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Cheers Steve, that's come through. I think this will be taking a back seat for the next few weeks, as to drastically improve rankings further would take a lot more time on my part, which I don't have before the new year. 

Hope that's alright.

Cheers

Steve- Didn't know how to contact you personally, but would it be possible to get a quick paragraph testimonial from you. I'm just looking to build up some testimonials for my site. 

Thanks

Tom.

Hi Pete, 

It totally depends on, well everything. Whats your budget? How long do you have? How much do you need rankings? How profitable will it be for your business? Will it really benefit you? Do you want to improve your SEO or just want more sales? 

All these questions are super important before you get started on an SEO campaign, as I could rank you for a keyword tomorrow, but if it gets 0 searches a month and will earn you £0 for eternity, whats the point?

It's pretty impossible to answer a question as broad as this in a forum. I'd say, just try and establish what you want from SEO before establishing how to actually run a strong campaign. 

Tom.

Update time 

And its a beaut. 

Hopefully the rankings have stopped bouncing around in the SERPs, it looks like they, have so these are the results from my 3 week case study. 

Started on the 19th November, rankings were:

“seo business forum” - 16th 

“UK business forum” - 47th 

Now: 

"seo business forum" is 6th and

"UK business forum" is 38th

Google likes to trick us with dips before coming back up to where you should be. 

Rankings graphs below:

And

Tell your friends. 

Thanks

Tom.

No worries, give me a message if you want any direct seo advice. 

Cheers

Tom.

Hmm, in your example yes, but only very very marginally. 

Maybe you just used the wrong examples but directory, forums and social signals carry very little weight. But yes of course if its from a something vs nothing point of view, then yes the individual doing something would rank about the individual doing nothing, sure. 

But say for example company A creates their site, great content, tons of social shares, retweets, likes, etc, tons of comments on forums, getting 100 visitors a day.... Would still rank below Company B who has average content, all on page seo done correctly and has 1 or 2 links for a relevant "decent" authority source. 

It's sad but its just how it is.

Sidenote:

My next article is actually probably going to be on why Google will never take social signals into account. The short of it is, this means they are releasing their control to sites they have no authority over. 

Hi,

Unfortunately backlink love doesn't exist unless your already huge. 

You can't survive on people linking to you unless your content is one of a kind AND you have over at least 20,000 Unique visitors a month. And for most business websites, that's just simply not going to happen. 

Instead you have to go via one of 2 methods, these work for life too! 

1.) Pay someone else to do it 

2.) Learn about it

Both have up and down sides. Depends if you value your time more than money or vis versa, you also have the risk of whoever you pay, their strategies not working! Or whoever you learn from their strategies not working! So you have to be careful. 

If you have your heart set on doing it yourself and being 100% "white hat", (I just had a mini rant last night on why I hate that, but that's a different story), then I would recommend the moz blog and quicksprout as a place to start. 

But again don't expect any changes if you can't dedicate £500+ or 10 hours a week to your seo campaigns. 

As for your post itself, Its just for content, no offence intented here, but no one would link to it naturally or probably if you reached out to them. The post is simply too short and not authoritative enough. 

Cheers

Tom.

Update:

So day 1 and I noticed MLS doesn't struggle for content, although its not a huge forum its probably my favourite as there are no Bull sh*tters. Like on other huge business forums in the UK….

This meant that changing up the design of the site, internal linking structure, techy SEO points was not really an option, so as always we are left with the links.

After speaking to Simon we decided to go with the promotion of: “seo business forum” and “business forum”.

The problem (in short) – Lack of links:

18 referring domains to the /forum page

Only 1 to the seo sub forum, although its all about quantity and authority nowadays, one link simply isn’t going to cut it.

Luckily lack of links is my favourite type of problem to address (technical stuff is tedious) and not really applicable for this type of job. 

SIDENOTE: Weirdly the homepage of the MLS site was ranking higher than the SEO Sub forum, which was super odd.

Long story short: Build links to the homepage of the site, homepage of the forum AND the seo sub forum page.

What I'm doing:

Built a buffer site that I could build some links to fast without being hit, the main one of these was: http://forumseo.weebly.com/ This site is where I would be building links too. This was for a number of reasons, but the most important being, I could hit this site with a high % of relevant anchor text without being penalised by Google; “seo forum” “UK business forum” “UK SEO forum” etc and the other is because I had a link to ghost marketing on their (as this was a free case study I thought I’d get a bit of link juice for myself.)

This caused a bit of early movement with the site, but wanting to speed this up. I created an automated a link building process (OMG not automation…) to the weebly site and the social media sites, although these processes are a hell of a lot slower to improve rankings, it would make the future promotions look more natural. 

Next on the list was the high quality kicker links, these you can either buy usually from authors writing for big blog style sites (for example Huffington post post’s cost around $500) or you can build them from your own website if you have a blog network. I did a bit of both and spread the link building to the weebly site, the homepage and the SEO section of the forum for more diversity. With the anchor text “seo business forum” and “UK business forum”

The links should start to get indexed over the next few days. I will post a rankings update in 1-2 weeks.

Cheers

Tom.

Sure, just getting set up still, seen a bit of dancing in the serps. 

First proper update should be in about a week. Ranking update in about 3. 

Originally Posted by Steve Richardson

“Cleaned down all the posts relating to our SEO Pakistani friend. Old school SEO at it's worse 

Hopefully Tom is going to show us home grown professional SEO 

Looking forward to an update ”

Originally Posted by Garde

“Honestly? Jumping on the bandwagon of the centenary of WW1 - very poor taste IMHO  ”

Agree, not a fan of this campaign at all.