Am I in deep over my head here?

I'm running a normal business as contractors and I'm just trying to get some half decent trafic to my site to help my page rank, I tried adwords but that was too costly for the return, I've written articles and posted on contractor forums and made my content as good and as interesting as possible,I have pinterest, twitter,tumblr and youtube accounts yet I still only get 0-1 visits per day LOL, I've tried to deter from posting this here but I just spent hours getting 300 related photo's of related images for a bot thats now dead, I'm getting really frustrated so was kind of hoping for some advice.

maybe I'm trying to run before I can walk? I've paid several people on here for links etc that don't seem to have had an effect on my rankings or traffic. Not blaming any sellers, I just don't know if I'm starting in the right place

any help would be greatly appreciated.

yours sincerely,

a lost and confused avid reader of these boards

In a way, you're confounding a couple of things. The way you shift back and forth between traffic and ranking suggests that you're not really clear on how that works, and it's likely you don't have a clear plan in front of you either. When you're trying to rank, you need to have a clear picture of what you are trying to rank FOR. You can't just say "I want to rank my site." Pick a keyword, do some research on it (no point ranking for something that no one is looking for), THEN try to optimize for it (start onsite, make sure your titles, urls, and headers are good, then take a look at your overall keyword density). Next, you can start building links, but make sure the links pointing directly to your site are quality, not spammy.

If you've done your research correctly, then as you start to rank higher for your chosen keywords, you'll also pull in more traffic. But if you don't understand the causality here (ranking for a widely search keyword will net you traffic), then you'll be wondering why no one is coming and clueless about how to fix it.

I'm a little confused. What are you trying to rank for? If you're a contractor, shouldn't you be trying to rank for something local, like Painters in New York City?
If so, you could hire someone in the BST section of this site who might be able to get your site to rank for specific keywords.

Thanks Guys.

I have been backlinking to my site and I have also built pages on my site for specific cities local to me, is there a page rank checker I can use for different keywords?

If you're referring to rank tracker (not page rank checker, because they are different), then i'd recommend this one. You can track 10 keywords for free.

What kind of backlinks have you been building?

Fire! said:

....is there a page rank checker I can use for different keywords?

Click to expand...

If you happen to mean a tool that will help you figure out where you are ranking for different keywords (a reverse ranking tool), you might try this one here. You put in your URL and it will tell you what keywords that page ranks for.
Hope that helps!

SEO is way more complicated than it used to be !
if you do something wrong all your business is ruined !
So if your a noob i would first read a lot of articles and topics on BHW before doing anything !