Guest Posted March 21, 2007 Posted March 21, 2007 Greetings! My site has been up and running for several months now. I'm STILL at a 0 PR by Google and not quite sure what the deal is. Perhaps you would be willing to look around and see if you see anything that's off kilter, or anything that needs improvement. Moonlight Direct Again, any comments by way of response on the board or private message would be so very much appreciated! Peace & Light, Isaac
Andrew Yuen Posted March 22, 2007 Posted March 22, 2007 To improve search engine ranking, I recommend doing some research, finding some keywords and optimizing your front page by incorporating those keywords into your introduction (make them bold). Also, add those keywords inbetween your <title> tag. As for your site, I believe you have to many infoboxes. I would remove infoboxes such as verified by: paypal and secured by godaddy and move them to the bottom of the page. Also would remove the reviews infobox as you have a button for reviews located on each product page. In your footer I would remove that page request number. Also in your categories infobox I would remove the product count as it slows down the site as well as the (->). When looking at the buttons of your website certain button text does not match the other buttons. For instance it looks like you used a different text for the print button when looking at the reviews and add to cart buttons. I would re-do the buttons using the same text. I would also remove the product was added date. Andrew Yuen osCommerce, Community Team
Guest Posted March 22, 2007 Posted March 22, 2007 To improve search engine ranking, I recommend doing some research, finding some keywords and optimizing your front page by incorporating those keywords into your introduction (make them bold). Also, add those keywords inbetween your <title> tag. As for your site, I believe you have to many infoboxes. I would remove infoboxes such as verified by: paypal and secured by godaddy and move them to the bottom of the page. Also would remove the reviews infobox as you have a button for reviews located on each product page. In your footer I would remove that page request number. Also in your categories infobox I would remove the product count as it slows down the site as well as the (->). When looking at the buttons of your website certain button text does not match the other buttons. For instance it looks like you used a different text for the print button when looking at the reviews and add to cart buttons. I would re-do the buttons using the same text. I would also remove the product was added date. Wow! Thanks for the excellent advice!! I fixed some of the simpler things you mentioned right now, and will get to the keyword integration and button re-creation this evening. Definitely some good advice, and removing the "->" and the product count from the categories box has significantly decreased the load time. I had no idea this was a factor. Thanks again!
Guest Posted April 2, 2007 Posted April 2, 2007 Okay, so I've now made all of the above changes. STILL Google shows my site as having a "low" page rank. I'm not certain what I'm doing that google considers so despicable, but something is really wrong here. If I had a higher page rank and still not getting traffic, I'd assume it was the google "sandbox" effect. Does anyone know why my site is ranking so low?? There's a link in my profile and also in previous messages in this thread. Thanks! -Isaac-
soregonmale Posted April 2, 2007 Posted April 2, 2007 Google can take up to 6 months for ranking. Be patient with that one, you'll see results once it picks up your keywords and such.
Guest Posted April 2, 2007 Posted April 2, 2007 STILL Google shows my site as having a "low" page rank. I'm not certain what I'm doing that google considers so despicable, but something is really wrong here. If I had a higher page rank and still not getting traffic, I'd assume it was the google "sandbox" effect. Does anyone know why my site is ranking so low?? Hi Isaac. The PageRank you see in the Google toolbar is unreliable. It's updated maybe every few months and isn't the same as Google's internal PR that they use for ranking. Don't pay attention to it. If you look around at any SEO forums, this is what you will be told (over and over again). It's good that you've taken Andrew's advice and fixed your title tags, but it looks like you've still got quite a few to go. Take your info pages (privacy, shipping, conditions) for example. They all have the same title. Make sure that you go through all of your visible pages (everything in the catalog/ folder) and fix the title tags for each one. The default title tag for each page is: <title><?php echo TITLE; ?></title> This puts your store name as the title tag for each of these pages. Either enter individual titles for each page manually, or change it to HEADING_TITLE; instead of TITLE;. The only problem with this is that not every page has a HEADING_TITLE. For the most part, I just do it manually. The key is that you want to have each page of your site with it's own distinct title. As far as on-page optimization is concernced, this is the most important aspect of SEO. For product pages, it looks like you're using a title tag contrib that uses the product name in the title. That's good. Just make sure that you set individual titles for all of your products and categories as well. As it stands, all your category pages look like they use the same title as your homepage. Not good. Speaking of your title, it reads "Moonlight Direct - Witchcraft, wicca, magick, craft, pagan, candle, witchcraft