http://www.hawaiiweddingspace.com Okay, Ive been doing everything that i know is possible to SEO my site. The new site is about 4 months old, but the Domain is 3 years old, although i had it offline for a one year period (stupid right). This new site, im targeting the keywords: Hawaii Weddings, Hawaii Wedding. I have other Hawaii sites that i have created that aren't specifically targeting these terms and are actually ranked above this one that i am targeting. FRUSTRATING. The site is growing. It obtained PR3 last update. Ive got CSS controlling H1 tags & H2 tags and using that on the homepage. Does anyone know how to better optimize these types of sites... I have a pretty good amount of backlinks so this isn't the issue.. Site broke into top 100 for Hawaii weddings as far as number 68 but for who knows what reason is now at 177. I have another SEO person helping me and is also having trouble pinpointing issues. Yahoo has site at #8 but Google hating it right now any ideas? forgot to mention: site is running on Dzoic Handshakes, which is made in PHP/Smarty
I had some previous experience with Dzoic Handshakes... All I can say is that I would never ever accept to do anything with this script. Editing it as a developer is a real nightmare. There is no developer documentation. Just developer forums, with very limited support. So even if you get a SEO specialist, I doubt he will be able to help much with this ugly script.
Site is 3 years old. Had the domain offline for a year. But the "new" site has been online for about 4 1/2 months. New site is same theme as old site. Just a new platform (DZOIC Handshakes)
I see the domain name is 2 years and 9 months old, it was create on March 2005. So age shouldn't be a factor, and your backlinks are decently plentiful. I wonder, do you backlinks use the anchor text that your trying to rank for in the search engines? Your keyword\phrases your trying to rank for should be the actual anchor text.
Yeah most of my links anchor text have my keywords. I usually anchor: Hawaii Wedding Space: Perfect Hawaii Weddings That one captures: Hawaii wedding, and Hawaii weddings ??? But lately Ive been doing like my anchor, just to target one.. and do : Hawaii Weddings ONLY. Someone said something about Mod-rewrite helping my cause, but it seems to cause havok to my site.. So that might not be an option.
SE friendly URLs would only help your cause, not harm it. You are right, you want to use Hawaii Weddings ONLY when doing your anchor text, I think in due time your site will provail. Keep building backlinks, this is what will get you higher in SERPs, I'm going on the line to say if you get 500 more "quality related backlinks" you should easily breach the 1st page, make sure to use only hawaii weddings as the anchor text.
Well, something always can be done... I'm just saying that I found it very "unfriendly" to work with Handshakes. Actually, it is unpleasant to work with any product that doesn't have documentation or at least comments in code. In any case, best of luck to you
Well okay thanks.. Im looking for solutions or suggestions.. I know the code is cumbersome.. but i really like how it functions.
Oh, and 1 more thing about it... It consumes A LOT of resources, at least the version that I had (about 10 months ago). On a dedicated server, a pretty good one, it was dropping like a rock with about 70-80 online users. So if your traffic increases - watch the performance of your server.
You know what, they have done some major upgrades in the past couple months.. We have another site that has about 200 members www.truehalo.com and it doesn't consume that much resources.. Im just trying everything i know to SEO this sucker and im pulling out my hair at this point.. I have tons of links already, at least 1/2 being wedding related... and i have competing sites with less content and links well ahead of it... and moreover i have other sites not targeting these exact terms and also ahead of it.
which part me pulling out my hair... LOL. it's not great right now.. it's pretty confusing but ill just keep plugging along.