ProWeb SEO – April Update

My “day job” has been taking up entirely too much of my time: An entire month has gone by and I’ve completely neglected this (very, very important) website. In reality, Search Engine Marketing should be my day job, but I haven’t had the time to implement the new ProWeb WordPress theme and I refuse to directly tell anyone about this website until I consider it to be “finished” enough to be viewed by potential clients. Until then, I will be working on ProWeb sporadically when I’m not giving SEO advice on Quora or sharing silly, drugstore-related anecdotes on Twitter. (See: drugstore tales and drugstore purchases for my random observations from work.)

In addition to the questions that I’ve answered on Quora, (a website that I highly recommend,) I have also been semi-active in the category for Search Engine Optimization on Reddit. (For those of you that are unfamiliar: Reddit is, if their site is to be believed, “a source for what’s new and popular on the web.”) I responded to one user about an SEO issue that was shared in public and this is the message I got in response:

“I really don’t know what to say, Nick. I think this is the best SEO advice I’ve ever gotten. It explains that impression of being lost in the anonymous wash of [...] sites. It just makes perfect sense. Thank you so much.”

He also purchased me three months of Reddit Gold, (the premium Reddit service without ads,) in exchange for my help and allowed me access to the Google Analytics data for the site.

It’s still too soon to see any effects on his website from the changes that I recommended, but as soon as I have that information I will share it here. Hopefully, I will have the new theme in place before then, but until either of those things happen: in real life, I will be working in a drugstore and online, I will probably still be answering questions on Quora, because I find the community more engaging than Reddit and, honestly, it’s kind of addictive.

The SEO Consulting job I didn’t get

In February, I interviewed for a Search Engine Optimization position at an insurance company based in Las Vegas. It was easily the best job interview that I’ve ever had, but they were looking for someone with more experience. Since I was turned down for the job, I’ve continued to (occasionally) monitor their site and, while they have made some minor changes, they definitely haven’t experienced any significant movement in the search engine rankings. Sadly, I think they hired the wrong guy and, at this point, I’m not sure if I should even mention it to them. All I know is that I would have produced some results by now and they seem to be in the same place as before. In the same amount of time, this completely new, mostly content-free SEO website has been entered into the Google index and I am already ranking for several different keywords. Granted, “seo services las vegas” is no “health insurance” when it comes to keyword phrases, but it’s a start.

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ProWeb Update 02-28-11

ProWeb’s stretch in the Google sandbox lasted about a month and, as of this writing, this website has a Google PageRank of zero. That rank is the Google toolbar PageRank, however – which is only a vague indicator of the actual PageRank that Google uses in their index. Even so, this is a good sign as my SEO efforts appear to be working.

This website has actually started showing up in search engine results pages a couple weeks before I planned. As far as search engine optimization goes… this is great. From a business standpoint, though… not so much: I haven’t spent nearly enough time on this website to get it ready for the public.

WordPress Theme

I have someone working on a custom theme for ProWeb SEO Services. The current theme of this website is, and was always intended to be, a temporary solution. If the site looks essentially the same as the one pictured to the right, then this website – as much as I hate to say it – is still unfinished and under construction.

I’m actually fairly new to WordPress (on a self-hosted domain) and I’ve spent most of my free time learning about this blogging platform. I’ve been messing around with plugins and tinkering with the back-end, behind-the-scenes workings of things here instead of adding content and developing the front-end (look and theme) of this site.

Not Getting Messages

I’ve also encountered a couple of huge setbacks during my indoctrination to the WordPress community. The first was an improperly configured Google Analytics plugin that failed to record visitors for about two weeks. I mistakenly thought that I was getting no traffic and assumed that I had more time to work out all the issues of the site. The second – and way more unfortunate – setback was a contact form that has not been forwarding ANY of the messages from this website. I tested the contact form when I installed it and it worked fine, but then it apparently stopped working. (I have since discovered that this is an issue with GoDaddy, my less-than-stellar hosting company.) If you have requested a FREE SEO Quote or tried to contact me for any reason, I have NOT received the message and I’m sorry.

(edit: This problem should now be fixed, but if you send a message and you don’t hear from me then please attempt to let me know by some other method of communication.)

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