Local Sites

[addz123]

What kind of budgets are you guys throwing at these city portal type sites excluding SEO?

I'd assume I need to have at least $10k lying around to do this properly (i.e. with voucher codes, daily offers, coding and content).

I have SheffieldJobs.org (my city) which I guess has some potential, but it's an area I'm not looking to get into for at least 12 months.

[MJ]

I don't think outsourcing in the ways we are used to are the keys to these types of sites, when I first bought my domain someone asked me what my plan was and I said "watch my money burn" - I'm trying to keep how easy that will be in mind and go slow, small focused, and do most of it myself rather than hire any writers or anything like that.

[Pokeraddict]

I launched deadwoodpoker.com (exact match domain for about 3000 monthly searches) and have the intention of adding a few blog posts here and there. The site has been getting links for a couple of weeks and have not gotten anywhere on exact match on Google though. I will keep adding fresh content slowly and see where it goes.

Still nothing, page 1 on Yahoo and Bing and sandboxed on Google. I update it every couple of days and have rounded up a few backlinks. Is it possible it being on the same server as my blog hurts it? The #1 SERP on Google for my exact match has not been updated in 3 years. I thought it would be easy to unseat.

[pokerprop]

1) John I'd suggest if that's the case remove sidebar column navigation links for now - Google does not treat that style of site as well as easily as they used to.
2) Next don't use someone else's theme - this can sometimes cause you to have the same code as other sites spamming. Getting something unique and simple coded for cheap might help.

Re hosting: I'm not sure. I'm #4 (site 1) and #6 (different site) for a decent term where both sites are on the same server and IP so its possible, does it hurt any? or sometimes? I don't know.