Getting Started With SEO, a Rough but Necessary Start

It all started when I won the big drawing at the CRS Sell-a-bration in Honolulu.  The grand prize was a very expensive SEO package from Randy Eagar's company Webstarget.  I will write more about that once they are able to complete the project.  I am quite excited to see how much of an impact this makes for my business.

His expert Garrett immediately caught a problem with my website and domain.  This is a lesson that will be useful for many of our members.

The search engines do not recognize my domain names, because they are not parked with the websites.  The search engines can find the sites, but under the actual address of the site and not through the domain name.  To fix this I have to park them with the same service.

I had my domains registered and parked at http://www.godaddy.com/ a wonderful vendor that I have nothing but praise for.  I have my websites on http://www.homestead.com/.  I have used this service for years and had nothing but praise for them until this week.  Hopefully they will win my loyalty back, but as I write this post I am still having problems for the third straight day.

Until this week I used a forwarding service from GoDaddy to send people to my website when they typed in the domain name.  I did not realize that is different than pointing to the site.  After researching the issue with both vendors, what appeared to be a simple fix was attempted.  By simply changing the settings on my domains I could shut down the forwarding and park the domains with the same service as my websites, while keeping the purchasing and registering of the domains at GoDaddy.  Wow that sounds wonderful.  A couple of key strokes and I am all set and ready to turn the keys to my site back over to the SEO experts.

With both accounts on the screen I followed a few step by step instructions with tech support from Homestead and that will do it.  I was so happy.  He then said it will take 1-3 days depending on how fast the updates happen at GoDaddy (They were instant).

Later in the day I was getting a little annoyed that a counter offer I was expecting still hadn't come in.  I then noticed a lack of e-mail messages. How Lost Would You Be Without E-mail?

After a few quick checks I realized my e-mail was not working.  I went back and checked and my website domains were still not working either.

After going back into my Homestead account I found a disclaimer that when you point the domains to them your e-mail will no longer work.  Now that is a useful piece of information I could have used before shutting me down!!

After many phone calls to the tech support guys the fix to that problem was supposed to have been made early yesterday morning.  We are now waiting for homestead to update my system to get it working.  That has been since early yesterday morning.  There is still no sign of relief. 

I hope they get me up today and not leave me sucking wind all weekend.  If and when we get past this mess, I will post the results from the SEO project.