Hi, I own a website called DM Fragrances (www.dmfragrances.co.uk) and although I have top positions in yahoo.co.uk and msn.co.uk for my most important keywords and PR4 I'm just not getting any Google-love (specifically google.co.uk). The domain itself is almost 4 years old and the site has been live for 2 years although it did get a major overhaul in the middle of last year. At best I've managed to get to page 4 on Google for 'perfume' (a VERY competitive keyword I know) and while I don't expect to break the top 10 any time soon, what I've found is that the homepage will sit on page 4 for a week or two and then disappear completely (not just to page 10) for several weeks and then appear back on page 4 again. During this time, the page still exists in the index even though it doesn't appear in search results. Has anybody else experienced this, and more importantly does anyone know what causes this and what I can do to prevent it? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks, MartinG
Hi MartinG, When trying to promote a website in a very competitive area such as yours, I've always focused on multiple keyword phrases that may be slightly less popular, but will be easier to rank for. The keyword "Perfume" is a tough one - page four isn't too bad! How do you rank for all the other keyword phrases you can target? I'd rather be on the first page for "Buy Armani Perfume online" than nowhere for "Perfume". I'd work on all the brand names and variations - there are literally hundreds of possibilites for you to target, one per page. Your site looks very nice, if you can get the traffic you shouldn't have any problem converting visitors to buyers. If it were my site, I'd probably make some minor changes to some of your page titles. My personal preference is to use a phrase that is likely to be typed in a search engine. Your home page title is: Perfume, Fragrances, Perfume Shop, Perfumes Which is keyword stuffing, and I bet no one ever types that exact phrase in Google or any other SE. I'd rather use something along the lines of: Buy Perfume Online UK (adding UK should help your site rank better with this regional reference - after all, you aren't competing with those in other areqas of the world) Of course this is just my own take - ten others will probably have ten different suggestions! One other thing - do you provide a data feed to froogle? If not, go to froogle.com and check out how to add your products. It's free and I've found it helps.
I did some research about your website and I noticed that your on page SEO could greatly improve. Your meta description is too long. It should only be 150 characters. You have too many H1 heading tags. There should only be one per page. Some of your images don't have alt tags. All images should have alt tags. (I could have figured this out by looking, but instead I used websitegrader.com) Check it out. It helps a lot. Hopefully it helps you improve your rankings
Your title for home page is more a listing of keywords then an actual page title. Your home page as more then 150 links. Google webmaster guidelines recommend at most a 100 links per page. Those are the alt description found for your images: alt tags for images bring good SERP but also targetted traffic from google images
lol interesting, I have the total opposite problem. Yahoo and MSN hate me... Still working on that. I do agree with proinet, trying to rank with more unique search terms is the way to go. For my villa site, i tried ranking for "Cyprus Holiday Villas" and still am, its just taking time to slowly climb the google tree. But have had more success in ranking for "Villas in Ayia Napa" or "Villas in Protaras" etc etc Also ttomp13 - nice site that websitegrader.com i've been looking for something like that for a while, so cheers!!