Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I just found startupnation and it looks awesome, I set up my profile and
now am looking for some feedback on my new website. I will try and
follow the guidelines the best I can.

My website is a completely cost-free, information based website that
gives users a good overview for profiting with credit cards. I`d never been
able to find a good financial strategy that didn`t have any strings
attached, and never actually thought I would, but when I did, I thought I`d
share that information with everybody I could. The basis is using credit
cards and their free balance transfers to make large profits, it`s easy, it`s
free, and almost everyone can do it. Once I gathered all of the
information I could on the technique, i spent a couple months designing
the website, blog, and forums.

The site seems to be going well, I`m just trying to spread the word a little
bit, and seem to be getting good feedback. My main goal though, is to
get the forums started, if anybody here would like to help, just sign up
and introduce yourself, I would greatly appreciate it!

I designed the site myself, except for the templates, all of the information
and coding was done by me. I`m fairly new to web designing so any
design, content, and SEO tips would be awesome.

I will be keeping up with the thread so I hope I can get some good
responses, thanks for the help in advance!

http://www.mycreditstrategy.com
http://www.mycreditstrategy.com/blog
http://www.mycreditstrategy.com/forum

If there`s anything else you`d like to know, just ask.

Josh

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My new website: www.MyCreditStrategy.com

Learn how to make thousands with credit cards.

I need help starting up the forums!!

Hi Josh :-)
I used one of the tools referenced by WebWorld (Roland) in a topic he just posted. You can find it under "eCommerce resources."

From what I gather, you site is heavy on the following key words:

• credit cards for business
• credit card for student
• credit cards for students
• credit card for students
• credit card for college students
• credit card
• credit cards
• visa credit cards
• unsecured credit card
• gm credit card
• credit card deals
• universal credit card
• no credit cards
• prepaid credit cards

So there`s a lot about "credit cards," but nothing about making money with those cards. If you think about it, you`re then competing with a trillion other sites that offer `credit cards,` and `credit cards for students.`

What you want is a way to boost your visibility to your target audience. To do that, you want to know not only who are these people, but what will they most likely type into the Google query bar.

If someone has credit cards, are they dreaming of making money with their credit cards? Probably not. Instead, they`re dreaming of paying down the balances, paying this month`s payment, and so on. They`re worried about those credit cards, not thinking of them as a business opportunity.

So one key phrase that comes to mind would be "credit card problems." If you can build some SEO content around that phrase on one page, that would bring you more visibility. Another phrase might be "get out of debt."

The point is that nobody really cares about `credit cards` as a key phrase. They might be looking for cheap credit cards, or a loan or something, but there are too many sites specializing in that. Instead, put your mind into your market`s mind NOT to solve a problem, but to figure out what quesitons they`re asking from a search engine.

Those questions may not have much to do with your product, but they`ll attract people to your site. THEN you can solve their problem or sell your idea. See?

Another problem you have is that all your headings make sense in the context of your writing, but mean nothing in terms of SEO. The headings each should be a keyphrase. Same with what you have in bold typeface. Right now you have on your "Introduction" page a number of bold words. They include: When, After, So let`s, and As far.

The engines will look at your bolding and assume it deals with relevance. "When" doesn`t show much relevance, does it? :-)

Finally, I notice that none of your images have "Alt=" text. This isn`t only helpful for visually impaired people, it also offers you many opportunities to include SEO key phrases. For example, if you want to use "Get out of debt using credit cards," you can include that as the Alt= text for several of your images.

Great advice, thanks a lot for your time!

I like your idea of switching some of my keywords to target questions people are probably typing in, rather than the cookie cutter terms.  Would I do this just by putting it in the meta tags, and "Alt=" text in the images, or do you have some other ideas on how to accomplish that.

I will try and change the headings so they will correspond to the keywords, I`d never really thought about that.

If anybody else has any tips I would love to hear them, I still need a lot of help getting that forum going!

Thanks again Craig,

Josh


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My new website: www.MyCreditStrategy.com

Learn how to make thousands with credit cards.

I need help starting up the forums!!

Here is what you can do to start ...

go make a list of all the forums and boards that deal with finances and credit issues. Then go make a list of all the ones that are work at home opportunities.

Make yourself an account on each one with the signature you made for this one.

And post away.

The site really is pretty good for a DIY job, congrats.

Thanks for the tip, I`ve already made it around to a couple forums, but I really need to expand to some of the bigger boards.  It`s always been a little dream of mine to have a large finance forum of my own so I`ll definitely keep trying.

Josh


-------------------------

My new website: www.MyCreditStrategy.com

Learn how to make thousands with credit cards.

I need help starting up the forums!!

Building traffic is time-consuming and takes a lot of work to develop and grow your community. I would do some research online about growing online communities.

You need to a) participate in your own community to keep momentum going, b) find people to keep it going for you, and c) continually bring new people in. So, it is a constant effort - an idea that most people find surprising when they first try it.

There`ve been so many posts about SEO that the folks at Startup Nation created an entire topic just for the ideas. I`d read some of those many posts on the forum as there`s a tremendous amount of information.

It sounds as if you`re not familiar with the concept of "search engine optimization." So first, get some more familiarity and education. After that you can decide if your writing skills are up to the job, or if you need to hire someone.

It`s not easy to accomplish. :-) It`s sort of like a logic puzzle using words that mustn`t exceed 300-400 words per page.

I`ve read quite a bit on SEO, but I just don`t think it`s my thing.  Last night I made unique titles and descriptions for each one of my pages which should help out, but for the major stuff I may look for some help. I`m starting to get listed more and more on google, but I think getting some good backlinks would really help me out, I`m just not sure how to go about it.

The site is slowly building up some steam, and doing quite well, but still no luck with the forums :(

Does anyone have any recommendations for SEO work?

Thanks again for all the help, you guys have been great.


-------------------------

My new website: www.MyCreditStrategy.com

Learn how to make thousands with credit cards.

I need help starting up the forums!!

I`ve done work for Net Site Marketing, and Linda seems to know her stuff. You could see what they charge. 

SEO and backlinks are separate but imporant and continual tasks.

Backlinks are related to SEO in that you want to use your targeted keywords (when possible) in text based backlinks.

SEO - if you look at the "text-only" cache of your home page: http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:http://www.mycreditstrat egy.com/&hl=en&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-43,GGLD:en&str ip=1

You`ll see the "text" can can be indexed.  NOTE: your menu does not appear (that`s becuase the menu is a graphic and not text. Your site doesn`t employ h1 h2 tags either - which can help SER (search engine results).

You have a few words bolded (strong code) - this is good for SER, BUT the words are: "using", "we", "there", "feel" (the first word of each paragraph on the left of your page. I would suggest not to "bold" those words unless they are your targeted keywords.

~Roland

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