Doing Everything Right, But Not In Searches
Neil
[carolwilsongallery.com]. Web site has been online for many years. We
have hundreds of in and out links, all relevant. Main keyword phrase
for what we sell is Cat Art, which used to always get us on Google's
page 1. Now we're not even on the first 10 pages. Occasionally we'll
appear on page 1 again, then not for months. Second most important
keyword phrase is Cat Paintings. That has always made us show up on
page 1. Index page has both phrases several times, plus both are in
page title. Also in meta statements, though I know those mean next to
nothing. Would be very grateful for your suggestions as to how we can
get on Google's page 1 with Cat Art and stay there. Thanks.
John Bokma
no h1, h2
cluttered title (seems to be repeated everywhere)
Those drop downs look nice, but it's wasting SEO like mad.
Cropped 1, what's that for a name?
Under a chair -> make those things longer (Black cat hiding under a chair
for example).
There is so much room for SEO that a simple print won't do it :-)
--
John Need help with SEO? Get started with a SEO report of your site:
Rich
IMHO....
It's a combination of Keyword Density and links back to you.
The top site tigerpixie.com has Keyword Density of 4.6 for "Art" and 3.45
for "Cat". You have 2.77 for "Art" and 1.57 for "Cat".
Now, if you follow John's advice and change all the ALT tag's in your images
to things like "Art: Cat in a Bathroom" and " Paint Tubes.. A Cat
Contemplates Art" your keyword density will sort itself out.
The next part is links. Thinks of a way to get people to link to you. Study
who's linking to your competition. Email and ask if they'd like to link to
you !
Be sure to sort your competition's links by Page Rank first, after all, one
PR7 site is probably worth several thousand PR1 sites.
Hope to see you back at number1 soon !
Rich
http://www.richdavies.com
Starting again at PR0... Help me !
rwap
Hi there,
As pointed out already, there are plenty of things you need to look at
in order to improve your search engine rankings. Unfortunately, this
would take a lot of work and need quite a few changes to your site.
The number of inbound and outbound links does help, but you have to
look at the actual content of your site and how it compares to other
sites which have higher rankings.
The method in which search engines (and in particular google) work
changes on a regular basis as they refine the algorithms to cut out
what they see as spam sites.
A few pointers:
1) You use a lot of java script based links to get to other pages on
your website. Search engines will ignore javascript, and may penalise
you as you do not provide an option for users without javascript
installed. Even a link to a simple sitemap could help, but you do need
a <noscript>.... </noscript> section
2) You have far too many keywords listed - this looks like spam -
keywords on each page need to relate to the content on that page
3) Your title is much too long and seems to be the same on each page
which is a waste and may be penalised as spam.
4) Your links page contains TOO many links and so your site may be
penalised as being a link farm
5) The drop down lists contain titles for the pages which are
meaningless and not related to the words which appear on those pages.
Some of the print titles also just do not provide any information about
the picture "Cropped 4" for example.
6) Beware of the images which you are putting on your site - how many
people might just right click and set as desktop without paying
anything?? Consider adding a watermark to the actual pictures with
the address of your site.
7) The galleries do not contain much text - search engines will ignore
the pictures, all they will then see is the ALT tag for each image,
which is the same as the text under that picture. Why not look at
using a long description to describe the print (see longdesc on google
- it is an IE plugin)
8) The text size on the drop down menus does not resize which can be a
problem for people with poor eyesight. Google has started taking into
account accessibility issues with sites now.
9) Your customer service page contains no information about your
business - this may not affect search engine rankings, but I would be
wary as a private individual of purchasing prints from a site with no
postal contact details - how do I know that this website is in fact
owned and run by the artist for example??
10) You have direct email addresses in your pages - do you get a lot of
spam by any chance?
11) A lot of the links on your site to ordering pages are
printx.php?pid=??? Search engines will ignore anything after the
question mark and then get an error ! This can be fixed in two ways,
either redirect the user if no pid is supplied (to the index.html page
for example) which will not improve things from a search engine, unless
it penalises broken links; or look for a script on the internet which
enables you to convert these generated pages into "fixed" webpage
addresses.
Well that should give you some food for thought for starters. This is
however just the tip of the iceberg, but as its Christmas, a little
help is offered.
More pointers on what to look at appear on our website -
http://www.internetbusinessangels.com
Rich Mellor
Borek
> 11) A lot of the links on your site to ordering pages are
> printx.php?pid=??? Search engines will ignore anything after the
> question mark and then get an error !
Wrong. It is better to not use too many parameters, it is better to avoid
"id" as the parameter name (even partial), it is paramount to not pass
session ids as a parameter - but parameters can be used and pages with
parameters in URL are in most cases properly indexed. Google "pH of
buffer" - two first links have both question mark and parameters, which
doesn't stop them from being #1 and #2.
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com/?left=BATE&right=pH-calculator
http://www.ph-meter.info/pH-electrode
http://www.bpp.com.pl/?left=dysleksja&right=dysleksja
http://www.terapia-kregoslupa.waw.pl
John Bokma
> 3) Your title is much too long
Nah, it isn't (I use longer ones). It isn't a good title though.
