SEO companies, Backlinks and Trade Secrets

[nickcargill]

I have spent so much time investigating what it takes to move my domain up the ladder.   I have so far determined good quality optimized website and I am almost done with that. MOZ Rules!

If I look at Open Site Explorer at my competitors it gives me some of their backlinks...  Some people say backlinks are not as important anymore.    But If I am in a Vacation Rental business and I can get other websites/blogs with high PA to post some good content that I write to link back to my website this should raise my SEO?  Correct.

I am fortunate that online media assets always seem to have articles such as "The best destinations this Fall",   "Getting away for a long weekend",  etc......

In the past I have been contacted by writers/bloggers that wanted to trade free stays at my homes for an article.... back then I had no idea what a PA was,  but now I can at least point MOZ at their website to see if it is worth it.

I was also thinking about hiring somebody to do this.....My question is two part...

1. Am I on the right track about building good quality backlinks from high PA with truly good content.  I have been writing articles now for 30 days along with this other stuff and have probably 10 unique pieces plus another 20 in our recent blog...

2. When SEO companies call me weekly they all say "we can get you to the top 3 placements in 60 days or other say 3 to 5 months or others say 6 to 7 months."  Being a business person I ask,   "How do you do it? and what tools do you use?"   I never get a straight answer,  because they say it is trade secrets..... or they say they use internal tools....

This kills me! I do not want to do this myself,  be an SEO company I just want to know the process a vendor will use to raise my SEO.    If they were to say I have contacts at these 5 major websites and I am going to get your content listed on these websites...  I would say great.    4 years ago I paid a company monthly for a year who moved my domain name from 70 to 35 but that happened in the first 3 months and then nothing.   And he would never tell me what they were doing...  plus now I realize my site optimization was crap.   Out of 10 keyword phrases,  the highest I got right now is 32 and a new guy on the block is less than 10 and has less content and backlinks...   I wonder once my site optimization is done will that really really help me.

Is it too much for a SEO to tell me specifics!    I have purchased MOZ,  Authority Labs, Buzz Stream, SEO tracker,  I am committed to this...

I have 15,000 facebook page likes and 80 you tube videos, pinterest and twitter too...

M

[OlegKorneitchouk]

destinationbigbear.com/blog would be ideal.

You should stop posting to http://destinationbigbear.wordpress.com/ asap and put all future content onto your main site.

Does http://destinationbigbear.wordpress.com/ get any traffic? If not, i'd copy over all of the posts and 301 from old urls to new ones.

[nickcargill]

Thank you William and Oleg!

I did not think I was wrong to want to know details.  I have a spa company that manages 80 spas for me,  I want to know what they do weekly to ensure quality but that does not mean that I want to enter the Spa servicing industry.

Oleg,   should I then use wordpress.destinationbigbear.com as a subdomain rather than destinationbigbear.com.wordpress or should I look at migrating the entire software to my own server and use destinationbigbear.com/blog

Thank you again guys!

[WilliamKammer]

Hi Nick,

A couple things here, but first and foremost: a good, honest, white hat, non-sleezy SEO will tell you every single thing they are doing. About 15% to 20% of my job is explaining my actions to my clients, which can be frustrating sometimes, but is also necessary. My mindset is that it's important for my clients to not only understand what I am doing with their website, but also for them to get behind it 100%.

Let's be clear about one thing: there is no such thing as a "trade secret" in SEO. There is nothing that, once you know it, you can just exploit it and charge business owners to do that one thing. Every account is unique and requires a different approach. If a company won't tell you what they're going to do, don't use them. The same way I wouldn't buy a car unless the dealer told me which one I was getting.

Also, giving out free stays for blog posts/links is walking a fine line on Google's guidelines and some SEOs will say it's straight up buying links. Be aware that this is a somewhat risky strategy.

It sounds like you have a good amount of content and social presence, so it looks like the first thing you'd want to do is figure how to best utilize those two things together in a content distribution strategy. If you can get you good content to the right audience, links will "naturally" come in without needing to target them with free stays.

Make sure not to ignore potential on-page issues or possible penalties incurred as well. Moz is a great tool to help with the on-page stuff, and this might give you an indication of a deeper penalty issue: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I would create the blog on your own domain and have them link to that page. That would help you rank all of the other pages on your website as well. Having it on another website won't help your rankings as much as direct links to your site.

With your thousands of guests, I would also try to streamline some way for them to leave reviews on your website as well as travel review websites. That would 1) help you rank locally 2) get you to the top of other lists/directories and attract more links to your website

[nickcargill]

Thankyou

I have developed some really good relationships locally with other business where i have written reviews of their business and put them in my own directory on my website but have not linked to their website (just content and phone numbers and addresses.   Each weekend I can have 1000 guests stay at our homes so our business directory on our website is valuable to our renters, I did this with the intent of now reaching back out to these businesses and asking them to link to me because I have been sending them businesses... some of them have PA's in the 40's and mine is 21.

I am creating a new section on my blog that has 7 articles related to owning a 2nd home and using it as a vacation rental... This information is very valuable and all the real estate agents I work with I usually email this to them to pass onto their clients...   If I have them link back to this section of my website will the fact that it is wordpress hurt me? Example below.

http://destinationbigbear.wordpress.com/

Thank you so much for taking the time to encourage me.... it means a lot to me.

Anyone else's comments are welcomed too...l was going to go to Seattle this weekend to a big seminar because I felt so lost, but after the last three weeks of MOZ I am feeling better.

Nick

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yes, you are on the right track.

Submit your site to vacation rental websites/directories, write awesome content + outreach to people who might be interested in it, work with bloggers (maybe offer a discount) to stay at and review your property, try to find lists/stories where your property can be listed - i'm sure a bunch of your competitors are doing this so see where they get their backlinks from and figure out how they do it.