the site, of which I am quite proud and yes they do seem to work as I have used them for my other business as a builder and developer.

Apr – Definitely moving now.

Page rank of 2! (not much I know, but a start) But now it’s time to work on the backlinks and this article is all part of that ongoing effort and if, as a bonus I can help anyone else in the same boat then all for the good.

Building Materials & Supplies Sourcing

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