SEO and Actinic

[Ian Allcoat]

Hi Folks,

About 4 or 5 months ago I finished a site using Actinic and have since applied everything in my arsenal that I know of to the site in order to get it up the rankings of search engines.

However, I have failed miserably!! My site is nowhere to be seen. It has been crawled but as far as good placing is concerned.....no chance. I have tried everything, even learning more than I knew before in a vain attempt to get my site seen. Obviously links are important which is an ongoing thing but this is more than just that.....! By the way, I have got other client sites high up in search engines!

Therefore, can anyone out there tell me (as I feel I need to try something else), if there is any worth in the idea I have of re-designing my home page completely outside of Actinic with hard coded links to the store so that there is no code generated by Actinic that could possibly be causing a problem. OR, am I just clutching at straws and in fact, Actinic is good as far as SEO is concerned?

If anyone out there can see any glaring mistakes on my site (www.glasses2you.co.uk) and it's just a case of me being a plank then pleeeeease, someone tell me cause I'm losing the will to live. If anybody out there has experienced OR even better, overcome a similar problem, I'd really appreciate any advice anyone has.

Help much appreciated,

Thanks,

Ian

[Mike Hughes]

Google has indexed your site, it's just that you aren't ranking well.

Your biggest problem is probably that you need some decent links. Although PR is not so important these days it is a good indication of the links you. Your PR is only 2 and many of your links are of dubious origin.

To expand on the 'dubious origin' bit. Your links from mainzer theatre appear to be short term from some sort of linking program (bought or swapped) and they appear to be gone now anyway. Other links, such as that from www.020.co.uk/o/opticians/london.shtml are provided via a 302 temporary redirect that cause the search engines problems and can lead to duplicate content penalties.

My advice? Don't use any link 'schemes', don't buy links and don't submit to any directories/pages that don't do direct links. Do get direct links from decent, on topic sites and from the major directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ.

Mike

[Ian Allcoat]

Thanks Mike,

Yeah I realise that certainly my links need looking at and building up in a big way where Google is concerned but my main concern here was more that I have always, with links or not, managed to accomplish good list placements with most other engines such as Yahoo and Lycos and yet with this site nothing. I was therefore starting to think that maybe some of the code Actinic puts into the HTML towards the top might be having some sort of effect.

Do you think as well as building better links that it might be worth my while trying this idea of creating an index page outside of Actinic, therefore eliminating unnecessary code?

Cheers,

Ian

[Mike Hughes]

I doubt if there's anything Actinic is doing that's causing you any problems. My own actinic sites do fine without any messing about.

I just tried yahoo for 'prescription glasses uk' and found you in 16th place. can you be more specific about what you think the problem is?

Mike

[jont]

creating an index page outside of Actinic

Certainly a step in the right direction as you can hardcode the links and avoid the cgi-bin. I tend to base the index pages on the Act_Primary and leave in the Actinic functionality to allow the cart to be shown on the homepage and keep the layout the same as the rest of the site - nothing worse for site branding to have different feels throughout the site.

[Ian Allcoat]

Actinic SEO

OK guys, thanks for your comments.

I'll give it some more thought.

Cheers,

[outofthehat]

Certainly a step in the right direction as you can hardcode the links and avoid the cgi-bin.

Why does Actinic use the cgi-bin? I always thought that would be counter-productive for rankings...

[Mike Hughes]

Yes, going via the cgi-bin is not good for rankings.

Actinic only needs to do it for customer accounts where it needs to track whether a customer is logged in or not. For sites without customer accounts it isn't needed yet actinic still includes it.

To me, actinic is losing it's way with the software. What started out as very comprehensive and well thought out software is becoming less and less usable as they chase new features at the expense of fixing known problems.

As someone who's used actinic for a few years now I'm a bit sad that I feel like this.

Mike

[jont]

Yes, going via the cgi-bin is not good for rankings.

The only links I have via the cgi-bin are for the shopping cart, everything else is stripped away with manually maintained links.

becoming less and less usable as they chase new features at the expense of fixing known problems

Alas a common issue for a lot of software vendors copying electrical equipment in showing more and more features on the box to wow customers away from other products

[RuralWeb]

Your site does not use cgi-bin links, (I think these are only used in a small number of the actinic templates anyway).

Having had a quick look through your site the reason for your lack of rankings is the complete lack of descriptive text in the site. SEs work on text and if you dont give them any to eat then you stand no chance of getting a decent ranking. All your products only give size details, each should have a very good description of the design and features containing keywords that you are targeting.

Actinic in my opinion is the best e-commerce solution available in terms of SE BUT it does not and never will get you to the top without you doing a bit of work on content.

[Ian Allcoat]

Hi Malcolm,

Right, I will have a look at that. To be honest, I've always been under the impression it was the index page more than anything that needed to be text rich with the right keywords etc, with text links leading off to other content rich pages which I have done. So, if you're right, that's an easy fix and thankyou. However, I'm a bit worried that even more text to read in the product part of my site (which in my opinion is already quite daunting) could be a turn off to a customer. Having said that, I'd rather have customers to turn off than nobody find the site! So thanks, that should keep me busy for a while.

[PA.com]

Hi Ian,

I've been finding similar problems with my six-month-old site, though recently my search result positions have improved along with my page ranking. My site is called Piano-Accompaniments.com and on every page the words piano and accompaniments appear fairly frequently, as well as being in the meta descriptions, page titles etc.
Comparing arguably the three major search engines, with the search words "piano" and "accompaniment" I find the following results:

MSN: top 1 or 2 results, with what seems to be a reliance on meta description words, page title, and other text near the top of the brochure pages.

Yahoo: Now about position 26 (up from 34 last week so woohoo ), again seems to be down to the same text as above.

Google: There are apparently around 407,000 results for these words, and I don't think I've broken into the top 406,000 yet. If I put the correct combination of words in i.e. "piano accompaniment Shostakovich sonata" I stand a chance because these words appear next to each other in the index page text, so maybe strategically consolidating your page text as much as possible is advisable, bearing in mind some people do search for four-word phrases instead of two-word phrases.

I have subscribed to Google Adwords though, and this sponsored result generally appears on page 1 of Google. Perhaps think about doing that, as a lot of my customers cite Google as the way they found my site - must be due to the Adwords.

Webceo provide a free version of their search engine optimisation software (click here for site: http://www.webceo.com/download/) which does have some nifty tools for looking at your pages and then suggesting optimizations. Also, do a search under some other parts of this forum (i.e. Ecommerce Business Issues) to see if there is any advice you missed there.

Hope these suggestions aren't all too obvious, I'm not exactly a world expert when it comes to search engines!

Paul

[george]

Some work on your page titles would help you a bit Paul.

[tonyd]

Hi
I'd suggest that the problem isn't with your site, it's with google. If you're getting decent rankings in other search engines, but not in google, it's likely that you're in the "google sandbox".

There are plenty of articles about this if you search the web for it - basically it seems that google now doesn't rank new sites for a period of several months to ensure that they are genuine sites, not spam sites.

Apparently the only thing you can do about it is be patient.

[leehack]

IMO we are all guilty of making Google too big for its boots. Ive read umpteen articles written by Google about what not to do and what they will do if you do certain things. Lo and behold my main 4 competitors contravene their rules very badly, in fact one is so ridiculous, its untrue.

Follow what they tell you and your are lucky to be in the top 30, contravene and break all their guidelines and guarantee yourself a top 5 spot. Quite Pathetic!!

Ive started using a couple of the other search engines, just to try and balance it out. Last thing we need is only one decent search engine available and Google doing what the hell they want, while we all fight it out.