store, wicca store, witchcraft supplies, wicca supplies, ritual items, spells, spellcasting, wiccan jewelry, altar tools, altar, incense, oils, herbs". That should be changed as it looks a heckuva lot like keyword stuffing, and could get your site banned. Keep your titles targeted towards the content on the actual page. You don't want to be using all of the keywords possible for your niche on every page of your site. Keep it focused. Having focused, specific titles on each of your pages will help to get them ranking (and out of Google's Supplemental Results). Speaking of supplemental results, do a site: search on Google for your domain. Here's an example. You'll see that you have about 1,040 pages in Google's index. As you go through the results (particularly page 2 and onwards), you should notice that it says "Supplemental Result" for the majority of the pages next to the page's URL. You'll also notice that the bulk of these have the same title - Moonlight Direct. Since you changed the titles for some of your pages, these should change once Googlebot revisits. But it won't help if all of those new pages all have the same new title. Make the title changes as recommended and put some more original content on your pages and you should see your pages come out of the supplemental results. As far as PR goes, you just need to go out and get those inbound links. Again, these won't be quickly reflected in your Google Toolbar, but that doesn't matter... On another note, make sure that your navigation links to the homepage are consistent. You have 3 different URLs for the same page: - header logo link, Home, and Catalog all point to http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/index.php - Top link in breadcrumb trail and copyright link in footer point to http://moonlightdirect.net/ which re-directs to http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/. As far as Google is concerned, you've got 3 pages with the exact same content: http://moonlightdirect.net/ http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/ http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/index.php To us, these are all the same page, but Google sees them as 3 separate pages. Make sure that you keep everything consistent, as this could be construed as duplicate content and work against you. At worst, you're spreading (and diluting) your inbound links by using these different variations. I'm curious, is there any particular reason why you don't use the www for your domain? This isn't a big deal for SEO (as long as it's used consistently when people link to your site). Although Google is working on fixing this, Google will usually treat http://moonlightdirect.net/ and http://www.moonlightdirect.net/ as different pages as well... HINT: Try doing the site: search on Google with the www. From a marketing standpoint, there are a couple of things you should consider. If people are at your store, why are you telling them to leave? On your homepage, you've got the Gay Pagan webring that will send your customers off to somebody else. And why are you running Google AdSense?! All you're doing is advertising for the competition, and sending people away from your site. I'd look at reducing these channel conflicts and focus on selling YOUR products. For your design/layout, definitely keep it simple and keep the focus on your products and why your customer needs them. Fix your layout so that the containing table width is not 100% of the screen. That is osCommerce standard and probably worked when everybody was using 800x600 resolution, but it makes your site too wide for anything higher. Hope that helps. Good luck with your store.
Victor Wise Posted April 3, 2007 Posted April 3, 2007 I notice you have a printer friendly page for each product description. I hope you are excluding these pages from being indexed by google, else you are being penalized for duplicate content. Best Regards, Victor Wise
Guest Posted April 3, 2007 Posted April 3, 2007 AWESOME advice, guys! Thank you so much for the help!! Hi Isaac. The PageRank you see in the Google toolbar is unreliable. It's updated maybe every few months and isn't the same as Google's internal PR that they use for ranking. Don't pay attention to it. If you look around at any SEO forums, this is what you will be told (over and over again). First, I wanted to say that the PageRank figure I was using for my site statistics came from my Google account statistics page, not from the Google toolbar. I'm certain both figures are a far cry from Google's actual numbers, but one would think the site would be more reliable than the toolbar. In any event... on to my changes! It's good that you've taken Andrew's advice and fixed your title tags, but it looks like you've still got quite a few to go. Take your info pages (privacy, shipping, conditions) for example. They all have the same title. Make sure that you go through all of your visible pages (everything in the catalog/ folder) and fix the title tags for each one. The default title tag for each page is: <title><?php echo TITLE; ?