i-like-water

I own an ecommerce business which is very reputable. My BBB rating is A+ and i can back up my legitimacy with other third-party rating sites like Google, Yahoo, Citysearch, Judy's Book, etc.. For some reason my site has been flagged as having 51/100 for Vendor Reliability, 53/100 for Privacy (we're PCI compliant - wtf) and 55/100 for Child Safety. All i can say is all three of these ratings are completely a joke. I have no idea how they came up with these ratings.

It is very easy to manipulate their so called 'Reputation Scorecard'. I have no 'trust' in a company that is so easy to manipulate ratings with.

Just to clarify it is not Aaron.

I used to think there was some magic sauce to SEO - that only good content with proper promotion would get high rankings. I've worked with SEO consultants on every level. I've worked with two separate individuals who are extremely well known (sorry NDA prevents sharings names), hired writers, and outsourced work overseas. For my particular industry, which i won't share because it will identify me, my content is pretty much un-linkable. You don't want to talk about it. I paid a writer for years to write top quality content that is actually useful to users and promoted it accordingly. Because good content is what Google wants, right? Wrong.

After spending well over $100k in SEO i can tell you sadly the most effective tactic has been spam. Yep, tons of links on sites, setting up gateway pages that are focused on particular keywords, spamming social sites with links, setting up blogs to target keywords, etc.. I've hired/fired about 5 different companies in India and finally found one that is working magic for us.

Google's algorithm is not a mystery - most 'SEO' people will try to sell you some snake oil. I was paying 10k a month to a top name SEO consultant (very popular SEO book, well respected) and never felt so cheated in my life. Beyond the basics of SEO like semantic structure of your HTML and URL's - SEO is primarily a popularity contest.

ycombinator may be a good temporary boost of traffic while you're on the frontpage of HN but you'll need to look at a more sustainable way of generating traffic - this is where I struggle the most. I run an ecommerce company that does a moderate bit of traffic (around 70k uniques a month) - 70% of my traffic is PPC (Google, Yahoo/Bing) and the rest is done through organic optimization. My business has a very low repeat customer ratio due to our market (sorry can't explain this bit i don't want to share my company publicly). Here is what i've learned:

I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!

Congrats on the site and getting started on a project.

How are you driving visitors to the site currently?