I need some help, have spent a good amount of time trying to get our rankings up in the last few weeks. We are a small company that does pretty good business despite the antiquated site we are on. The help I need lies in someone taking a look at the site and telling me a few simple things.
We primarily sell Paint markers, Industrial Markers and some art supplies. The core business is the Paint Markers, mainly the Solid Markers. I have nothing to compare too other than where we sit in the rankings, I'd like to improve those if possible. What I don't want are a bunch of replies with links to better title tags/meta tags and seo. I can find links all day. I honestly am hoping a few of you would take a quick minute to take a look at hoe the site comes up in searches, maybe provide some feedback as to how you think we are comparatively and possibly where you may think we should focus to improve.
I'm very much still a novice, I took the site over a few weeks ago and simply want to make it the best site I possibly can. I am moving us to Drupal 7 ASAP but for now this is what I inherited. Your help is beyond appreciated
My company name is Americo Supply, it is a dot com address so I am comfortable in thinking you can find it with that info. Thank you in advance, I am not trying to solicit any free work for anyone, just hoping someone maybe can relate and offer their professional advice for possible improvements to my title tags, meta tags or both.
Steve
Comments
rdf, content
I don't claim to be expert, though a colleague has a track record of SEO success with Drupal, and I have studied his work. Drupal 7 should help as you do not seem to be using RDF yet.
Still, you can install RDF to a limited extent on Drupal 6. I manage a Drupal 6 + Ubercart setup, and I seriously hesitate to upgrade to Drupal 7, as I know it may not bring much benefit to the client's business beyond the RDF with (RDF tagged prices are great for Google).
What really hits me about your site is the lack of text. Plenty of relevant, useful, and fequently updated text, containing the keywords you have panned to rank for, might help. Blog, longer product descriptions, articles. Twitter feed. Customer reviews and ratings are good. But SEO is full of assertions (sometimes contradictory) and no facts. From personal experience I know Google likes blogs. It is all a lot of work, writing or buying high quality, original content, none of this comes free.
Not SEO related, I wonder whether you will be switching Drupal Commerce? I have started building with it recently, but have not tried an Ubercart > Commerce upgrade yet, and if I do move an online shop to Drupal 7 one, would be tempted to stick with Ubercart.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
_
Some of these ideas are good. I'm not certain your site screams blog and I wonder how effective a blog would be on traffic. The reason Google likes blogs is that blogs are constantly changing. Google likes new content and active sites. So you don't need a blog per se, but need to come up with a way to be changing your content on a frequent basis.
I can't comment on RDF since I don't know anything worthwhile to add. i will say that you need people using your products to help in social sharing, posting links on their site, etc. if you know specific customers who are artists or whatnot, contact them and ask them to point users to where they shop for their supplies.
In the end, John says truly that SEO is always just a bunch of people assuming they know the system. If anyone had the key they'd have a job with some major corporation doing it for them and making large figures.
@John
I would highly suggest if you build any future ecommerce with D7 you use Commerce instead of UC. I've built a D7 store with UC and it's incredibly frustrating. The UC.org site is a ghosttown, modules are being abandoned in favor of Commerce, and the modules that remain have been around forever without any indication of a stable release. There are certainly modules out there with active maintainers so this isn't true of everything. I do feel that with what I've seen this year that UC won't be around nearly as long as they estimate. The UC site was broken for a couple of months with nothing from admin. People were posting about it in the forums and not once did anyone with power come in and comment. The support issues on the site sometimes go months before someone comes in a bumps it with a +1 and then may go forever again before any more activity.
emm......
If I were you.. what I would do is...I would get an exact match domain.. in this case would
1. Find the traffic for the keyword solid paint markers and it's variations..
2. I would choose a keyword which has at least 1000 exact searches (including it's variations)
3. Find out the page rank and all other SEO factors for the top 3 results in Google when I search for the keyword solid paint markers.
.4. Say if the keyword is solid paint markers, I would get a domain named solidpaintmarkers.com
5. Promote solidpaintmarkers.com and make it to the top most position in google
As of now, the site which stands first for the keyword solid paint markers has only a page rank of 2 with very few backlinks, I can easily beat it within 2 months if I do everything properly. Ultimately what it matters is you do it better than the one with whom you would like to compete. If his site is slow you make your site faster and you will see the difference..all I can guarantee is that you can reach the first page but not the first position but however I have few sites which are ranked 1 in Google for the keyword which exactly I wanted... and there are plenty of other ways too....
