How to get one's fair share of Google traffic
ardee - December 21, 2007 - 19:42
In the first quarter of 2007, we created the Drupal-based site http://www.fuhnee.com. We did everything we every read about or thought of to get our fair share of Google search engine traffic. But we get way, way less than other (non-Drupal) sites we've set up or bought.
Any idea why?
Thanks!!
Hello, Google analytics
Hello,
Google analytics should help you determine the traffic that you have and from there you should promote to your strength. Attempt to keep people returning.
Not to be cruel - but I went to the site and only saw links to other sites - original content is very important and maybe I just didn't understand. Yet, I will not return because of the terrible popup ads pissed me off.
Best wishes.
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Just learning Drupal
Hi LPH, We actually get
Hi LPH,
We actually get quite a bit of traffic and a modest number of return visitors, but far fewer via Google than other sites that are much newer and have much less content.
The site actually has hundreds of pieces of content of its own, though it also has a lot of outgoing links too. (Do you think the large number of outgoing links is what's hurting us?)
I don't like the popup ads either; it's a business decision and I'm not the business guy (I'm the tech guy). We've had them turned off for periods of time, which I prefer, but now they're on. Sorry about that!
BTW, we do use Google Analytics but it's not telling us why similar sites, but much newer and with much less content, are getting 10 or 20 times as much Goggle traffic as http://www.fuhnee.com is.
Thanks for your input!
Anybody else have additional insights?
Good start
Ardee, it's an interesting example of what can be done with Drupal. Still at a pretty simple stage, I see, but I'm sure you're building on it. And it doesn't look as "Drupally" as some sites, which is good; I know many beginning Drupal devs struggle to make sites look more "mainstream".
I have to agree with LPH on one thing, though: As soon as I see a pop-up ad, I say "that's it, bye, forever". I know the audience in forums like this (techies who loathe pop-ups) won't be the same as your wide general audience (many of whom resignedly view pop-ups as something that "just happens"), so I can understand the tradeoff aspect. But I would certainly ask the business guys to make future elimination of pop-ups part of the plan.
Anyway, I'm interested in your SEO concerns. I wonder whether time alone will cause this site to rise in traffic. Please post updates here! (Do you have an example of a similar, newer site with less content, that's getting 10X more traffic than your site?)
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A site by, of, and for the Drupal beginner: http://www.drupalace.com
Hi Drupalace,
Hi Drupalace,
Thanks for the kind response.
Right now it's just me and my partner, but we're on opposite coasts. He makes the money decisions, but we do consult. I'll remind him how badly people hate the popups.
The other site we've set up recently (non-Drupal) is http://www.blanny.com. It's very new yet it's getting *much* more Google search traffic than www.fuhnee.com is. We've tried various things over the months to figure out what's going on. Here are two things we've done so far and what we're thinking of doing next to improve the situation:
1. Our actual movies are hosted on a different server (cheaper bandwidth) than our site is. We recently realized that this could be killing us SEO-wise, so we modified .htaccess so that it "looks" like the movies are hosted in a subdirectory on the main site (but that non-existent subdirectory is actually redirected to our cheaper-bandwidth host). We *think* this is acceptable to Google but are not certain.
2. We've stopped using so many keywords on the main page. Apparently it can look like "keyword stuffing."
3. We use "tags" (taxonomy) to make it easy for users to find videos with content of various types, but it now appears that we may be using too many tags per video. These tags get put into the keywords of the corresponding video's page, so maybe we're being penalized by Google for keyword stuffing on the content pages. I'm trying to write a tool in PHP to let the admin quickly add/remove tags from lots of content pages, all from a single admin screen, after which I'll use it to remove all but 3 tags per video. (It would be *really* nice to be able to "deactivate" rather than remove the excess tags, in case we ever decide to put them back, but I don't know how to do that.)
Any additional input from you or anybody else is appreciated!
Cheers,
-ardee.
PS; I like your Drupalace site a lot! I just joined your community. (Is the name a play on words: both "Drupal Ace" and "Dru Palace"? Clever!)
SEO etc.
I'm gathering notes to do some writing about the SEO topic early this year, so stay tuned. So many things – at least to me – fall under a black-box mystery, and I end up worried I'm doing something wrong that is silently strangling the search-ranking life out of any site I make. Your examples are good: On a Drupal page, how are we submitting keywords (whether or not we use a module like Meta Tags), and when does that become too many keywords? Is it easy to fall into a trap of submitting multiple keywords, and how bad is the SEO impact from that? How many tags should we be placing on nodes? And so on.
I recently noticed the SEO Checklist module, and found that I was already doing pretty good in following its suggestions, but I still have questions. (And lackluster SEO results. : ) I've also just started noticing groups at group.drupal.org, and see there's a Search Engine Optimization group and a Building Site Traffic group, and plenty of resources linked from there. Lots to check out and report on in 2008!
Oh, re site name: Any reader of your comment is likely to think, "Dru Palace? What's that supposed to mean? That'd be a lame idea for a name!"... yet, sadly enough, that was the actual first idea. "Hmm, I need a name that blends with 'Drupal'... Let's see, there's 'palace', like the site is a 'palace' for Drupal users... Bland, but... Oh, that also becomes Drupal Ace? That's even better!"
Oh well. If you can't be creative, be serendipitous. : )
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A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com
Google constantly changes
Google constantly changes their algorithms.. they're not dumb and they have been trying for a long time now to give truly relevant results and keywords are anything but relevant (as you can write whatever keywords you want but it doesn't mean that your web site is actually about those keywords), they feed off text articles that are well written in complete sentences. Look at the sites that are winning in SEO for your topic and reverse engineer what they're doing..
Also, the most important thing at this time for getting a high search engine ranking is the number of relevant sites linking to yours, the more highly ranked sites in your topic are that are linking to your website, the more your site appeals to google.
Latest theory
Our latest theory as to why our SEO growth fell off sharply as compared to our other non-Drupal site's is that there are two many words before the interesting words. There are CSS filenames, JavaScript filenames (includes), JavaScript source code, class and ID names for DIVs and other page elements, etc., for the first upmteen words that a spider would see, parsing top to bottom.
This tool can tell you the same thing about any site: http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/spider-test/index.php