></title> This puts your store name as the title tag for each of these pages. Either enter individual titles for each page manually, or change it to HEADING_TITLE; instead of TITLE;. The only problem with this is that not every page has a HEADING_TITLE. For the most part, I just do it manually. The key is that you want to have each page of your site with it's own distinct title. As far as on-page optimization is concernced, this is the most important aspect of SEO. Done! :) For product pages, it looks like you're using a title tag contrib that uses the product name in the title. That's good. Just make sure that you set individual titles for all of your products and categories as well. As it stands, all your category pages look like they use the same title as your homepage. Not good. I managed to fix this as well! Go Isaac! Speaking of your title, it reads "Moonlight Direct - Witchcraft, wicca, magick, craft, pagan, candle, witchcraft store, wicca store, witchcraft supplies, wicca supplies, ritual items, spells, spellcasting, wiccan jewelry, altar tools, altar, incense, oils, herbs". That should be changed as it looks a heckuva lot like keyword stuffing, and could get your site banned. Successfully "unstuffed" my keywords. I'm still a newby and obviously experimenting with what works and what doesn't. Good to know that DOESN'T! :) Make the title changes as recommended and put some more original content on your pages and you should see your pages come out of the supplemental results. I have had this same advice from others, and never been quite sure what that means. "Add more original content." Okay. I'd love to... just not sure what that would look like for someone with a site such as mine. For someone with a site on say, professional dog breeding, they could easily add information about the backgrounds of specific breeds, and what happens when they mix. They could take that a step further and detail how profesisonal breeding has changed some of the major species, etc. With my site, however, my products are my products. I'm rather at a loss of how to add more "original content". Any suggestions here? As far as PR goes, you just need to go out and get those inbound links. Again, these won't be quickly reflected in your Google Toolbar, but that doesn't matter... I'm using the Links Manager contrib and have it successfully working. My hope is that increased traffic to my site will result in some link requests... hence even further increased site traffic. On another note, make sure that your navigation links to the homepage are consistent. You have 3 different URLs for the same page:- header logo link, Home, and Catalog all point to http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/index.php - Top link in breadcrumb trail and copyright link in footer point to http://moonlightdirect.net/ which re-directs to http://moonlightdirect.net/catalog/. Corrected! I'm curious, is there any particular reason why you don't use the www for your domain? This isn't a big deal for SEO (as long as it's used consistently when people link to your site). Although Google is working on fixing this, Google will usually treat http://moonlightdirect.net/ and http://www.moonlightdirect.net/ as different pages as well... HINT: Try doing the site: search on Google with the www. My initial thinking in omitting the "www." is due to the length of my domain name as it is. It just gives the average consumer one less thing to think about, and four keystrokes less. It's much different for, say, AOL or something like that. Other than that, no reason. I noticed, however, that Google has ZERO listings for my site including the www, so I changed all the links on the pages above to go directly to the site minus the www. Why change a good thing? Even though I'm not listed as high or the way I want, I still am LISTED. So I'll just stick with that. :) From a marketing standpoint, there are a couple of things you should consider. If people are at your store, why are you telling them to leave? On your homepage, you've got the Gay Pagan webring that will send your customers off to somebody else. And why are you running Google AdSense?! All you're doing is advertising for the competition, and sending people away from your site. I'd look at reducing these channel conflicts and focus on selling YOUR products. Perhaps this is a newbie error, or perhaps we have different philosophies. My original thinking was to sign up for the webring and AdSense as an initial way of bringing traffic to my site [since none of my "organic" SEO has seemed to have any effect yet]. I would then cancel these subscriptions as soon as I began to have a page rank higher than zero. Ugh! Also, I chose the "Gay Pagan" webring because there are little to no other metaphysical retailers listed in the same webring. Hence, it would draw customers who are interested in the same schools of thought without promoting competition. Does anyone else see this issue differently than I? I want to succeed here, of course, and will certainly take it off if need be.... I just want to make sure there's a need before I do it. Same goes for AdSense, by the way. I would remove it at a later date. I also carefully screen the links it's providing and remove any potential competitors. For your design/layout, definitely keep it simple and keep the focus on your products and why your customer needs them. Fix your layout so that the containing table width is not 100% of the screen. That is osCommerce standard and probably worked when everybody was using 800x600 resolution, but it makes your site too wide for anything higher. Is this a CSS change, or would I find this somewhere else? Do you have any suggestions to an appropriate "containing table width"? I have not done anything with CSS editing before, so this will be a learning lesson for me. Not asking for complete instructions, just a point in the right direction. Okay, that should be it (one novel later)! Thanks so much again, everybody! --Isaac--
