Congratulations to Sara and Mark Mannix whose Mannix Marketing, Inc. ranks in the Top 30 Organic Optimization Companies, as ranked by TopSEOs.com. In addition to marketing and SEO services the company provides its customers, Mannix Marketing also owns and operates three of the most informational and best optimized geographic domains/websites; Albany.com, Saratoga.com, and LakeGeorge.com.

Sara and Mark have generously shared their knowledge with the entire Associated Cities community, giving other geodomain owners invaluable advice and ideas.

Although TropicalBirds.com has been doing well on Google for some long tail keywords, and it continues to grow daily, only the home page shows up in Yahoo. When I inquired about the issue with Yahoo, I filled out a form asking if there’s an issue, and I received a canned response that may provide some information:

Q: What are some of the common reasons that a site may violate Yahoo!’s Content Policy Guidelines?

A: Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines (link above) outline what we are and are not looking for in pages that we index. Listed below are some of the more common reasons that a site may violate these guidelines:

- Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site)
- Massive domain interlinking- Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content
- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka “link farms”)
- Hidden text
- Excessive keyword repetition

Since I am not a technical person, I don’t know what half the stuff is, nor would I know how to do it. Can anyone have a look at TropicalBirds.com and let me know what they think might be the problem? I haven’t signed up for any linking programs, I don’t have hidden text, my metas and the site aren’t filled with extensive keywords (to my knowledge), and all of the content is 100% unique – created by a writer who researched the topics for me.

I would really appreciate it if someone could provide some feedback, as the canned answer doesn’t help me at all.

THANKS!!

This might be a dilemma faced by other domain owners/developers, but I always seem to have an issue with my search engine optimization once my websites are developed. When I consult with friends who do SEO, most give some very good tips, but it can be quite an exasperating amount of work – especially after a site is launched. So, my question is, how do you prioritize your SEO while developing your website?

Much like you can’t expect your web designer to be a master coder/programmer and visa versa, you can’t expect your web developer to be a master of SEO. As a result, there may be some major issues related to the SEO that would require huge back-end changes, which is something a domain owner/developer doesn’t want to hear after a site is launched. When major issues come up, there is a whole lot of redesign that might need to be done, costing a great sum of money. That said, how do you overcome these issues?

Take TropicalBirds.com for example. The site averaged less than 1 visit per day before launch. A couple weeks after launching, it was receiving over 100 uniques per day, with the majority of the traffic coming from Google. People were finding the site via searches for tropical birds and other long tail keywords – just as I anticipated. In fact, only the home page is indexed in Yahoo – and the site has been live for close to 2 months! The RPC is very low, but it was a neat topic and the site is making more money than before.

For some reason (probably natural occurrence), after a month and a half, the site dropped from #4 to #20 for the term “tropical birds” in Google. Traffic has been down, and I can’t really figure things out. I have in links from bird breeders, although I do have dupe content on the bird breeder and bird veterinarian pages. I started a forum, although I am currently blocking the Googlebot from seeing it because there isn’t a ton of content, and the free forum software would probably be considered duplicate content.

Anyway, long story short. The site has been launched after a considerable amount of time and effort. I want to help grow the site, but I don’t know how to tackle it via SEO. I know that in links are important, but those are very difficult to gather. In general terms, how does one go about building a good looking, informational, structurally sound website that also utilizes great SEO techniques? How much can someone expect to spend to on improving the SEO for a completed site like TropicalBirds.com?