Do I Need Better SEO?

[MarkPearson]

I have a new website and business www.rosesbydesign.com

SEO will become an important part of the business success.

How long should I wait before I expect to see results of the current optimization?

The site has been online for around a month.

When do you recommend I call in the experts and is it worth spending the money?

Have you had SEO and seen great results, who do you recommend?

For those of you that are good in the field of SEO, would you give me a quick rundown of improvements my site needs.

If any of you do this, then maybe PM me a quote.

[DuaneJackson]

Don't expect to get anywhere with Google for 9 months or so, simply becuase it's a new site.

Your site isn't too bad in temrs of SEO.

Your navigation images should be changed to text. They can be made to look exactly the same with CSS.


Also, a lot of your pages are products.php followed by a querystring. I'm always rambling about eliminating querystrings, Try and find some of my previous indepth explantions here (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/search.php?mode=results)

Same applies to your /proddetail.php pages. Also, try to link to these with text and not just images.

Get each individual product added to your sitemap page. This can be done dynamically so you don't need to keep updating it.

You have a few javascript functions (MM_preloadImages) on every page. These should be moved to an external file.

Use ALT tags on images.

Finally, and this is a biggie in terms of cost/time - get the whole site re-done in XHTML/CSS to lose all the coding for tables - this will also make your site more accesible.


Hope that helps!

[MarkPearson]

Hello Duane,

With the current site as it is.

And waiting 9 months or so.

Would our site get decent listing?

For this 9 month period, will it mean we will not be listed or not listed high?

[Magsite]

Give me 5 keywords you would like, what search engine you want to check and I'll get a full report to you. See what you think!

[MarkPearson]

Hello Lisa,

Is it worth a check now...?

As we are a new business and been online for less than a month.

I'm talking about the future and putting my website into the right position now to potentally to be at or near the top in the future.

[Magsite]

Just sent a pm mark!

[DuaneJackson]

it's hard to guess what will happen with your site on google between now and then.

Use the intervening months to build inbound links and implement some of the things on my list.

And ofcourse there are other search engines too. : )

[MarkPearson]

Yes.

What parts of the list do you impliment as a SEO business Duane?

Pm me your charges if you like.

Its funny...

Type in Personalised Roses in google and our site is 19th listed!!

But in MSN its top 3

[DuaneJackson]

We can do all of it really, but we're not cheap.

I'll have a better look and email you on Monday.

You're right near the top on Google - you just need to go via ebay and kyotee : /

[Kyotee Matt]

Personally, I would recommend that you get rid of every single query-string if possible.

We learned that the hard way at Kyotee - late 2003, we realised that we had very few pages in Google for the businesses we were promoting. We took stock of the situation, and decided to do three things:

1. We moved hosting providers so we could get hold of mod_rewrite, and rewrote the site in PHP from ASP (This was an awful undertaking - skip this step!)

2. We decided to redirect everything to our .co.uk domain (previously we had a few pages from .com, .net and .co.uk in the SERPs , and it just looked messy)

3. We changed our system so that every page could be reached via a URL without any parameters.

Before we did this, we had around 4,000 pages in Google. After we removed the query-string, this number increased quickly, and within around six months, we had passed 500,000 pages. We are currently hovering around the 2 million mark, but this is still increasing as more businesses add themselves to the directory.

The point of all this is: Google HATES query-strings. If you want Google to spider as much of your site as possible, then you really need to knock that barrier down.

Of course, this is just one aspect - there are many more things you can do to optimise a site, but we learned the hard way, so I don't think you should have to.

- Matt

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Mark,

Heres a report on your homepage on how to get it ranked higher in Google for the phrase "personalised roses" (This phrase is not searched for much at all in the UK according to my tests) it would be better developing slightly different keywords.

http://www.matrixxhosting.com/downloads/roses.pdf

I see at least 2 entries for UKBF members linking to you in Googles top 10 for this !

Hope this helps,

Rob

[JoyDivision]

I have to get rid of all the querystrings on my Manchester site when I redesign it. The problem is the method I have developed looks like this

bands.php/joydivision/2

instead of

bands.php?band=joyvision&page=2

but idealy I need

bands/joydivision/2

because that PHP extension will confuse search engines won't it?

[Kyotee Matt]

I'm not sure if it'll confuse them, but your second method does look a lot better!

It really shouldn't be a big job to change what you have already into the better method - if you'd like me to take a look, pm me.

[DuaneJackson]

try and avoud sub directories, use _ instead of / if you can.

Matt, did you recode to PHP just to tak advantage of mod_rewrite? You can achieve the same thing on an ASP/IIS server.

[JoyDivision]

The sub directories don't exist though, its merely a trick to avoid using querystrings, each sub directory is actually just a variable which stores a string in order for the correct records to be taken out of the database, I am not sure in that example how I would use an underscore instead of a slash.

[Kyotee Matt]

Duane, we realised that the same could be done in IIS, but the hosting company we had been with didn't support any URL rewriting on either their Apache or IIS packages!

We switched to PHP primarily because we found the language to be more elegant than ASP (this was way before c# and ASP.NET), and our site really needed an overhaul by that stage.

A complete rewrite allowed us to really iron out every crease we had, making our site faster and easier to extend. I have always believed that you only really learn if you have to do something, and reimplementing Kyotee allowed me to learn PHP and Apache to a level far deeper than I would have any other way.

So we moved to PHP and a new host, and things have worked out really well!

On the underscore / slash issue, we found that using slashes in the url is fine as a separator - but there has been some discussion into the use of underscores as opposed to hyphens:

http://www.prweaver.com/blog/2004/08/26/2-hyphen-and-underscore

Kyotee uses slashes to define the different section within our site, and hyphens to replace spaces in file or directory names, so if you were looking in Buckinghamshire for web designers, our url would be:

http://www.kyotee.co.uk/uk-business-directory/ categorysearch/Buckinghamshire/Web-Designers.htm

Oh, one thing that is almost a dead cert to get Google to crawl your pages is to get a sitemap set up. Obviously, I can't garuntee that, but you might want to try them: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

[DuaneJackson]

I know. Surely it'd be easy to use an undersocre not a slash as they are not real directories. It'd only be more difficult if they WERE real.

[DuaneJackson]

Fair enough. I know I have a number of sites I'd relish the opportunity to re-write from scratch. It certainly looks like you have kyotee well and truly sorted now.

For future reference though, it's easy enough to do the equivalent of a mo_rewrite on a windows server using nothig but a 404 page with some code in it.

[Kyotee Matt]

We did look into using the 404 rewrite method too, but personally, it was too much of a hack for me to stomach - doing that also has the effect of adding a large number of 404 errors to your log, clouding your view of actual 404's.

Moving to a new host was better for us, and it meant we could use the standard rewrite rules rather than hacking together a proprietary version.

[c2webdesign]

Hi Mark,

With any SEO starting right at the launch is key. It does take a while for Google to start giving new sites their full credential - but in the meantime this is the ideal time to start requesting link backs (or pay a SEO company to do for you).

It's an ideal time to find out what search terms people are using to find sites like yours. You can then ask other sites to link to you using these search phrases/keywords. This helps give a big boost to your position for these keywords.

By requesting linkbacks now from related, quality sites it means once Google starts giving you full recognition, your linkbacks are in place.

In terms of Google a good 70% of your position is based on factors outside your site e.g. other sites linking to you.

Best of luck,
Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Web Design | Online Marketing | Search Engine Optimisation