Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The term is

tim hallbom

The new website is

TimHallbom.com

I was under the impression that someone could take over rank for their own name.

Let me know what we're doing wrong.

Thanks.

The 5-star review system is archaic.

Let me first say that 5-star reviews are a successful part of my eCommerce strategy and also everyone I know that is successful as well.

Why are they out of date?

When you look at something with a total of 400 four-stars reviws on Amazon, what does that tell you? Almost nothing if you don't read why it was not 5 stars. It could be something Amazon automatically fixes and you don't care about. Thus it's 5 stars. It could be an issue you really care about. It's now more like 3 stars or the real 4 stars. Different products have different types of things that cause less stars, not always obvious, good, or bad.

Thus I propose a new system, one that you can read the rating and know what it means. It's called 3-Levels 5-Stars.

It would vary per industry. For shoes it would be, like:

Walking Shoe Sold Online

1. Matches Fantasy of Style I want: 1-5

2. Logistics Like cost and if it was broken on arrival: 1-5

3. Usability, Usefulness, Durability: 1-5

The goal is for 80% of the people to not have to look any farther than the three-level five-star system. Otherwise, everybody has to read every four-star review to know for sure what's up with that product. Same with 3 stars. 4 and a half stars. Just expand the little 5-star thing the world's  got going to include three categories.

You could also have a variation statistic for those that don't know that 4 reviews isn't a big enough set not to have variation in outcome, but that's only an extra addition.

Hello,

There are some ways.

#1 talk to customer service and see what calls or emails they've had on the products in the category, or what they know about the category from working with customers. This will give you a more 10X FAQ.

Despite that, you can research the appropriate on Google, which will be useful information and needs to be included but will not make it dynamic.

You need to talk to someone who is in the business of working with customer service in each area to do the best job, whether it's in your company or not. Otherwise, you can simply Google the information, tailor what you know, and make the best FAQ possible. Try to always include something that's not in Google search that sets you apart.

I'm sure other more premium members will have other ideas. My suggestion is just our standard practice. I don't know what level you are at.

Hello,

What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now.

What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent.

Thanks,

Bob

Hello,

We have an Ecommerce store and we need our category buttons to be redone and to shine. Unfortunately, I've tried all my places and none are 10X, though none of them cost very much (like Fiverr, Freelancer)

What I would like is some advice on where to go for inexpensive but still very good quality graphics. I'm a good designer, and so far, I can do better graphics than the designers I've found, I just don't have the time as a busy SEO.

Please let me know If you have any gems you are willing to share. I'm searching the community colleges as we speak.

Thanks.

So many good responses, thank you! I knew there was better stuff out there than the same old same old.

Does anyone else think Fiverr with experience. I'm thinking Fiverr is good for 1X but not 10X, but if you think there are some geniuses on there and more people agree, I will give it a try, it's cheap.

The community college is a great idea. I'll work on that.

Bob

Hi,

Here's what I'm doing:

I've got Creative Suite and I'm putting together animations and videos for several websites, finding clips and images and forming what we need.

What I need:

A video production service to put everything together with their fine 10X or near "touch" without charging me too much since I did all the legwork. I'm asking for a miracle here, I'm asking for almost 10X animation, but where I do the legwork and it doesn't cost very much. Real low budget here, but we're not willing to put out anything low par.

Please share any services or advice you know of.

Thank you.

Hello,

I'm teaching a friend SEO and she wants very basic SEO videos on Youtube. I looked for some but there was a lot of incorrect information that some people were giving out. Does any experienced SEOs know of credible, basic SEO videos that the SEOs that make them don't give out backward information. Good quality videos. I will keep looking, but please, if anyone has some gems send them my way.

Thanks.

Bob

Hi,

I have launched a very new website and am tackling this term:

nlp techniques (3K)

with this page

It's a 1 year target. I'm developing 100 new processes for the page. I've put up 11 so far. It looks like the top contenders have a lot to offer as far as number of techniques and quality of techniques. They are just honestly dumping their regular training material on as a big area of their website, what I'm doing is developing new innovative techniques from scratch that do the same thing and hopefully more.

Let me know what you think I can do to move up the ranks. I can't do outreach for link building since this is a social community.

Hello,

I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.

I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?

Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.

But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.

Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.

Would love to hear your experiences either way.

Thanks.

Hello,

I'm starting a web design company doing standard web design, E-commerce web design, and E-commerce SEO. I've been doing the nuts and bolts of an E-commerce business with four online stores, one very successful, for nine years. Since that's my main experience, I'm sticking with helping others with the nuts and bolts of their E-commmerce SEO. I also do the web design, which I've been doing since 2001.

What should I charge per hour for my web design and E-commerce SEO services? I live in Boise, Idaho. I'm thinking $100 an hour for everything, is that too much for web design or too little for SEO? The SEO would be billed exact but my web design estimates are more generous.

Looking for honest opinions. I don't want to over or under charge.

Thanks

Bob

Julie and EGOL,

Some excellent information, and useful for protecting my own stuff as I grow! My client's wife happens to be an attorney and she said exactly what both of you said.

Thanks.

I spoke to the owner. There's only 4 in question and one nofollow now

On the 4, I looked and they're not generating traffic. I'm unclear what you mean by relevant in this case. They are generally related to our niche as, for example, an informational clothing site (backlink provider) is related to a store that sells socks (our site)

We have 81 linking root domains and one nice piece of content if that helps.

What do you recommend for these 4? I'm guessing swapping for an editorial link is your recommendation, but due to not exact niche relevancy, I'm wondering if you'll suggest removal.

Thanks for the awesome advice, btw

Hello,

I was doing competitive research and our top competitor has a clean backlink profile that includes the Best Of The Web directory.

The top people on this Q&A used to recommend them and DMOZ for the only true good directory links.

Is this still true or is Best Of The Web less important now?

We only are listed in a small handful of directories, and not anything recent besides DMOZ.

Thanks,

Bob

Hello,

We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console.

Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup?

We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago.

Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone?

Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin.

Thanks.

Hello,

We have an Ecommerce store and we need our category buttons to be redone and to shine. Unfortunately, I've tried all my places and none are 10X, though none of them cost very much (like Fiverr, Freelancer)

What I would like is some advice on where to go for inexpensive but still very good quality graphics. I'm a good designer, and so far, I can do better graphics than the designers I've found, I just don't have the time as a busy SEO.

Please let me know If you have any gems you are willing to share. I'm searching the community colleges as we speak.

Thanks.

Hello,

I think there is a lot of room for improvement to my SEO packages (analysis) page on my website. Visit it by clicking here.

I've always done SEO for our own business, so I'm new to this. Any help is appreciated.

btw: I'm going to redo the chart on the page. I don't think profit and sales would ever compare like that. Thanks.

Hello,

For both ecommerce and sites that sell services, I've seen a lot of people recommending a blog for SEO.

Should this blog be inside or separate from the main website for the most results?

I can see how adding one to a site would create more unique content and an opportunity for link bait, but perhaps there is a reason to have a blog separate from the main site

Thank you.

Hello,

I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice.

DMOZ and Best of the Web fall into that category.

And so do some niche directories.

How do you determine whether to go with a niche directory or not?

Also, what's the ratio of how many niche directory links you'd want compared to other types of links (being very safe) 3:1? 4:1? 5:1? Does it matter what your other links are?

Thanks.