Practical eCommerce

ptorhorst · **Date:** Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:40 pm **Subject:** SEO Recomendations Needed

To all you SEO Gurus out there in the Practical eCommerce universe, I NEED YOUR HELP! I pulling my hair out trying to get a leg up on my companies competition. My problem is this, we have a great website and offer a great service. The best in our industry I think. The fact of the matter is that we are newcomers to the Search Engine battle. We are trying to compete with companies that have been established for 10 or 15 years on the web and have locked down major keywords. I have done a lot of work on making our site SE friendly: keyword research, properly coded pages(Meta Tags, Titles, <h1> Headings, Keyword Density) re-worked site structure around keywords, changed dynamic links to static, named pages according to search engine friendly term, etc... I have seen improvement, but nothing to write home about.

I would really appreciate it if someone could give me some recommendations on where to go next. Our site is: http://www.questce.com and our industry is Insurance Continuing Education. (I know, not very titillating stuff Laughing

, but it's a nice site) I'm starting to think that since we are newcomers we will never be able to compete in the top rankings of our targeted terms.

Where do I go from here?

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:45 pm **Subject:**

As someone who has been in the Insurance/Risk Management business for over 15 years, it's rpetty well established that leading organization for Insurance Education is the IEA (Insurance Education Association). So, you will definitely have an uphil battle competing with the established reputation IEA already has.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that you cannot rank high in the search engines and/or be successful. It all comes down to your SEO - not only your metatags and keywords, but items that the search engine spiders can/will pick up on as well.

I do think, however, that you are going to have to do a lot of traditional marketing as well - i.e. print information to companies, shocasing at industry conferences, and advertising in trade pubications

ptorhorst · **Date:** Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:58 pm **Subject:** http://www.ieatraining.com/

Yes, I think that the IEA is a very good model and are well respected in the industry. If I remember correctly though they only operate in california. We, Quest, operate in all 50 states.

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Thu Feb 22, 2007 2:17 pm **Subject:**

They offer certificate/designation programs (such as the ARM and CPCU) that are valid throughout the United States.

But that's neither here nor there . . . as far as I'm concerned, there's always room for more quality continuing education and credential (sp?) programs - especially one offeriing online courses.

erichar11 · **Date:** Thu Feb 22, 2007 2:28 pm **Subject:**

I've been doing a lot of research on SEO lately and what I've come to understand that your pages have to have TLC (Title, Links and Content). These are the three main things that seem to effect page ranking for Google at least. Since you stated it's a fairly new site, I would probably say you don't have to many backlinks to your site (others linking to you). If that is the case, start getting links from sites in your industry and specifically authority sites. I would bet that if you did some research on the number of links a competitor has for a top keyword, they would have a lot more people linking to their site. Remember, a link is considered a vote for the page and it's even better if a link is from an authority site.

Just my two cents.

Eric

simonlilly · **Date:** Fri Feb 23, 2007 2:35 am **Subject:**

I think you have made a positive start with your site. Some things that jumped out immediately are:

- You have a mixture of on page JavaScript and externalised code is .js files, get all of it into .js files to make your content higher in the code.

- Consider making your site validate using the W3C validator, this should help you nest your <h1> tags correctly.

- You may have too many <h1> tags for some search engines liking.

- I have found some success adding title tags to any links. This is good for an accessibility point of view and also adds some nice keywords.

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