Guest Posted April 4, 2007 Posted April 4, 2007 First, I wanted to say that the PageRank figure I was using for my site statistics came from my Google account statistics page, not from the Google toolbar. I'm certain both figures are a far cry from Google's actual numbers, but one would think the site would be more reliable than the toolbar. I assume that you're referring to Google's Webmaster Tools. That's great if you are. PR is pretty much a measure of the the number of backlinks you've got. You can see how many links different SEs have indexed to your site by doing a search for "link:www.domain.com" in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Traditionally, Google will show a fraction of what MSN and Yahoo will show. With Google Webmaster Tools, you can get a better idea by clicking the 'Links' tab at the top of the page. The results will show you the number of backlinks, and you can click on the number to see the actual pages linking in. To get more backlinks to your site naturally, good content is king and you could do this by adding articles to your site, in addition to adding more copy to your product descriptions. For example, you sell pendulums on your site. Working backwards from the product, what would people use it for? Divination. You could write an article (or series of articles) on divination that includes information on how to divine things using pendulums (maybe specific types of pendulums) and link to specific product pages from within the article(s). Ideally, the articles you write would be based on keyword research, so that you can target the people looking for that information. I just looked through a few of your pendulums and noticed that they all use the same description. That's duplicate content that probably explains why a ton of those product pages are in Google's supplemental results. You could easily update these. Why should I use amazonite vs amethyst vs bloodstone vs black onyx? Do research to see the significance of these different gemstones and put that content into your product descriptions. Heck, talking about different gemstones and their effects looks like a good opportunity for a series of articles in itself... At the end of the day, people with websites don't tend to link to just stores selling product (unless they're affiliates). They link to content they feel their audience would appreciate and find valuable. My initial thinking in omitting the "www." is due to the length of my domain name as it is. It just gives the average consumer one less thing to think about, and four keystrokes less. It's much different for, say, AOL or something like that. Other than that, no reason. I noticed, however, that Google has ZERO listings for my site including the www, so I changed all the links on the pages above to go directly to the site minus the www. Why change a good thing? Even though I'm not listed as high or the way I want, I still am LISTED. So I'll just stick with that. :) You can focus Google's spidering efforts with Webmaster Tools as well. Click on the 'Diagnostic' tab at the top of the page, then 'Preferred Domain' on the left. You can specify www or non-www there. Perhaps this is a newbie error, or perhaps we have different philosophies. My original thinking was to sign up for the webring and AdSense as an initial way of bringing traffic to my site [since none of my "organic" SEO has seemed to have any effect yet]. I would then cancel these subscriptions as soon as I began to have a page rank higher than zero. Ugh! Also, I chose the "Gay Pagan" webring because there are little to no other metaphysical retailers listed in the same webring. Hence, it would draw customers who are interested in the same schools of thought without promoting competition. How would AdSense bring traffic to your site? With regards to the webring, if you look at the links, they are all re-directed through the webring software (eg. http://a.webring.com/go?ring=gaypagan;sid=7;id=7;next). They're not direct links to your site, so do nothing for your PR. Also, I chose the "Gay Pagan" webring because there are little to no other metaphysical retailers listed in the same webring. Hence, it would draw customers who are interested in the same schools of thought without promoting competition. Do you get visitors through the webring? Keep it if you get traffic. Otherwise, ditch it. It would be interesting if you had access to click stats for the webring so that you could see how many visitors come and go. At the very least, I'd probably look at moving it so that it's less prominent. Since it's above your new (featured) products on the homepage, people could be leaving before they see what you've got to sell. Same goes for AdSense, by the way. I would remove it at a later date. I also carefully screen the links it's providing and remove any potential competitors. If it makes you money, keep it. Ideally, test your results with and without it, and keep whichever option makes the most revenue. Is it better to make pennies per click on AdSense, or making sales from your store? Is this a CSS change, or would I find this somewhere else? Do you have any suggestions to an appropriate "containing table width"? I have not done anything with CSS editing before, so this will be a learning lesson for me. Not asking for complete instructions, just a point in the right direction. This wouldn't be CSS. You'd be changing the table width in the <!-- body //--> in each page visible to your visitors. Victor363 made some good points about screen size and resolution, to which I responded in the thread for my store here if you'd like to check it out. It's really a matter of opinion...