I think this works
Does a subdomain using the keywords work equally well?
It seems to me that having a domain name containing the key words is a quick way up in Google (though some disagree). OTH there are benefits to keeping your own brand name in the URL, even if it takes longer to establish your SEO position.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
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Are you meaning:
sitename.com/brand-name/product-name
?
If so i have always thought this to be beneficial. If not could you provide an example so I get your meaning?
not really that
I'd like to know if that works too
What I had min mind was that if you were running a paint shop, Instead of e.g. www.mybrandname.com you could have URL paintshop.mybrandname.com
Not sure if this works for Google?
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
_
Okay. That completely skipped my mind and I should have know what you meant. The example i gave is supposed to be good so if you were wondering you could try it and see. I always put everything into categories that I think are relevant. I don't always put them in what i believe is best. The reason is that sometimes I just get lazy. But sometimes I do what I've heard and what I believe to be the best way. Example, on one site I have the auto alias to work with specific category or token:
sitename.com/blog (default Drupal) but i have multi-blogger site so I also have sitename.com/blog/author-name for each blogger teaser list. Then I have sitename.com/blog/author-name/blog-title for each actual blog.
This provides the organization I want, especially since sitename.com/author-name is the user profile and it gives me keywords for their name, their blog title, and my name. For people that say Google can see "blog" in the URL and know that everything after is related to blogging. I don't know if this is true, but just in case I have it in place and I like the organization.
As for your subdomain question, I don't know at all if this will help or hurt or do anything at all. I did a quick Google search for subdomains and seo and what I got wasn't much help.
thanks
OK thanks. Sounds a good idea, I will use it.
What we know is that a subdomain is seen by Google as a completely separate site (as in www.example.com vs example.com) but I found no more information about subdomains and SEO. Next up are custom TLDs of course....
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
may be
domains are easier to rank than sub domains..... Google doesn't treat a sub domain as a separate site like it used to do earlier.....!
What matter's most is studying the competition of your existing competitor. It would be a blunder to get a new domain and go after one of your competitor's webpage which is ranking high for one your keyword, which has proper title and a page rank of 5 or 6 and expect your new domain to beat that webpage within 2 months...!
As someone said, there's no
As someone said, there's no correct advice, except perhaps to build content and backlinks.
These are just thoughts on your site, even if they're written in the imperative:
1)
Use your meta description properly, in proper sentences, with one or two target keyword phrases for each node. Don't keyword-stuff it like you're doing now. You seem to be using your meta title correctly, which is the most important one.
2)
Set-up pathauto to get the title in the url:
Eg. domain.com/product/sakura-halogen-marker instead of domain.com/node/102
Use Global Redirect.
*Be sure you can live with a temporary drop in SERP and/or 'Google Dance'*
3)
Try to internally interlink between your product nodes within the descriptions. Eg. link between similar markers, or to recommended ones (and upsell at the same time). You'd be surprised how much Google likes interlinking. Don't bother trying to 'sculpt' page rank to certain pages - just generally interlink between nodes a lot. Use lots of different targeted keywords and longtails in the anchors.
4)
More written content *consistently* added. If you write one article a week, sustain that rate. If one a month, sustain that. Each 600 word article should contain two or three key phrases, repeated up to four times, using longtail modifiers. With a subject like pens, you're really going to have to think laterally about the content. Just a quick brainstorm...
· A series of reviews done as 'tests' - giving marks for durability, waterproofing, range of uses, value for money, available colours, etc.
· Instructional content like tips for safe/proper usage and care of the products.
· Start a campaign encouraging legal graffiti, posting photos/interviews with legal artists.
· Reassure visitors about the environmental aspect of the products and their manufacture.
· Look at the eHow 'paint marker' videos on YT for more content ideas.
5)
If you can, use YT yourself, since it accounts for 25% of all USA search traffic. Making your own channel means you'll have some extra content to embed on your site with accompanying text, but also seeing a real person from your company explaining things may build trust and increase conversions.
6)
Backlinks from high-PR, authority sites are still the single most important element.
Do it *consistently* and as naturally as possible, using a variety of anchors.
_
What does everyone think of landing pages without dynamic content? I've been thinking about this a lot lately since a site I have http://www.48fourteen.com has a pretty static front page. There are a few blocks with dynamic content but generally just new users, a link to new blogs, comments, and forums, and a small few other things. Even the slideshow doesn't change all too often.
