Cliff Hagberg- www.BirdCityUSA.com

Cliff almost quit the program before it started because everything I told him we would be doing, he already knew. I'll admit it is the basics. But the old saying goes 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' .

I showed him a few of our successful websites, and we got on track.

Here's what he had to say:


"OK, a couple of things you should know right off the bat. Right from the beginning I thought I had thrown thousands of more dollars down the internet drain. I wasn’t hearing anything I didn’t already know and I thought the pace of the program was great for a beginner. Problem was I wasn’t a beginner! Or at least, that’s what I thought.

While I knew most of what Jeremy Cobb and I talked about, I hadn’t yet put it together into a cohesive plan. To make matters worse, Google seemed to refuse to pick up my site! Over five months since they first spidered me and I was completely ignored. Out of thousands of pages, they had picked up one. Out of hundreds of links, they had picked up seventeen.

Suddenly, it all happened. I checked Google just for the heck of it and found out that they now listed over 4,000 pages on my site and hundreds of links - just like that! The next thing that happened was my page rank. I’d been waiting for almost six months for my page rank to show up and day after miserable day, I showed nothing. I was hoping for a PR3 and prepared for a PR2 because there is a lot of content on the site.

Less than two weeks ago, I checked again just for something to do and, there it was - PAGE RANK 4! I couldn’t believe it. I had to tell someone right away. I called my wife at her office and she said “What’s a page rank?” OK, that didn’t work, who else can I tell? I wrote Jeremy and he was as blown away as I was. It’s almost unheard of for a brand new site to achieve a PR4 right out of the box. I say that because I’m convinced that I was the longest resident in the Google Sandbox ever! If it’s true that the Google algorithms is exponential and in base eight, then it is eight times eight as hard to get a PR 2 than it is a PR1. Then it’s eight times eight times eight as hard to get a PR3. So for me to get a PR4 to start with, that’s eight times eight times eight times eight as hard to get as PR0! That’s almost 4,000 times harder to get than a PR 0.

Every time Jeremy Cobb said we need more content, I was going to kill him! I couldn’t write that many articles! But I did and it paid off.
Traffic to the site was stumbling along at about 100 visitors a month for five months. In February, it jumped to 2,344. For this past April, I had 8,714 visitors and for the first day of May, I had 727 unique visitors! Want some traffic?

There’s no magic in the program. It’s good, solid optimization and it does work. It hasn’t translated into a ton of sales yet, but my site isn’t fully designed as of yet. My home page is not converting very well and I know that, but it’s certainly going to! If I had to break it down, I would recommend the following:

1. Content, content, content. Keep it up to date and add regularly

2. Get in every directory you can that’s free.

3. I would rather have fewer links of excellent quality than a ton of links that aren’t any good.

4. Make sure you’ve got a good, clear site map

5. Do your keywords for every single page. Almost all of my sales are coming from people searching for specific products. Every product page on my site has its own Meta tags with keywords and description. I don’t rank well yet for any search terms at all, but if you search for a specific product that I carry, I’ll be in the first eight results for almost every single product!!!

Now, if I clean up my home page, add some more content, get a few more links, add some more products . . . oh yeah, all the things I should be doing every day. Jeremy didn’t tell me a thing I didn’t already know. The problem was I hadn’t done it. If I hadn’t paid so much money, I might never have actually done the work and I wouldn’t have a Page Rank 4 right off the bat. I have another site that took five years to get to PR4. Thanks Jeremy Cobb!

Cliff

http://www.birdcityusa.com
http://www.ivsrealty.com


One mans basics is another mans advanced. Stick to the basics and you will succeed! There are some great tactics out there that are advanced and work like magic. Use them wisely because "all good things come to an end". Especially with advanced tactics. Sometime they'll get you banned all together. With another worn out clichéd quote I'll contradict my last; 'Good things come to those who wait'. Five months is unusually long, but it happens. Patience is a virtue.

Good job Cliff,

-Jeremy Cobb