Hi guys, I have a site www.greatfoodplaces.com low hit count and SEO below average. Can anyone review it and maybe give me some advice on pushing this up the rankings. Maybe some of you guru's could assist on the project. not much of a budget available but a little cash is available. Thanks M
Some basic things you could consider: 1. Be careful of any duplicate content on your site. SERPs tend to not like pages with large amounts of duplicate content. A quick glance at some of your pages shows that a lot of the same content appears on other websites. 2. Try and use some proper header tags (H1, H2 etc.) to highlight keywords in your site rather than simply changing font sizes. These tend to tell search engines that the key terms you’re targeting are important for visitors. Another quick glance at your code doesn’t show the use of any header tags. 3. You may also want to double-check some of your links. For example, on the home page for “greatfoodplaces.com†your URL simply reads “greatfoodplaces.OM†.Proper linking within your site can help you a lot with directing search results at particular pages. 4. Make sure when you click on links on your site that you can see relevant content. A search via the dropdown menu for “England†will give a list of places in England, however browsing through the side links by clicking on “Entertainment Guide†then “England†provides no results. As search engines will use the links rather than drop-down menus making sure your link structure works properly will help you a lot. 5. Try developing some incoming links as well. A quick search for “link:greatfoodplaces.com†in Google or Yahoo will tell you what incoming links you have. As it is, you should try to develop some of these to increase your ranking in searches.
Abbadon, Thanks a mil for the reply. It seems as though i might be getting penalised as the text comes from venues that advertise on my site. is there any way round this? Can i add H1 and H2 tags without messing up the code on my site? How much work/time/cash do you think i need to invest in getting the site heading up the search engine rankings? Again thanks a mil for your assistance.
One thing you could try doing is asking your advertisers to provide one or two unique write-ups for their venues on your site. Generally advertisers are happy to do this, especially if they're paying you for advertising space. This could help increase both your traffic as well as their traffic to their venues in turn. You could also simply include header tags in your CSS script. This would allow you to easily integrate them into your site without re-doing all of your code from scratch. CSS is really versatile and helpful for things such as this. As for what you need to invest, your biggest investment (especially on a low budget) is time. Spend some time each day promoting your site to similar websites out there and getting listed on other websites in a similar niche. With time you can increase your ranking simply by focusing on getting incoming links from high ranked sites that reference you and really promoting yourself on the web. Directories can be helpful for this, but make sure that they don't add "nofollow" to their links and are fairly well ranked themselves as well as relevant to your site.
Design wise, it looks more like web 1.0. than web 2.0 and the empty spaces on the side bar makes the overall site layout just average looking. The color motif or theme can be improved too since it is a food related site.
Abbadaon, Thanks for the info. The issue we have is that we provide venues with a log in to allow them to update their info in real time. This keeps down our overheads and gives them the unique facility to update their directory listing in real time. I am actively contacting all venues encouraging them to use unique write ups. As i have no dev experience i am looking to take your suggestion on board and getting H1 and H2 headers and also new script that allows me to change the headers etc. I am also going to change the search functionality to allow a free text search. I am also looking to get some sort of link exchange set up on the site. Any ideas on what is the best free software to use for this?
Satko, Thanks for the comments. Dont quite agree with the colour pallette not being right foor a food site though. Side bars are there due to the site being made for both mobile and desktops. but thanks for the feedback
Bear in mind that for search engines links are what directs them to internal pages, not search bars. While an open text search bar may be good for users, search engines crawl the links you provide. As long as you keep them out of un-crawlable formats (flash, pictures without alt tags, etc.) and all links function as you'd like them to you should be ok. Try to keep things from being too deep in your site as well. With a site your size nothing should really be more than 2 clicks from the home page, that will help guarantee search engine listings. As for a CMS system to manage content, that really depends on what you feel comfortable using. For most text management these days a lot of people have gone over to wordpress as it's quite flexible for users and has a lot of SEO optimization in place both right out of the box as well as in the form of plugins, however it's not entirely suitable for your site. You might want to ask a developer to make one for you if you don't like your own, though from the way you described it you shouldn't have much of a problem so long as your users follow your suggestions, otherwise you may have to do some editing or personal reviews. For link building, try checking out some of the directory postings here on the forums. New directories tend to allow sites to submit to them early on to help build their user base. That may be helpful to you, especially if you can find one that suits your niche. You could also try contacting some local sites or businesses from different areas you're focusing on and trying to get links to your site from them. Sites that hold a lot of weight such as .gov, .edu, newspapers or other long-standing business sites can be very helpful in pushing visitors in your direction if you could manage to get some links from them coming in. Just bear in mind that a lot of outgoing links to unrelated sites can sometimes hurt your site as well as some search engines might view you as a link farm rather than a valuable site that can contribute to their user experience.
All of the above and take the spaces out of you keyword list by the comma's EXAMPLE food,night club,dining,ect Also better description. Good luck off to a good start.