Non Technical SEO advice

[4little1s]

Please go easy on me here but I am no techie....

We run baby furniture, bedding & toys website at www.4little1s.com and we are struggling with SEO generally. I would really appreaciate if someone could give me a few basic pointers in the right direction to help us along the way.

Would really appreciate it

[guccij]

Non technical SEO suggestions

1) change your main section headings so they more closely reflect the market you are aiming at. e.g.:
clothes_footwear.html could be baby_clothes.html
and
slings_carriers.html could be baby_slings.html
and
toys.html could be baby_toys.html

2) Having competitors' ads for your affiliates is a mistake. If I click on one of the John Lewis ones (there are THREE of them!), I find that a lot of their nursery stuff is cheaper than yours. Also they're a well known brand. Who am I more likely to shop with? Hmm.

3) The raft of SEO nonsense at the very bottom of the page is doing you no favours. Get rid of it.

Basic stuff:

the right hand vertical banner is a mess in Firefox and the baby monitor gif is plain irritating.

The contact details are buried in your terms and conditions - does not inspire confidence.

Acres of white space and too much scrolling.

[Orchid]

Planet Ocean are the business

Great beginers guide here http://www.searchenginebook.com/
and it's free.

Once you've digested this their paid version is even better http://www.searchenginehelp.com/

And they do a subscription service that's the dogs doodahs http://www.searchenginenews.com/

[acompton]

Jules's suggestions are valid points, but only point 1. is actually to do with SEO. The rest are about improving the site (and customer confidence).

I noticed the T's & C's are sprinkled with this phrase:
....Unique baby gifts from 4little1s.com

This looks like a blantant attempt at SEO, and is just annoying. Search engines don't like repetition of the same phrase, either.

Here's a sample of keywords I found:

<meta name="keywords" content="Izziwotnot | Nursery furniture uk | Bedding | Lollipop Lane | Vanilla furniture | Hemingway II furniture | Humphreys corner nursery | Baby gifts | Sleepsuits | Swaddling blankets | Swaddle pod | ,Izziwotnot | Sleepsuits | Swaddle pods | Unique | Baby gifts | Nursery sets uk | Nursery furniture uk | Sleepsuits | Handmade | Baby | Clothes | Toys | Wooden | Bouquets | Hampers | Children | Name plaques,Swaddle Pods baby gift | baby gifts Swaddling Pods | Swaddle | Pods for swaddling | Swaddles" />

This is keyword spam and of little value. Also, I think keywords should be separated by a comma (might be wrong here). There is something in Actinic about keywords being inherited from the parent section. It look like this is happenening here (the occasional comma tells me this).

[Mike Hughes]

Hmm.

I don't think you're a total newbie on this.

Perhaps you could tell us what you've done so far? Your home page and a few of the inners appar to be grey barred on PR (although the toolbar PR indicator is varying between grey and PR4) and I suspect this post of yours elsewhere might have some relevance

Missing Links

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have been monitoring the number of links we have on our website according to the Webmaster Tool in Google for a few months. Its been saying about 900 odd for a while and then a few days ago it said 750 and we seemed to drop off the edge of a cliff in our rankings for our keywords.

Anyone any ideas ?

If you want us to help you need to explain what you've done so far.

Mike

[4little1s]

Hi guys

Thanks for the comments. I have been struggling with this site an getting it to pick up in Google .. in yahoo it appears well. I have added some text at the base of each page to help it pick up ... someone told me that google won't pick up the tabulated format of the site well and that the fragments in CSS would do better. I don't know what you think on this. Really I am no expert. Just trial and error on my part.

Our rankings were reasonable until recently. About 1 month ago we disappeared off of the face of the earth.

I have made some fundamental changes to our sites keywording ... focusing on nursery furniture and baby bedding ... previously our focus was on baby gifts. That being said, we were on page 4 for nursery furniture uk and now we are nowhere which makes little sense.

