Could use some help with a website I'm setting up

[caferacermike]

I spent the weekend dropping pictures and text into a website template and paying to have it hosted. I'm not having any luck at all getting it to pop up on any search engine radars. Can any of you help with this sort of thing? I'd be willing to negotiate for your time. The site is here, http://www.fishonguideservices.com

I know some of you are good at this sort of thing, that's why I'm reaching out to ARC members.

Edited July 1, 2012 by caferacermike

[Funkness]

I have a friend who does it for a living drop me a text 605661303..5 with what all you are trying to achieve and I'll find it out for you

[pbnj]

I'm no expert, but I know you have to submit the site to the search engines and then it takes a few days/weeks to start showing up. How fast depends on your search engine optimization (SEO).

[Bayou]

Check out getlisted.org

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I am here: http://tapatalk.com/map.php?2wsh3b

[caferacermike]

Thanks for the replies so far.

I've done a Google verification and manually uploaded to Google and Bing/Yahoo as well as a search engine crawler.

I will check out getlisted.org right now.

I'm having a hard time getting my friend to understand that it could take a month or so for this site to start listing. Heck it didn't exist before 7:00pm yesterday.

Funkness I'll give you a shout tomorrow.

[Robb in Austin]

The only issue I see is that there are a tonne of similarly named outfits already on line.

[caferacermike]

Yeah I told him that but he already had a DBA and business cards printed. I couldn't believe we lucked out and got that site, it basically slipped from someones hands right when I looked it up. His DBA is Fish On Guide Service, the site is fishonguideservice"s". How lucky is that?

I almost had him with "www.nomorebankfishing.com"

I've had some people tell me today that they couldn't open the site, are any of you having that problem?

[Robb in Austin]

Opened for me just fine. Checked it right before I posted.

[chrismunn]

So do you get free guided trips to calaveras with him???

[jestep]

There's no point in submitting to the search engines. Inbound links will get your site indexed.

As you can see, the site is already listed in google: https://www.google.c...ideservices.com

Google doesn't rank new sites highly very quickly. I would estimate it would take a year to get a brand new domain ranking for anything remotely competitive unless you have a huge budget and know very well what you are doing.

You basically now need to work on marketing it. Here's my 50,000 ft view of this. There's 2 parts to getting a site to rank well.

The first is that the text and information on the site needs to be well organized (both data structure and for human readability) and needs to contain the text you are trying to rank for. This is called on-page optimization.

Second, is the off-site marketing is what actually gets a site to rank well. Inbound links from good quality sites containing the phrases you want to rank for are most important. These need to be on related websites, forums, blogs, etc... Social media is starting to gain a lot more influence.

Here's a few good resources to get you going:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

http://www.seobook.com/blog

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/

http://www.grokdotcom.com/

There's plenty more great sites out there as well.

[mFrame]

Take a look at this, it's one of the key ways that Google and Bing are ranking sites now. Definitely worth trying.

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/

[caferacermike]

Thanks for the replies. I didn't realize that the site now logs me off everyday even though it should keep me logged in so I wasn't getting update info.

Of course now he wants an even flashier site. Personally I think it looks great for what his business does.

Chris I don't get "free" trips. I paid over $400 to get the site up and running with 3 years of hosting, plus about 50 hours of building the pages and his constant weekend picture updates. I wouldn't call that free, I'd call that work.

4 trips would just be breaking even. Soon I should break even. But I now have a boat for in bay fishing whenever I want to rent houses in Rockport, which is about once a month. We have an agreement that I get to bring him and his boat with me, and he is updating his sonar software to Port Aransas so we can mark our spots for future reference. It's a win/win for him since he wants to start guiding both in San Antonio and the Coast. I have a phone loaded with GPS marks from several previous guided trips to get us started.

It will tide me over til 2014 when I buy myself a 28-32' fishing cuddy to fish deep sea and be able to stay out overnight. Just started buying myself some Penn Senators to get ready.