That is how I started my website. It was online for more than a year while I was creating it contents, while my homepage title read "Under construction". I guess I should not have created the site online but rather have saved the money for a web host and domain name until the contents was ready. -Then, on the other hand, from what I understood from you guys is that the age of the domain name also counts in the rankigs, so it may not have been such a bad idea after all.

After I removed the Under Construction status and submitted my site to Google, MSN and a few other search engines, I did exactly what you advised to cf05, and looked for relevant links, rather than go for quantity. The result was one or two searches per day to reach my site from google and a few per week from MSN.

Relevant links, I mean the real relevant ones are difficult to come by, when your niche is as small as mine. For more than 6 months, my Google PR remained on 0. I attributed that to the sandbox, until you guys enlightened me, and I understood that PR has nothing to do with the sandbox. Apparently, I was never sandboxed (or sandbagged) at all, since people did find me through google.

So, after 6 months, I still had to get that PR. I was becomming hopeless and thought that I got the concept of SEO all wrong. Then I discovered a site that listed websites that were also looking for reciprocal links and after exchanging links with a couple of sites that had no relevancy to my subject at all, I selected travel websites to have some relevancy. It was not the relevancy I had been looking for, but I hoped Google's algorithm would not see it that way.

Within one week, I got my PR4 for my home page and a PR2 for all pages that had a link to my home page - including the reciprocal link page. I cannot say this proves the intelligence of the algorithm, but it is nice for those sites that exchanged links while I still had PR0.

So, when you advise not to go for reciprocal links, my feeling is that this is wrong. Go for some 40-50 links. My bet is, you will get your PR faster.

Once I had that PR, my popularity started growing in the search engines. First thing I found out was that I was getting #1 positions in MSN. That may have been unrelated to the Google PR, it probably is the consequence of my blogs - comments on current news issues. From what I understand, this practice ranks you much better in MSN than in the other SEs.

Google also started giving me better positions, probably due to the fact that I listed myself (unpaid) in their travel directory. Searches I get from them seem mostly to be related to photographs.

This happened a few weeks ago, and now, Google started catching up. instead od 1 or 2 searches per day, Google sends me now 10-15 searches per day. The problem I have is that those searches are seldom related to the keywords I optmised for. Most searches are one-time phrases. The only repeated searches come from MSN, for rather general terms like "Phnom Penh" (which is the name of Cambodia's capital).

What I ask myself is where I go from here. I have been reading this forum daily and tried to implement the advice I read here. I appologise for not participating too much, but I feared that there is little a newcomer like me can teach you and I did not want to post, just for the fact of having my link published. There's no relevancy to my site in WPW forum anyway, I'm only here to learn at this point. Maybe later, when I know all the answers, might I express my opinions.

I hope that cf05 may learn something from my experience and I would also like hear some advise from the experts on the next steps to optimise my website, now that I have come so far.

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marc
Cambodia - Phnom Penh - Phnom Penh events today