Newbie needs seo help

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by admagic

for example this site
Local Driving Schools covering West Byfleet
is high ranked for "driving school byfleet"

What site ?

Your link is to some sort of directory listing loads of driving schools in the Woking area

[fisicx]

In fact 8 of the results on page 1 (excepting the google maps list) are directories if you do a search for 'driving school byfleet'.

To rank well this a site has to provide better value. The competition is not other driving schools, it's all those directories

[admagic]

Originally Posted by Ian J

What site ?

Your link is to some sort of directory listing loads of driving schools in the Woking area

Precisely.

But LOOK HARDER NOW and you will see it is not only high ranked but it also carries google ads in the first fold.

And site targetted CPM ads can replace all those google ads with a single ad for the OP MUCH cheaper than keyword targetting.

[admagic]

Originally Posted by admagic

First of all step back and put yourself in your customers shoes.
The first rule of all advertising is to describe the solution, not

What do they type when they go to the web?

The answer is far more type "driving lessons" than "driving school" so that is your prime keywords

So do your Keyword research and base your site and pages on what your users are asking not what you are .

Now SEO is only a small part of a small part of the game.

Start posting great articles with good content on driving lessons, how to drive and so on, and creating web 2 minisites (eg hubpages) based around your keywords. these are far more trusted by google than you are.

And link them into pages on your site that are focussed on the same keywords.

Create a facebook page too.
Social marketing is where it is at now.

Promote these articles on such as digg, stumble upon and netscape

My suggestion is you recreate the site on wordpress, or create another blog since everything you put there will ping blog engines and be indexed quicker by google.

The above sounds hard , but is a lot easier than creating your own site!

These activities will bring you traffic - and sooner rather than later search engine rankjing

NOW go the extra mile.
Your key objective is to get people to sign up...so create a downloadable guide called " the ten most common reasons for failing your driving test, and how to avoid them" in return for email addresses...

The n you can promote to that list.

Also consider methods like ppc - done correctly that will do well

for example this site
Local Driving Schools covering West Byfleet
is high ranked for "driving school byfleet"

Use site targetted ppm advertising on google and you will get one big ad that zaps all the other advertisers on that site!!! And it is far cheaper than bidding on those terms. - there are other down and dirty ways to leapfrog competition on adwords, but I wont advertise those on a forum!!

this forum seems to be doing screwy things.

It is ommitting words in places which makes the above unreadable!!