My name is Aaron Pratt. I am a former IT professional and current stay home dad. I needed something to supplement my family’s income but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I am the type of person who works well on his own. Jobs are in short so I decided to focus on my passion - making things!

My SEO success

My wife, Ellen, son Henry and I spent a whole summer preparing a new lawn and garden for our newly purchased bungalow. It needed plenty of water to continue growing through the year. Our problem was our community was under a mandatory water restriction and we didn't want to pay for all the water regardless! This challenged me to design the perfect rain barrel. I made myself four 58-gallon rain barrels from tough, 100% recycled imported vinegar containers. Just for kicks I put one up for auction on e-Bay and it sold within a few hours. I made another one and it also sold. I found my new part-time job!

The first thing I noticed, while selling things on e-Bay, is having a good description is exactly how people find you. I also realized that having a website to redirect people for additional information ensures a quick sale. My e-Bay experience led me to register my own domain name. I was preparing to branch out into the “search engine world” without even noticing it.

I started with doing searches in Google for “rain barrels” and was puzzled by what was making certain sites show up in the top 5 results. It didn’t seem sensible that a site with “rain barrel” in the title, while having nothing to do with rain barrels, would appear ahead of a site that actually sold rain barrels. The more I explored the more it didn’t make sense. This led me to find SEO Forums an expert who knew this stuff and was willing to work with me. We e-mailed each other back and forth. I edited my site using his keen advice while learning myself. I made it to top 20 positions with just a few changes to my HTML code. Eventually my site hit the top 5 searching for “rain barrels.” While I was optimizing and waiting for my page to climb to this position, I used the very affordable Google Adwords to promote my product. It is great for people who do not have a good page position but want to sell a product right away.

To make a long story short, I am now selling my rain barrels via search engines. It is free and if you are willing to put in the extra time and effort you will succeed. I owe my success to the SEO wiz who was there to answer questions and give me pointers. We went through all kinds of ups and downs from being dropped from Google, because of an issue at my host, to putting a 301 redirect in place, and focusing my backlinks to point to the long URL. Confused? It was the support that got me to a top 5 rank in the search engines that truly mattered. I can not stress how valuable an asset these quiet SEO experts are, working behind the scenes to help a small business, like mine to improve visibility. I have learned a lot and continue to learn new things ever day because of this. It is like going to school BUT unlike school, it holds my attention.

Thank You Peter @ www.seo-works.com

Aaron F. Pratt – Owner and Craftsman @ http://www.ne-design.net