What works and doesn’t
We launched our project management training business Parallel Project Training 2 years ago and despite the economic difficulties we have managed to achieve significant growth in both turnover and profit. Much, although not all, of this has been due to the significant investment of time and effort into search engine optimisation. We could not afford to employ one of the big SEO companies. If you billed all the hours we have spent on DIY SEO at commercial rates it would add up to many tens of thousands of pounds. However after all this effort we now rank near the top of page one for most of our key words like project management courses and project management training. Along the way we have made many mistakes, but also had some real successes which we would like to share with other small business owners.
What we did well
1) From day one our site had a page rank of 4, this was because we invested several thousand pounds in becoming an accredited training provider with the professional body. Clearly this single back link had significant value.
2) We employed a PR consultancy who got us some coverage in the national press, including a back link. Clearly a link back from a national newspaper carries a lot of weight.
3) We employed a freelance backlink builder from India using people per hour. He adds a high number of low grade links every month for a very cost effective fee. We carefully monitor his work to make sure it’s not spam and has relevance.
4) We employed a freelance copywriter to write articles on the main do-follow article sites.
5) We issue two press releases every month on the main press release sites
6) Our site incorporates a blog which we update every week with a new post.
7) We registered with DMOZ and Yahoo. DMOZ took several goes and also some directories used by competitors.
We follow our sector on twitter and have built a relationship with the other bloggers in the sector. If invited we accept and offer guest blogs.
9) We analyse our competitor backlinks and try to get links from the same sites.
10) We did lots of server tweaks to ensure that the website an very fast.
11) we did quite a bit of on page optimisation for the main landing pages, but we still have some issues with other pages.
Let’s start with the mistakes.
1) We started by just building back links to our home page and didn’t have specific landing pages for each of the key words. We should have done more key word research and started building to multiple pages from the outset.
2) We build too many backlinks from no-follow blogs. While these were useful at building contacts with other bloggers in our sector, we didn’t realise the significance of the no follow tags.
3) We published too much content on the same websites. This is important because the number of referring IP addresses is also important. Nowadays we send our press releases to different sites.
Next steps
Our next plan is to set up a project management news site and seek listing in Google News.
Website
http://www.parallelprojecttraining.com
Description
Paul is Business Development Director for Parallel Project Training. We are innovating in new way to improve your project management skills, including printed study guides, podcasts, e-learning and face to face training. Paul is a active social networker and blogger, on-line and in the real world. Paul’s Google Profile
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential in order to get higher ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. A higher position in the search engines will drive your customer enquiries and sales.