> 6) Beware of the images which you are putting on your site - how many
> people might just right click and set as desktop without paying
> anything?? Consider adding a watermark to the actual pictures with
> the address of your site.
I wouldn't recommend this. People shopping for desktop images are
probably not the ones going to buy anyway. And why downgrading your
images for genuine buyers? (Unless all images are 1280 x 1024, didn't
check that).
> using a long description to describe the print (see longdesc on google
> - it is an IE plugin)
Huh? longdesc is a HTML attribute, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#h-13.2
longdesc = uri [CT]
This attribute specifies a link to a long description of the image.
This description should supplement the short description provided
using the alt attribute.
> 10) You have direct email addresses in your pages - do you get a lot
> of spam by any chance?
But that's not a reason not to do it. As for reducing the spam a bit,
use @ instead of @. No idea how well this still works, but most bots
are extremely badly written. You can decide to "encode" a few random
characters in your email this way, but the @ is the most important one.
> 11) A lot of the links on your site to ordering pages are
> printx.php?pid=??? Search engines will ignore anything after the
> question mark
Nope, this is not true, at least certainly not for google.
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aprofile.php
> and then get an error !
Of course not!
> This can be fixed in two ways,
> either redirect the user if no pid is supplied (to the index.html page
> for example) which will not improve things from a search engine,
> unless it penalises broken links;
There are no such broken links, hence your "solution" is worse then the
problem at hand.
> or look for a script on the internet which
> enables you to convert these generated pages into "fixed" webpage
> addresses.
Or use mod_rewrite + a tweak in your script
Tips
> A few pointers:
> 2) You have far too many keywords listed - this looks like spam -
> keywords on each page need to relate to the content on that page
> 3) Your title is much too long and seems to be the same on each page
> which is a waste and may be penalised as spam.
This is the most obvious main problem -- the <title> is the same on every
page. If the HTML <title> is changed to be unique on every page, I bet the
site's rankings will drastically improve within a few weeks.
> 4) Your links page contains TOO many links and so your site may be
> penalised as being a link farm
I don't think the links page is too long. But I wouldn't link to it from
the home page. Don't send people to other sites until after they have
looked around yours a little. Link to it from a sub-page, and remove any
irrelevant reciprocal links (if any).
> 11) A lot of the links on your site to ordering pages are
> printx.php?pid=??? Search engines will ignore anything after the
> question mark and then get an error ! This can be fixed in two ways,
> either redirect the user if no pid is supplied (to the index.html page
> for example) which will not improve things from a search engine, unless
> it penalises broken links; or look for a script on the internet which
> enables you to convert these generated pages into "fixed" webpage
> addresses.
Search engines are not ignoring those pages. For example, the following URL
has a PageRank of 2:
http://www.carolwilsongallery.com/printx.php?pid=049
Also, it is not a good idea to do redirect to the home page when a page is
not found. That can trip up search engines. If a page doesn't exist, the
server should send a 404 header, not a redirect.
Also, the URLs shouldn't be changed. They already have PageRank.
First steps to better rankings:
1) Change your HTML <title> on every page so that they are significantly
different
2) Meta description: make each meta description one or two human-friendly
sentences, no more than 130 to 150 characters including spaces or it will
get cut off. See the link in my signature for more info on how to maximize
the value from your meta description. Cut the keyword stuffing out of your
meta keywords also. Limit yourself to 10 targeted meta keywords on each
page, with a different set of keywords on each page.
Type the following into Google and notice how your listing appears the same
for many results:
site:carolwilsongallery.com
That is a combination of your title and meta description not being unique on
every page.
Also, don't just think in terms of "keywords"; visitors are important too.
Here is your original title which looks like a string of keywords:
<title>Cat Art Paintings,Artist Carol Wilson,Painting Print,Cats
Artists</title>
Here is one way that you could rewrite the home page meta data to look
better in the search engine results pages:
<title>Cat Art Paintings by Artist Carol Wilson</title>
<meta name="description" content="Cat art paintings by award-winning cat
artist Carol Wilson. Browse online gallery of original paintings of cats.">
<meta name="keywords" content="cat art paintings, carol wilson, cat artist">
Target the other keywords on your other pages. On sub-pages, keep any
global keywords at the end of the title like this:
<title>Painting of Four Kittens Sleeping | Cat Artist Carol Wilson</title>
3) Link your simliar pages together. That would create sections of similar
content, and distribute PageRank. For example, pages like the following
would benefit from "view previous cat painting" and "view next cat
painting" links:
http://www.carolwilsongallery.com/printx.php?pid=075
Link to each of your main galleries from the home page with HTML links not
only an HTML form. You have many pages in the Supplemental Results,
possibly because there are few or no links to those pages.
4) Sign up for an account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
and "verify" your site. (No need to upload a sitemap.) After
you "validate" your site, Google's Webmaster Control Panel will show you
more information about your site. The most important things to pay
attention to there are possible errors that Googlebot is having, and
the "query stats" that show what keywords you rank for. Sometimes it will
show some keywords that you weren't aware that you were close to ranking
for (say #85). You can then do a little on-site optimization and get a
better ranking for those keywords.
