SEO / Online Marketing beginner

[lizard3666]

Hi,

I have created a recipe search website that has aggregated recipes from popular UK recipe sites. Users can then search through the recipes by combinations of ingredient selections and other criteria. They can also create an account to save any ingredient selections they have made.I really think my site does something special, perhaps a bit foolishly! Anyway, I am interested in making it more visible on the internet / learning about SEO and online marketing for free. I have tried a few experiments so far without much success, here they are in roughly chronological order;

1.) Submitted the site to Google about five months ago

2.) Created a wordpress blog talking about how I made the site with lots of links to it. However to date, I don't get very many/zero views of this blog. I did try reading other peoples blogs and making comments to try and help with this, but reading through lengthy blogs in order to make relevant and interesting was very time consuming.

3.) Responded to questions in a few forums to people asking about good recipe sites. However, I learnt very quickly that it's easy to get banned / blacklisted as a spammer doing this!

4.) Messaged UK tech journalists on Twitter asking if they could have a look at my site and provide some feedback in the hope they might give me a mention in one of their articles. A few replied to me, and I could see they had a quick look in the logs but that was the last I ever heard from them.

5.) Making posts about my site on LinkedIn/Twitter to the handful of people who are connected/following me.

6.) Giving a reciprocal link to a link directory site in return for a listing. I only ever had 1 referal from the site in a few weeks, so I quickly gave up on that after reading bad press about those kinds of sites and removed their link from my site.

I know there are lots more things I can try. Really I need to prioritise / start with the things that are likely to be most successful/effective first. Some colleagues at work made a few suggestions;

7.) The site looks too amateur! I know this. I focused on making the nuts & bolts behind the site work well first with the knowledge that I could perfect the presentation later.

8.) The meta tags (e.g description, keywords etc) on the landing page need changing and also something about using H1 tags which I didn't really understand.

9.) The word "suggester" is recognised as a spelling error by google spellchecker. Therefore perhaps I should buy a new domain that would be more search engine freindly. So I did, it's <removed by mod>

10.) Use Google sitemaps. I don't really see the point though as I think perhaps only the landing page needs indexing. The other 4 pages only really contain user generated data at the moment.. really you would have to have a quick play around with the site to understand what I mean. However, I read somewhere that a sitemap is important so I generated one automatically using googles reccomended tool and uploaded it into the root of my site, although I don't really understand what it's going to do!

There are also a few things I had in mind;

11.) Currently the domain redirects to index.html and then to index.php , is this dual redirect damaging?

12.) There may be lots of other things in the HTML of the landing page
that I could improve on

13.) I have had a few sign-ups. The users had to register with their email addresses. Could I use these emails somehow ?

Please can anyone help me come up with a plan / offer some suggestions ?

Here is the link to the site : <url removed by mod, please don't post your url>

Thanks,

Tim

 

[zoeway]

I can relate to you. When I started online marketing some three years ago, I was so focused on making the website look good and function good. When it was done, I allowed other services to do the seo for me. I concentrated on paid advertising w/c resulted to a few sales but a staggering advertising bill. After some six months, nothing was happening to my site in the search engines except more expenses.
I got tired and rolled up my sleeves. I am a a rock and mortar businessman and want to explore the wonders of the internet. I know how to manage different parts of the business to make it grow, but, this time everything was so new. I decided to get educated and outsource it later on. That way, nobody can scam me because i know something about it.
what helped me then was seobeginnercourse.com w/c was a very thorough on the basics of seo. What I learned was enough to get me started on seo traffic, and it is for free.
you seem like me. If you think this business is for you, be ready for the long haul. Educate yourself. This will also protect you from a lot of scams out there just after your hard earned money.
Enjoy the journey. Educate yourself.
If you ask where am I now? Well I am still not where I want to be, but, I sure am glad I am not where I used to be.

 

[malcom.disouza]

Use Mailer option to contact with your regular customers as well as for promotion.

 

[Clarkjackson]

Huaa,,. Tips are all most useful and i would appreciate your writing efforts on this

 

[fisicx]

Tim,

Your whole approach is flawed. If I want a recipie I'll use a search engine and look at the results to see if there's one I like the look of. I very rarely go to a recipie site and do a search.

If all you are doing is aggregating recipies from other websites then there is no incentive for the search engine to includes you in the results pages. That's why you aren't getting any visitors.

PS, just looked at the site and it's awful. There are no recipies listed, it's just a very unusable form.

 

[zigojacko]

I haven't seen the site in question as the link has been removed but a common fail that new websites make is that they don't offer anything new/unique. As fisicx touches on above, why should people visit your website? What do you have to offer? What can be done on your website that isn't available elsewhere? Rarely does a new website become a success if it doesn't offer anything new or approach an existing model from a different angle.

However, unlike fisicx above, I do actually go directly to a recipe website (here) to search for recipes at first instance and then only revert back to a web search engine if a) I can't find something suitable or b) for more choice. But, if all your website does is aggregate recipes from a range of websites, then why would I use your website over Google (that already has every worthwhile cached and indexed in their web index and have already began the roll-out for a recipes search within their global vertical search).

What are you going to do when everyone can see 'Recipes' listed in the left hand menu on Google? Surely your entire business model would be flawed? As Google have already provided a solution to what you are trying to achieve?

 

[terryuk]

Regardless of being an aggregating data, your site says you have 90,000 recipes. You have one page indexed in Google because your site has no structure or inner links to anyone of these recipes. Unless you are waiting for the day Google can submit forms intelligently.

If you wanted your chicken recipes page to get indexed, then create a hyperlink to http://recipesuggester.co.uk/ingredient_search.php?pageid=0&newsearch=1&keyword=chicken but even then the site is just an dry search engine right now not much use to me or the next person.

 

[lizard3666]

I thought perhaps the key thing that might make it unique is the way you can select many ingredients in one go then find recipes containing lots of the ingredients you chose. It's sad though because from the logs I can see people tend to miss this point and add one ingredient like "chicken" or "minced beef" then view the recipe results ! And beleive it or not, there are more than 90,000 recipes in the database ! Anyway, from the start it has always been more of a learning experience for me, and I have already learnt a lot on the journey. Thanks for your input.

 

[terryuk]

I thought perhaps the key thing that might make it unique is the way you can select many ingredients in one go then find recipes containing lots of the ingredients you chose. It's sad though because from the logs I can see people tend to miss this point and add one ingredient like "Chicken" or "mince" then view the recipe results!

Anyway, from the start it has always been more of a learning experience for me, and I have already learnt a lot on the journey.

My recipe list consists of no more than five for any meal, food is expensive. I prefer to buy beer instead

Good luck.

 

[fisicx]

I thought perhaps the key thing that might make it unique is the way you can select many ingredients in one go then find recipes containing lots of the ingredients you chose.

That's how YOU do things, it's not how others look for recipes.

And you don't actually have any recipies - all you have is links to the recipes. There are no images or lists of ingredients and the compexity is meaninless. A 20 ingredient recipe could be a doodle (chuck it all in the pot) and a 5 ingredient you be incredibly difficult to prepare.

There is loads of things you could do to improve the site but all advice is restricted to the full members private area...

 

[open sesame]

I haven't seen your site but I would of had a social aspect to it.

So a visitor can create an account, attach recipes and images of what the turn out should be like, attach there own recipes where other members can try them out add comments and maybe even a 'hotukdeals' type system where users can thumbs up or down which increases the exposure of the recipe.

 

[altwebdesign]

Tim,
Dropped you a PM

 

[RickieSee]

CONTENT. It's all about content, aesthetic quality and the resulting conversion rate. FFS, I give up.