I built a website for my wife's new organic soap business over 6 months ago, and I spent a lot of time on the small bits of SEO that I know about (Not much to be honest, page titles, meta tags etc), thought I had got it looking pretty good,.. but a few months on I'm still getting very little traffic and almost zero sales from the site, so I figure its time to ask for help! The site is here: www.meadowsorganic.com Its template based because I'm not a pro web designer by any means & couldn't come up with as good a design on my own. I also know some of the code doesn't validate,... but it is beyond my skills to fix. Is it worth paying someone to re-code for me?
For a site like this, it would help with a few article submissions.. I'm sure there are tons of topics that you can come up with. Besides having a blog might help in pushing your site up the ranks. In terms of design it looks fairly decent, however you might want to add another block somewhere on the homepage for users to go directly to the offers page.
I have checked your webstie and found that your website need some content. For this you need to add some content into your webiste for this you can create a internal blog or article section. then starting link building on daily basis it will work
Re-coding is not SEO Valid w3c is just a MYTH You should pay somebody for SEO but real SEO aren't cheap ...
I have just spent a bit of time looking over your web site and looking at the SEO side of things. There are a few problems and there are a number of things you can do for yourself. You don't need to hire a specialist if your willing to; and have time to, put the work in yourself and listen to the right people on forums such as this. Unfortunately you will always get one liners from people in this forum who are trying to build post count. The vast majority you can just ignore. Ok, lets have a look at some of the things you can fix for yourself: 1. The structure of your web site is poorly designed for search engines. One of the basic optimizations you can perform is to have the target keyword in the URL structure. It helps Google to determine relevance of the page and will also be highlighted in the search engine results. So lets look at a couple of examples: In your footer you have a link to: Gift Baskets Which leads to: meadowsorganic.com/index-1.html This would be far better as: meadowsorganic.com/gift-baskets.html On that page you have a link to: Unscented Castile Soap Leads to: meadowsorganic.com/product7.html This would be far better as: meadowsorganic.com/unscented-castile-soap.html That is just two examples, but the same principle can be applied to every single page of your web site. 2. On virtually all of your pages you have a number of meta-tags which can be removed completely. They are either not supported or completely pointless. expires rating language author copyright revisit robots googlebot Take all of them out from every single page. In addition, while you are doing the product pages write some proper meta descriptions and keywords for those tags. Using the Unscented Castile Soap as an example... Meta Description: Unscented Castile soap Meta Keywords: Unscented castile soap. These would be much better as: Meta Description: Unscented Castile Soap made the traditional way using only extra virgin organic olive oil. Meta Keywords: unscented castile soap, castile soap If you are unsure what keywords to use, take your primary keyword and head over to the Google Keyword Tool, paste it into the tool and run a search to see what other relevant terms come up. The general rule though is to make sure that whatever keywords you target, ensure there is relevant content on the page itself. 3. Sticking with your product pages, you have used the title (just beneath the photo) to create a backlink to the same page the user is viewing. This is completely pointless from a user perspective and the chances are that it is having a negative impact on your SEO. Remove the link and wrap the title in <h1> tags. This emphasizes the importance of the word to both the user and Google. Tip 1: To aid in user navigation and indexation of your pages you should add a breadcrumb to the page. Linking back to the homepage and the upper level category, in this case that would be 'Bath'. Tip 2: Another good thing to do on product pages is link out to related products. This will not only help sales, but also help internal linkage of your web site. So on this page you could link to other unscented products. 4. Fill out your alt tags on your product images. You have currently left them blank but this is another great way to get the keyword onto the page. Sticking with the same product page, adding "Unscented Castile Soap" as the alt tag will be better than leaving it blank. 5. You do not have a robots.txt file. Typically these are used to tell search engines what you don't want them to index, but it is good practice to have one because most spiders will look for it before they do anything else. Below is a basic version you can use which tells spiders that they don't need to ignore anything and to use a crawl delay to prevent them overloading your server (a lot of them ignore that setting anyway, including Google): User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Sitemap: http://www.meadowsorganic.com/sitemap.xml Code (markup): Just copy and paste into a blank file and save it as "robots.txt", then upload it to the root of your web site. 6. You will notice that in point 5 the file makes reference to a sitemap. Again this is something which you do not have set up. Head on over to XML Sitemaps and use the freebie tool to generate a free XML sitemap and upload it to the root of your web site. Note: You will need to do this again after you have corrected your structure as per point 1. -------------- Right, there you go, 6 actionable items which you can complete for yourself and which will improve your SEO efforts. There is not much point talking too much about link building because your site isn't really ready for it. But, overall you have very few links pointing to your web site and this is the area you need to focus on once you have fixed some of the items above. If you ask around here, your likely to get the same mundane link building tips... directory submission, article submission, blog commenting, social bookmarking... those are the typical regurgitated junk ideas. Yeah sure you can try them, but my preference is to think a little outside the box. One idea which could work well for your site is to contact bloggers who are interested in the types of product you sell. Offer to send them a freebie bar of soap or something in exchange for a write-up. Yes it will cost a little in terms of product and shipping, but these kind of links will last far longer, carry more weight in the search engines and if you find the right bloggers can generate a lot of direct traffic to boot. Ok, there you have it, all free and I didn't try to sell you anything Enjoy.
As I noticed Content is missing a lot and I suggest to add more content with keyword(appropriate keyword density). Title tag is missing for both image and also in anchor links. Robots.txt and sitemap is missing. Internal navigation is preferred. I have checked all your links.The page name you had given is like index1,index2 ans so on.Just change it like gift-baskets.html, soap-bars.html and so on.
Awww Nuts!! Have to be a member 7 days too before I can post a link! Quick (revised & linkless) question about the new .xml sitemap,... The generated sitemap is live on the site, but there are some orphaned pages (discontinued products etc) that are not listed. I intend to re-use these orphaned pages in the near future, so should I manually add them to the sitemap now, or wait until the new content is ready to go & generate a new one using that website? I also wasn't too sure what settings to use on the sitemap generator, so left at the default setting except for "monthly" change frequency,.. is that ok?
Be careful about bumping your post count like that, you are likely to be banned and they are pretty hot on it around here. Instead of posting a link you can just do it in plain text without the www. which people can copy and paste, e.g domain.com/sitemap.xml For the orphaned pages, just redo the sitemap once they are ready to be used again. Getting them indexed now will slow things down for when you want Google to reindex the new versions. As for the settings, the defaults are fine. You only really need to customize on specialized web sites which have very frequent updates in different sections, etc.