The only other thing that we have noticed is that our page links dropped significantly. We have restored a problem with the external links but notice that our internal links are down from 900 ish to 300 ish. I have no ideas on this at all and can't reason why. What would cause this?

Any tips on any of this gratefully appreciated.

Chris

[Duncan Rounding]

The first thing to do IMO is to get rid of the link spamming at the bottom of the page.
Make sure your meta description, page titles etc are completely relevant to the particular page. You seem to have more words in your metas etc than in the page itself.
Don't overdo them - remember to build your site primarily for visitors not SEs.

Also - what's the John Lewis ad doing at the bottom of the page apart from taking your custom away?

[Mike Hughes]

We have restored a problem with the external links

Where are the links coming from? It sounds like some kind of link network which is the kind of thing that google doesn't like.

Mike

[gabrielcrowe]

isnt it true that you cannot be penalised for incoming links, only your choice of outgoing links?

[Mike Hughes]

isnt it true that you cannot be penalised for incoming links, only your choice of outgoing links?

So they say.

But if your SE rankings are based on links are from a link network then once google works it out and decides to ignore them you will experience a loss of position.

Mike

[Ian Allcoat]

Hi Christianne,

As someone has already said, you won't go far wrong if you try and make the site for visitors rather than Search engines. I have concentrated my SEO efforts on creating pages full of useful information about the area I trade in. Boring stuff to most people but full of information. I dare say nobody reads them in reality but Google likes the pages. They are not spam, just texty and all about the right topics. People can read them or not. It's up to them. The point is, these pages don't get in the way of them getting to the products in any way but they get crawled and Google loves well written, informative text. My home page contains far too much text for my likeing but i like to think that it is designed in such a way that people won't bother reading it. All the good stuff is above the fold but it gets us to the top of Google for loads of search terms. I'm most proud of the fact that even for a really generic search term such as 'glasses', we are number 2 out of 60 million sites on google and even better, above Specsavers, which is cool!

Most people on this forum will disagree probably, but i have built many info pages, including my index page outside of actinic and just have all my product pages inside Actinic. This enables me to use carefully thought out folder names so that urls then contain key words e.g. http://www.4little1s.com/baby-walker...-products.html. I also name all my images very carefully i.e NOT image1 but maybe baby-cots.jpg etc. I also always seperate folder names and image names with - and NOT_.

Finally, make sure you put a lot of thought in to all of your page titles, image tags etc. As part of our ongoing SEO efforts, we use a company called FirstFound. They gave us some good pointers in the first instance and manually submit our site to search engines on a monthly basis for a monthly fee. Whilst we do all our own SEO, we keep them on as they are only £50 a month and whatever it is they do do seems to work well for us. We certainly wouldn't risk ending our association for fear of losing our positioning. I hope this helps, Ian

[Ian Allcoat]

Not sure what happened to that example URL but it's supposed to read baby-walker-products.html (Just so there's no confusion!)

[parklifeclothes]

we use a company called FirstFound. They gave us some good pointers in the first instance and manually submit our site to search engines on a monthly basis for a monthly fee. Whilst we do all our own SEO, we keep them on as they are only £50 a month and whatever it is they do do seems to work well for us. We certainly wouldn't risk ending our association for fear of losing our positioning. I hope this helps, Ian

Ian please see http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=40943 it might be worth reading this

[Mike Hughes]

This enables me to use carefully thought out folder names so that urls then contain key words e.g. http://www.4little1s.com/baby-walker...-products.html.

Ian, the only articles I can find on your website are all in the /acatalog/ directory. Are you sure about this?

Mike

[Ian Allcoat]

Hi Mike, as I said, these pages aren't in your face so to speak but are perfectly accessible from the home page. Here's an example:- http://www.glasses2you.co.uk/prescri...es-lenses.html - Now type glasses lenses into Google and you should see us in second place just behind Specsavers.

BTW - Thanks for the FF link Darron. Interesting. I use them for 2 sites. could shortly be saving myself £100 a month by the looks of it. As I say, I do all my own SEO but have always kept them on just in case getting rid of them rocks the boat.