Fix those problems (especially #1 and #2), and I think your site will be put
back in the running within 4 weeks.
--
http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-use-meta-description-and-meta-keywords
Big Bill
<see_reply-...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>rwap wrote:
>
>> A few pointers:
>
>> 2) You have far too many keywords listed - this looks like spam -
>> keywords on each page need to relate to the content on that page
>> 3) Your title is much too long and seems to be the same on each page
>> which is a waste and may be penalised as spam.
>
>This is the most obvious main problem -- the <title> is the same on every
>page. If the HTML <title> is changed to be unique on every page, I bet the
>site's rankings will drastically improve within a few weeks.
It will, probably because it'll actually get indexed. I've seen site
after site where only the home page is indexed and - surprise! - all
the titles are the same.
>> 11) A lot of the links on your site to ordering pages are
>> printx.php?pid=??? Search engines will ignore anything after the
>> question mark and then get an error ! This can be fixed in two ways,
>> either redirect the user if no pid is supplied (to the index.html page
>> for example) which will not improve things from a search engine, unless
>> it penalises broken links; or look for a script on the internet which
>> enables you to convert these generated pages into "fixed" webpage
>> addresses.
>
>Search engines are not ignoring those pages. For example, the following URL
>has a PageRank of 2:
>http://www.carolwilsongallery.com/printx.php?pid=049
You don't see too many top ten pages with session ids in their urls, I
notice. And really, these days, there's just no need for it any more.
BB
--
http://www.kruse.co.uk/seo-sitemap.htm
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/art-prints-sitemap.htm
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/lithographs.htm
KimmoA
You forgot the URL.
Borek
> Neil wrote:
>> A FREE PRINT TO YOU IF WHAT YOU TELL ME WORKS! URL is
>> [carolwilsongallery.com]. Web site has been online for many years. We
> You forgot the URL.
Huh?
Tips
"Big Bill" <bi...@kruse.co.uk> wrote in message
news:i5h6p2t90dqs0t7j7...@4ax.com...
They aren't session IDs in this case -- they look like "picture IDs". It
wasn't a good choice of URL by the developer, but it doesn't look like a
critical problem. If it were my site I would eventually rewrite and 301
redirect them, but the site could rank well without doing that. I don't
think search engines will mistake them as session IDs because the numbers
are only 3 digits.
N-H-P
There is NO SECRETE. Just plain common sense.
Your site suffers from just plain bad design.
Copy your competition!!!! The #1 site for cat art is:
http://www.best-cat-art.com/
Good design.
Lots of text on top of the page that explicitly references cat and cat
art.
Good use of internal links and their repective text names that
explicitly use the word cat in them.
Also, your choice of a doman name is a NEGATIVE for good placement on
cat art.
You should make your home page as physically small as possible with
lots of exlicit references to cats and cat art in TEXT. I am talking no
more than 20K, at most. Your graphic picture is way too big for your
home page. Use pictures no bigger than the ones on
http://www.best-cat-art.com/
Tips
> Also, your choice of a doman name is a NEGATIVE for good placement on
> cat art.
Having keywords in the domain name can help, but her domain name is already
4 years old. It wouldn't be good to start from scratch.
N-H-P
Nobody said that they should, certainly NOT me. I simply pointed it
out. It was a bad choice of domain names. :)
Just thought that you might want to know that the site is Doing
Everything Wrong, and it is showing up in the SERPs.
Big Bill
<john...@naturalhealthperspective.com> wrote:
Then it isn't doing everything wrong. It would seem to be your
interpretation of events that is at fault.
BB
--
http://www.kruse.co.uk/seo-sitemap.htm
http://www.kruse.co.uk/content-management-systems.htm
http://www.kruse.co.uk/submissions.htm
N-H-P
> On 31 Dec 2006 06:29:50 -0800, "N-H-P"
> <john...@naturalhealthperspective.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >Tips wrote:
> >> N-H-P wrote:
> >>
> >> > Also, your choice of a doman name is a NEGATIVE for good placement on
> >> > cat art.
> >>
> >> Having keywords in the domain name can help, but her domain name is already
> >> 4 years old. It wouldn't be good to start from scratch.
> >
> >Nobody said that they should, certainly NOT me. I simply pointed it
> >out. It was a bad choice of domain names. :)
> >
> >Just thought that you might want to know that the site is Doing
> >Everything Wrong, and it is showing up in the SERPs.
>
> Then it isn't doing everything wrong. It would seem to be your
> interpretation of events that is at fault.
No, it is because you got up on the wrong side of the bed.
Now, my drift is more explicit.
I just love the many parallels between the health and SEO ngs.
Denial is NOT a river. And, I just love questions from people who
start off their query: Doing Everything Right ... but for some unknown
reason ... all is going wrong.
Ha, ... Hah, Ha!
Denial is NOT a river.
--
john gohde
Now, posting with my baby WindowsXP Professional computer. :)