SEO Consultant

[Joelsim]

Hi,

I've had my site up and running for a week now

www.musictoyourears.co.uk

And I am struggling with natural search, ie I'm hardly coming up at all, not even my homepage.

Googlebot has visited as I requested it, and have sent a sitemap through webmaster and also Mash.

I've looked at the Google guide for SEO and it looks like I have absolutely followed it to the letter on page titles, meta descriptions, image names etc etc.

But when checking webmaster tools, out of the 400 pages I've submitted, only 26 have been indexed.

Can anyone help please?

Thanks

Joel

[peblaco]

If the site is only one week old you need to give it time, you won't jump to the top of the search results in one week.

[Mike Hughes]

Where to start...

OK.

Your biggest problem as I see it is that your whole navigation is by filtering which means that every product page is being linked to from a variation of http: // www. musictoyourears.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?FILTERPAGE= (I've put in a few spaces so as not to create a live link.)

Basically, Google has no way of knowing how your site's pages are linked together and working out how important any of them are compared to others.

The first thing I'd do is include your sellerdeck generated sitemap on your website. At least that will allow the google spiders to find all your pages.

The second things is to get some more links to boost the authority of your site. That should help.

I'd also make sure to include canonical tags on your product pages so Google know that

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aca...se.html#SID=13

is the same page as

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aca...rbud-case.html

and not a duplicate.

Personally, I wouldn't have built a site using just filtering as all your section pages (or what would have been section pages) are just variations of ss000001.pl . I know Google are better at indexing script generated pages but I think this is really asking too much.

Mike

[Joelsim]

Ah ok thanks Louise.

I thought that once it was crawled then the pages would all get indexed straight away, albeit on page 249 of the rankings. I was thinking something was wrong.

Using links already to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and a few forums.

[Joelsim]

Where to start...

OK.

Your biggest problem as I see it is that your whole navigation is by filtering which means that every product page is being linked to from a variation of http: // www. musictoyourears.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?FILTERPAGE= (I've put in a few spaces so as not to create a live link.)

Basically, Google has no way of knowing how your site's pages are linked together and working out how important any of them are compared to others.

The first thing I'd do is include your sellerdeck generated sitemap on your website. At least that will allow the google spiders to find all your pages.

The second things is to get some more links to boost the authority of your site. That should help.

I'd also make sure to include canonical tags on your product pages so Google know that

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aca...se.html#SID=13

is the same page as

http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/aca...rbud-case.html

and not a duplicate.

Personally, I wouldn't have built a site using just filtering as all your section pages (or what would have been section pages) are just variations of ss000001.pl . I know Google are better at indexing script generated pages but I think this is really asking too much.

Mike

Blimey, that doesn't sound good. Each product page is available through the top buttons with a normal page name.

How do I do the sitemap please?

And I have no idea what a canonical tag is so I will look it up.

[Joelsim]

OK I've looked up canonical tags.

Where do I put them? In Sellerdeck? Do I just add the following (dependent upon the page name of course)

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/acatalog/reloop-rh-2350.html" />

Any advice greatly appreciated as I don't know anything about coding whatsoever.

[Mike Hughes]

For the Canonical tags I use the code here from Graphicz http://community.sellerdeck.com/show...9&postcount=12 . Put it in the header of your outer page layout.

For the sitemap, just put a link to http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/acatalog/sitemap.html somewhere on your page. The usual place is in the footer at the bottom of the page.

Mike

[Joelsim]

For the Canonical tags I use the code here from Graphicz http://community.sellerdeck.com/show...9&postcount=12 . Put it in the header of your outer page layout.

For the sitemap, just put a link to http://www.musictoyourears.co.uk/acatalog/sitemap.html somewhere on your page. The usual place is in the footer at the bottom of the page.

Mike

Jonathan at Graphicz is my developer! He is away on holiday though for 2 weeks.

I have absolutely no idea where to start on doing this, can anyone help please? The last time I did any coding was on a Sinclair ZX81 where I managed to generate a random number I think.

What is a header of outer page layout?

And how do I add a link to the footer?

[peblaco]

For single product pages you may want to include the code for those.

[Joelsim]

Thanks Louise. I've just sent you an email.

Joel

[peblaco]

As these are minor issues you should have your designer look on their return.

[peblaco]

Please be advised if you are using SellerDeck filtering “make filtering the default view” the pages use a cgi-bin link so it requires addition of 301 redirects or a canonical tag, however the canonical tag cannot use variables store folder and page name for filtered pages as it affects the search engines listings as they cannot index content. See this post for details: http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=55375