13 in 13 - Web Design - SEO

[gzibell]

Hello World!

How do I improve search result ranking for specific keywords "hair salon Fargo"?  What tips do you have for increasing page rank? Backlinks?
www.heatherannzsalon.com

I have just finally created my 13 in 13 account and am waiting for approval for Jack since he is approving everyone individually.  I have been working on one of my goals for the past few weeks and was hoping there are some of you that are smarter than me that could provide some input.  My wife runs a hair salon and she has had a very poor website for the past 3 or so years.  Fist built with google site(terrible) then to wordpress (still terrible) and now over the past month or so I have been working my but off to improve her website and make it awesome!  I think it looks pretty good so far.  The site is hosted with host gator and is powered by wordpress.  I created a blog for her and she got a couple articles up, I use google and Bing webmaster tools to submit new urls/gather information.  The thing that troubles me is not getting on the first page of google.

 For example, searching for "the source salon fargo" pulls up a page on the site in spot 6 or so.  "the source salon and beauty supply fargo" page one spot 4.  This is great but not generating any traffic due to very low search volume.  I followed the same principles the best I could for her home page highlighting the keywords "hair salon fargo" and am listed on google page 3 which gets absolutely no views/traffic. 

Anyone in the programming/webdesign/seo fields that have some tips or suggestions for me on what I could do the push heatherannzsalon.com to the first page of google with "hair salon Fargo" or similar keywords?  Your help is much appreciated. 

Heck, Anyone just wanting to drop by take and look let me know what you think would be awesome.  Any feedback will help at this time. 

Thank You
Geoff

[livinitup0]

backlinks backlinks backlinks... and good ones too.. from high PR sites....no crappy web 2.0 sites unless you want sandboxed.
as silly as it is... google loves privacy policy pages. Id make a quick one and link it on your main page at the bottom....theres templates all over the web for this. 
Id also make sure you're indexed at all the local yelp/yellowpages/etc. sites with a link to your homepage.
might be a good idea to find some hairdresser forums that get some traffic and get active with your homepage in your sig. 
writing a few good articles about the salon and submitting to article directories could help too.
overall, the more traffic you can get the better you're going to rank eventually... its just going to take some time.

If you really want to speed things up you could always hire an SEO firm.

Also, for more resources/info on this stuff I'd highly suggest joining the Warrior Forum. 


 

[gzibell]

Thanks for the advice.  I got a privacy police published and linked in the footer so its on every page.  I have started to verify local listings site as you suggested. So far so good.  Listed on the main ones.  My wife had wrote an article over the weekend that we published and it received little traffic initially.  I posted this article up on reddit beauty, stumble upon, etc.  Have see about 460 unique visitors to that article so far.  That has to help some right?

I keep seeing all of these emails come through for improve seo google search ranking etc.  Even hostgator is partnered with a company that allows you to buy backlinks attracta I think.  Are these a bad idea or would it help to get some recognition quickly. 

I headed over to the Warrior Forum as started looking though some of the info there.  Seems like a great resource.  Thanks for the tip.       

[livinitup0]

in my opinion the best backlinks are organic... guest posting on blogs (doesnt even have to be in your local area) etc.
Id also put a lot of effort into creating a social media following and possibly creating a blog section on the website..maybe some hair tips and whatnot....just some sort of content to put in fron of your followers that you can link on FB, twitter etc....anything to get people to click on something that takes them to your site and keeps them there for a few minutes. Local sites like this have a pretty high bounce rate and if you can mitigate that with having the traffic read some content thats going to help a lot too.   

I would stay far away from buying backlinks... most of the time they are from very low PR sites, and google hates these kind of links... i cant count how many times Ive seen people getting dropped to the netherregions of the search results because google caught on to the amount of crappy backlinks their site had. do some research on the Google Panda and Penguin updates to kind of see what not to do. 

Another idea I had is to have them get involved with some sort of salon forum that allows signatures. Im sure theres tons of "how do I set up a salon website" type of threads out there (that get decent traffic) where you guys could post about setting up this website, give advice... with that all-important link to your site to get traffic.

If you havent checked out Jack's 5 minutes with Jack podcast, Id highly suggest checking that out too... he's got a good stuff he's talked about that I think would help you guys.