Natural SEO” service for my web business

[alexkate]

I own and operate two sites for fun. If possible I may be able to get a business' to place ad's on my site. Like I said these sites are for fun not profit. I want to get more members though. How do I get my sites to pull in more members with search engines. Are there any tricks you could show an average person to make their site more visible. I have been able to figure out quite a bit from hands on experience as far as operating the sites goes. I thought it might be more than I could handle but sar far so good. Thanks ahead of time for any help you may be able to give.
Thanks again

[fisicx]

The SEOmoz beginner's guide to SEO would be a good start. Reccomend printing out the MS word version and digesting slowley over a week or so.

There are no tricks, it's just a long slow slog that can take months or even years to come to fruition.

Anyway,

Make sure your pages have a logical structure.
Use text instead of images where possible.
Make sure each page has unique titles, descriptions, headers and content.
Write interesting and informative articles.
Keep adding new content.
Use social networking and community sites to made yourself known as an expert in your field.
Be different to everybody else.
Be patient.

Forget link building for now, just make sure the site is the best it can be - that doesn't mean perfect, just as good as you can make it without agonising over every comma and full stop.

On the other hand, if you have a site that is similar to thousands of others then you are going to struggle to even get noticed let alone increase your visitor numbers.

How are the businesses going to advertize? PPC banners or skyscrapers or box adverts or what? Click through rates on adverts are usually tiny, well under 1%. So if you are getting a penny per click with a click rate of 1% you are going to need 10 000 visitors to make £1. Is it really worth the effort?

[TWD-Tony]

If you are serious about being a "not for profit" website and are only interested in getting more members then a link exchange with other website's / business might be a better idea than a general pay per click system...

With pay per click advertising, yes you make revenue by placing PPC ad's on your site, but you are essentially advertising rival website's and driving traffic AWAY from your website. Plus you have no / very little control over the adverts displayed...

With a link exchange you are basically saying to other website's "have a link on my website so that my visitors can check out your site BUT you want a link back to your website from them so that their visitors can check your website out..."

Link exchanges have a very low SEO value, most links between websites in this fashion are basically ignored by the search engines - BUT that does not mean that it isn't worth the effort if you want to attract visitors from other websites. I have seen excellent results for new / low traffic website's by running a link exchange for even a few weeks.

Be careful though which site's you exchange links with, you want to keep exchanged links on topic with your website, if you are running website's about cars (for example) then it wouldn't be worth getting a link exchange with say a baby care forum - the traffic will be low and the visitors are not likely to be interested in your website content.

PLEASE NOTE: This advice is for getting more traffic in general and NOT advice for increasing your search engine ranking!

[fisicx]

I agree, the aim is to get more traffic not improve your ranking. There are lots of ways to do this and just one of them is SEO. What you are really doing is SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which encompasses all sorts of techniques. And I have begun to see a few blogs and articles on Social Media Marketing (SMM) and its variants, it's a good but time consuming way to build up traffic.

[erikko]

if i were you, it would be nicer if you on your own will optimize your site because for you to monitor how it goes in SE's and it will saves you money hiring people to do the work