Until very recently, we actually avoided SEO because we suspected that the majority of traffic would come from 'start-up' and 'damaged-credit' applicants.  After experimenting with GoogleAds for 6-weeks, our assumption was confirmed - however we did get enough 'established-credit' applicants to justify the wasted overhead processing the high amount of declined applications.

We just hired our web developer to go back and add proper Titles, Descriptions, H1s, etc to our existing web pages.  Upon completion, we plan to hire a content writer to edit those existing pages with SEO in mind (obviously without sacrificing read-ability by forcing key-phrases in awkwardly).

In addition, the web developer is also creating an article archive on our site to facilitate "article marketing".  Our target audience = business owners with 5 to 75 employees = and the most frequently asked questions relate to credit.  We just completed the initial article discussing the "5 C's of credit" that all lenders consider when making lending decisions.

Today, we are attempting to learn the protocol of submitting articles for publish.  Our first question is how to get "optimized text" links setup properly in the resource boxes.  We're having trouble (see signature box below).  Thanks.

You should post SEO stuff here; http://forums.site-reference.com/forum/ … -and-Tips/

It's better that way for everyone.... C U there.......

For the forum links use BB Code which would be

[url = whateversite.tld] Your Text[/url] -- take out te space between url and the = sign  and replace the URL.... I had to space it to display properly

Moved to proper category and corrected the links.
CE

Perfect.  Thanks for the advice.

Tnx CE .. let's see what we have here....

We just hired our web developer to go back and add proper Titles, Descriptions, H1s, etc to our existing web pages.  Upon completion, we plan to hire a content writer to edit those existing pages with SEO in mind (obviously without sacrificing read-ability by forcing key-phrases in awkwardly).

The first thing that comes to my mind is what terms you are after and what research was done into them prior to targeting?

Also, having the web developer and a copy writer may not be the best way to go about SEO.. if your hiring, there are folks that do ONLY that. It is much better to have SEO in mind prior to content development/articles than to have some one come along and 'optimize' it afterwards.

In addition, the web developer is also creating an article archive on our site to facilitate "article marketing".  Our target audience = business owners with 5 to 75 employees = and the most frequently asked questions relate to credit.  We just completed the initial article discussing the "5 C's of credit" that all lenders consider when making lending decisions.

Actually, article marketing is more about external distribution of the articles.. not starting an article repository. Certainly having more relevant content on the site is going to help, but the main goal of Article marketing is backlinks and self-promotion. Here's some reading on the whole article marketing area...
http://www.site-reference.com/articles/ … ntity.html

I wuold not recommend, generally, to use the same articles on the site that you use for the distribution process. If you have 3 articles, put 2 on the site and then distribution for the other.

Once again tho, the actual Keyword research and targeting phase is the starting point.. I'd be interested in what U have done there..... worrying about anything else is kind of 'cart before the horse' territory....

We recognize that article marketing is more about external distribution of the articles - but we're just getting started with article marketing - so thanks for the link, it should help with the learning curve - I'll check it out over the weekend.

Prior to the GoogleAd experiment, we spent some time on Keyword-Keyphrase research using various tools provided by Google, WebCeo, etc.  We came up with 5 obvious keyphrases and tested about 300 others with ppc ads.  The obvious keyphrases outperformed the creative keyphrases in terms of producing decent credit applicants (critical in our business), and despite a few of the creative keyphrases getting significant ctr compared to the general low volume of search- the resulting applicants were unacceptable (wasting overhead).

You know something, U have brought up some GREAT points. Not towards SEO actually but analytics/conversions which is a passion of mine.

I shall do a post and respond towards those issues for ya.. I'll post a link here when I do...


As far as the article marketing, get a feel for it and ask questions from there....

Did you ever get around to doing a post on analytics/conversions?  I've checked back here a few times wondering if you posted a link here.  Thanks.

No... and I re-read this 2x now and can't remember what I was going to go on about.... sorry... it happens. It was a temporal thing... so much has gone on since then.......