Guest Posted April 4, 2007 Posted April 4, 2007 To get more backlinks to your site naturally, good content is king and you could do this by adding articles to your site, in addition to adding more copy to your product descriptions. For example, you sell pendulums on your site. Working backwards from the product, what would people use it for? Divination. You could write an article (or series of articles) on divination that includes information on how to divine things using pendulums (maybe specific types of pendulums) and link to specific product pages from within the article(s). Awesome ideas! I will start work on this tonight! I just looked through a few of your pendulums and noticed that they all use the same description. That's duplicate content that probably explains why a ton of those product pages are in Google's supplemental results. You could easily update these. Why should I use amazonite vs amethyst vs bloodstone vs black onyx? Do research to see the significance of these different gemstones and put that content into your product descriptions. Heck, talking about different gemstones and their effects looks like a good opportunity for a series of articles in itself... I will definitely have to upgrade the product descriptions. Very insightful stuff. How would AdSense bring traffic to your site? With regards to the webring, if you look at the links, they are all re-directed through the webring software (eg. http://a.webring.com/go?ring=gaypagan;sid=7;id=7;next). They're not direct links to your site, so do nothing for your PR. I have had multiple problems with the webring people accepting my site, then rejecting/removing it two days later, then accepting & rejecting again. I emailed the "ringmaster" over a week ago and have yet to hear anything back. Hence, I promptly canceled my account and removed the code. As for the AdSense, good point. I'm not sure how it does bring traffic to my site, and I'm not sure why i thought it would. I'm blond; it's natural. Need I say more? :) This wouldn't be CSS. You'd be changing the table width in the <!-- body //--> in each page visible to your visitors. Victor363 made some good points about screen size and resolution, to which I responded in the thread for my store here if you'd like to check it out. It's really a matter of opinion... I have yet to decide if I want to change the table size or not based on the discussion in the above-referenced thread. If I WERE to change it.... what would be a good value to change it to? I personally *DETEST* having to scroll back and forth with the horizontal scrollbar and this will even keep me from returning to a site if I can't read the entire page. What would be a good way to test the table size? I have a rather high-res monitor with a huge viewing area, so I am not sure how any changes would affect other users. Is this a browser issue, or a monitor issue? Both? Thanks a zillion! -Isaac- :thumbsup:
Guest Posted April 6, 2007 Posted April 6, 2007 Hi Isaac, I'm glad you found the feedback helpful... I have yet to decide if I want to change the table size or not based on the discussion in the above-referenced thread. If I WERE to change it.... what would be a good value to change it to? I personally *DETEST* having to scroll back and forth with the horizontal scrollbar and this will even keep me from returning to a site if I can't read the entire page. I think this is really a matter of who your target audience is -- what kind of demographics you're looking at. I took a look at a variety of sites and here's what I found: amazon.com - adaptive width (100%) ebay.com - fixed width (800px) buy.com - fixed width (1024px) besbuy.com - fixed width (800px) dell.com - fixed width (800px for homepage, 1024px for interior pages) victoriassecret.com - fixed width (800px) store.apple.com - fixed width (800px, 1024px for product pages) adobe.com - fixed width (800px) These are just a random sample of sites off the top off my head, but it looks like 800px fixed width is still strong. What would be a good way to test the table size? I have a rather high-res monitor with a huge viewing area, so I am not sure how any changes would affect other users. Is this a browser issue, or a monitor issue? Both? I'm not sure what you mean by "test the table size". If you want to test what people at different resolutions would see and you use Firefox, you can get the Web Developer extension which allows you to resize the browser to specific resolutions (800x600, 1024x768) so that you can see what visitors at that resolution would see. For osCommerce, you'd need to modify the width for each page in your catalog/ folder. Look in your code for something like: <!-- body //--> <table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> And replace the 100%. This table is the containing table for the page, not including the header and footer, so you would need to change header.php and footer.php in catalog/includes/ as well. For my site, I use 770px for the table width. Looking at the source code for the websites I mentioned above, they've got: ebay.com - 746px besbuy.com - 780px victoriassecret.com - 733px adobe.com - the site doesn't use tables -- layout is done completely with CSS, and I couldn't find the width. So you can see that there's no set standard or best practice. Interesting topic for discussion though...
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