There are roughly ten bloggers on the site so would you consider creating a new block on the front page for featured content or newest blog entry? The links are already there so it is probably the same thing, there just isn't the images or anything special style wise about it.
even though google claims
even though google claims that back links do not help much. i still strictly believe that they are necessary to increasing your site's ranking.
Back Links was always a key
Back Links was always a key player in determining the ranking of a webpage in google SERPs. Now it has just changed to QUALITY back links, if it is related to your NICHE it will be better and if it has some good PR too it will be best.
Regards
Alicka
More than backlinks needed
Backlinks used to be the most important aspect to ranking but with the introduction of google panda, it's now also based on the quality of the site especially when you are trying to rank for competitive keywords. This means your site should have original content that is regularly updated and doesn't have a high bounce rate. By just working on improving your site without over optimizing, you will find you will naturally start ranking for keywords, even ones you didn't target.
SEO Critique
Hello :-)
I just had a look at your web site, I will assume that the main keyword you want to promote your shop is paint markers or sakura solid paint markers?
From a first look, the reason you do not have enough traffic to your web site is because the keyword "sakura solid paint markers" have very low search quieries (28 global and 22 localy in the US) while being very high competitive at the same time. Same applies to "solid markers" with 110 local searches and high competition. On the other hand "pain markers" have a good search quiery of 2400 local searches but it is very competitive so you need to optimise and link build your web site accordingly in order to compete with other web sites offering similar products.
The proper way to do SEO is to get one main keyword for your index page and then use 4-5 keywords as a basket within your index page text. Let me give you an example. I had a guy once who wanted to optimise his web page for a very hard term nlp which stands for Neuro-linguistic programming.
His keyword recommendation baskets were looking like the ones below:
Basket 1
Primary Keyword: nlp
Secondary keyword: neuro linguistic programming
secondary keyword: neuro-linguistic programming
secondary keyword: neurolinguistic programming
secondary keyword: neurolinguistics
Basket 2
Primary keyword: nlp training
Secondary keyword: nlp courses
Secondary keyword: nlp course
Secondary keyword: nlp coaching
Secondary keyword: nlp training courses
So in this case he can choose to optimise 2 different pages one for nlp and another for nlp training, depends what he is willing to pay really and use the baskets wisely.
You have to do a similar research and make always sure that those keywords do not exceed 4-5% of your total keyword density otherwise your page might be tags as keyword stuffed and you will lose rankings.
Back at your keywords you need to be sure that the words you use, your customers are looking for them as well. With small alternations you can get much more people to your web site. "sakura solid marker" for example have 170 local searches, not many but definitely more than the 22 you are targeting atm plus they are all looking exactly what you are offering. So by removing the term "solid" and optimising one of your pages accordingly you will have a bit more traffic. Small efforts, better results. This is just an example ofcourse, i will have to a detail research to be able to state more about your web site, unless i have the keywords infront of me I can not say with certain.
You should then do a couple of changes on your H1 title, title tags, link categories and desciprions etc but I will be able to give you more information once I get my laptop tonight and run some tests as firewall at work do not allow me to do that atm.
The second thing you need to do is link building and social mentions but you said that you can do that all day. Do it as soon as possible and make sure you use the term you wish to rank for when linking your main page. I would start on that immidiately as it seems that google has 0 web sites linking back to yours.link:americosupply.com
I will be able to run a full technical and on page audit for you should you wish to get more information. You need to pay a lot of attention to the technical audit. To give you an example there might be a possibility to have 2 different versions of you index page.
http://www.americosupply.com/
and http://www.americosupply.com/index.php
Google see this as 2 different web sites. Make sure you remove the index.php version so you do not waste your link building efforts. Here is an article advising you how to do it but make sure you check with your web developer first as there might be easier and more convenient ways to do it.
http://www.atladasmedia.co.uk/blog/112-how-to-301-redirect-non-www-and-i...
I did some rought checks your pages are indexed and followed and it appears you do not have a non-www version which is good.
I am at work now so these are just some thoughts, I can not go into more detail atm but nevertheless hope it helps. Let me know if you need further assistance, I will be happy to discuss furher. You can drop me a quick email at akronsound@gmail.com
Best Regards
there is a great seo video
there is a great seo video from lullabot i think, also install seo checklist
you dont need all the modules listed, but it helps
drupal is very seo friendly. not like Joomla, duhh
you can customize pretty much everything.
But mostly what can cause bad rankings is the speed of the site. I suggest optimizing the site, good server....
Drupal webdesign - regular sites and ubercart ecommerce sites
Drupal webdesign