Computer Care Tech Tips

Are you in search engine purgatory?

So, you built a website, you filled it with useful, informative content, original content.
Maybe you even placed some links to other relevant information that will aid your users.
Your website loads fast, is informative, is useful and it is original, but, you don’t seem to be getting hits.

Follow up:

You played by all the rules, if you did any “SEO” it was all white hat, not shady business, no keyword packing or dodgy link exchanges, but where are the hits?
You search for your exact terms on the big guy, you know who, the one that starts with a G. All you can find on the first couple pages are websites with little bearing on your search term or ones that obviously pay a lot for ads on that search engine.
I call this place, Search Engine Purgatory.

You are relegated to the lower pages of the search engines results, but why?
No one knows, and there is no one to ask.
If you run an eCommerce site it can be worse, the first pages are packed with ads for Amazon or some other clearinghouse site, your little page is nowhere to be found.
Short of paying an outrageous sum of money every month to buy ads on what is supposed to be an “organic”, term relevant search engine you can not get noticed or placed on the pages that anyone is ever going to see.
Who can afford that?
What is a small business operator supposed to do?

You can not live in purgatory, you will go bankrupt. Many already have, or they succumbed and started paying one of the big sites to list their items too.

It amazes me how very seldom I can actually find what I am searching for on that one big site that everyone seems to use, I actually find relevant pages to what I am searching for using the 2nd or 3rd place search engine. That is just my experience; your actual mileage may vary.

I am not here to sell you SEO or anything else for that matter.
I am posting to ask a question: What are we supposed to do?

All I know, write pages for humans to read.
Original content and thought.
Don’t use keywords unless they belong there.
In short, write as if the search engines did not exist.
Create your pages or product listings with the reader in mind.
Ask someone else to read your content and make sure it would be useful or helpful, if they needed what you are talking about.
Use social media, now that is much easier than it sounds.
How do you get post likes or retweets or reposts for product listings?
How do you get your brand to become popular on social media?
The magic bullet seems to be “cat videos”, but I am not sure how well that would work if you are selling bird cages.
You pretty much need a full time social media agent to handle it.
You must post early and often and then again and again, it would seem.
But then, how do you not bore your current followers if you are constantly reposting?
Purgatory, I am telling you.

My eCommerce site was very popular on the big guy search engine a few years ago, then, without explanation, rhyme or reason, fell out of favor.
I didn’t change, I was not using black hat techniques, I didn’t change much at all of the way I did things.
I listed the items I had for sale.
As a matter of fact, some sites copied my content, as I had spent hours doing research and placing useful and informative information with the item listing. For some of my items, I actually had the most information available on that item.
I listed new items based on what people spent time using my sites internal search feature to look for. My thought process was this, if one person is looking for it, then many more need it also.
This worked for years, then, wammo, the hits went away.

And that my friend is the reason for this post, what do we do?
I want to open up a discussion. How can we survive in this type of environment?
I would love to hear your questions and comments about this topic.

I have thought for years that maybe we need to band together, as small business owners and like, re-post, retweet and re-blog each others posts on social media.

What do you think?
Do you have any useful tips for the rest of us?
What are your experiences with the search engines and your placements?

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