Request for site review and SEO help

[pete machin]

You are right pinbrook. It is easy to get carried away with optomising your home page and neglecting the other pages and products. In my defence I am waiting untill My homepage is ranking before I turn my attentions to the product pages.

[Duncan Rounding]

You will probably be better off concentrating on some of your product pages than the homepage. The terms you can optimise for each product are much more specific and you are therefore much more likely to see results. Very few poeple will land on your homepage and you will find it much easier to get a higher listing for specific products than general terms that are on your homepage. The competition in your field is vast so rather concentrate on a few specific items first.

The same applies with your link building, I doubt you will do well trying to generate backlinks to your homepage with general terms.

Think about it in tems of traffic. Start a blog, put up some videos on YouTube, get on Facebook and Twitter. Get visitors to your site with something relevant that they want to see - the SEs will do the rest.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree entirely with Jo and Duncan that you really need to spend some time focusing on the sub-section and product pages. There are two good reasons for this:

1. Right now the sites structure isn't great. There are lots of pages called 'copy_of_1234.html', etc which are no good as they don't support any keywords and aren't really helping Google decide if that's a different page from 'copy_of_5678.html'. These will have to be changed and the sooner the better.

2. The closer people are to buying, the more specific their search terms will be. People who search for 'women's Lingerie' are most likely to be just looking around. They're not in buying mode. Once they decide what to buy, they'll use more specific search terms such as 'red lace panties'. These are what you need to focus on. Going for the high volume, generic terms is a waste of time as there's much more competition (who know what they're doing and are doing it well) and the vistors that you'll get are not the one's you want anyway.

Mike

[pete machin]

That sounds like good advice to me. Funny you should mention the 'copy_of_1234.html' url's as I am in the middle of changing them as we speak. This has been mentioned to me before. Thanks again for the good advice.
Pete

[Mike Hughes]

Be sure to use product names rather than part numbers when you do this.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

I've had a look around at smart traffic (your seo) and can't say that I'm impressed with what I'm seeing. Yes, they'll get you links but they're all fairly low quality and from what I read probably overpriced for what they're doing.

It would appear that they're mostly an agency using link services from the philipines? I can't be sure but there's more here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...=&oq=&gs_rfai=

As many of these links are on pages controlled by your seo company, there's also a question of what happens when you stop paying out all that money? The general concensus is that the links will disappear and you'll lose the benefit of all the work you're paying for.

Anyway, I suspect that if you ditch the hidden text (and link to your seo), make the filename changes we've discussed and use product names rather than numbers then you'll probably be OK.

Me, I'd ditch the seo company was well. That's up to you though.

Mike

[pete machin]

Thanks again for your constructive help guys. I am making some of those changes right now but it's going to be time consuming. I'm not sure weather to ditch the dropdown css text before I have spoken to smart traffic. You kind of hope that people you are paying lots of money to because they know what they are doing.....actually do know what they are doing
Anyway it's the Reading beer and jaz festival tonight so i'm off soon.
Thanks again,
Pete

[roundman]

i was contacted by Smart traffic last week and they sent me lots of fancy graphs and such, promised me they could get me onto page 1 in 10 weeks and keep me there.
They wanted to put a scroll down bar jammed with keywords on the front page.
and add over a 150 links to my site.
I have since learnt that the scroll down bar is deemed to be more damaging to the site than anything.
And now it seems the links are worthless too.
I could of had all that for small £3500 a year.
Very pushy sales people too, become a little insulting after 15 mins of being told no

[pete machin]

Hi Roundman. It's always useful to hear about other peoples experiences with a company you are doing business with.
I have made the dropdown text visible now. Not sure if I did it the correct or best way, I just changed the css code from "display:none" to "display:all". We all know the text is only there to help with the google ranking. It's a load of waffle but necessary.
I have also got rid of all the copy_of_copy_123.html files.
Pete

[roundman]

yes when i started i had alot of copy of copy files.
my site was built by a friend as a learning project and i have had to learn pretty much everything as i go.
Its been hard but i enjoy the learning side of it, and one day i will be able to say that i understand what everyone here has just told me lol
Maurice

[PatchworkRabbit]

I've also heard that it's useful to name your image files too? Things like 783728.jpg are probably not helping, is that right?