Saturday, January 12, 2008

Linked VASRD

I have been working on getting more members at PEBFORUM. One thing I have been doing is building useful tools on the site. A new addition is my Linked Veterans Affairs Schedule for Rating Disabilities. It is a searchable linked listing, including an Index for the critria used to award disability compensation.

On real world news, I received my notice of admission to practice law at US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims!

Sunday, January 6, 2008

A website for military physical disability

A little more about my marketing efforts. As I mentioned, I started www.pebforum.com to provide Servicemembers with quality information about the Physcial Evaluation Board process. I had my suspicion that this might happen, but it was not the idea when I started....I have gotten the majority of my clients from inquiries from the site.

So, as a consequence I needed to figure out how to maximize on these referrals. I started with Google Adwords. Basically, I put up a bunch of text ads online and spent like $100 on advertising. Along the way, I got a few mentions in Army Times (which in one week drove up registrations by 200 members!). But I realized that many, many Servicemembers were not being reached.

I decided to work on Search Engine Optimization. From the start of this summer, when I couldn't FTP files to my server and had no idea what HTML tags were, I have learned alot. But this SEO stuff is a different ballgame. This week, I installed h1 and h2 tags (which are descriptive keywords that SE see for better ranking), a sitemap generator (tells the SE where to look and when), and a new product called vBSEO (for vbulletin SEO- vBulletin is the software that powers my forums). I wrote more about this at the PEB FORUM -Vbseo post. Read it if you like!