My webpage mistakes

Well as I have said on some of the other threads I am working on redoing my website. I like my site, but it is bland and not good enough to hold users. So I decided to start out behind the scenes. So I figure that the best place to start is keywords. Well when I first made the site I picked way too many keywords. I think I had a good 20 at least.

So I figure I would start reading just about anything I could get my hands on that says SEO. Man, talk about an eye opener. I run a pet related website. Currently my site is mostly forums and care sheets. Well when I started I was pretty stupid. I made a site without many things on the home page to keep visitors interested. I placed a description and some key words on it and waited. Well in the beginning I was getting a little traffic but nothing big. I was making about $2 - $3 in adsense each day. I was happy and just sat back and planed on watching the site grow.

Well that did not happen. I have 363 members in my forums but I think about 300 of that is spammers that I deleted their posts and was too stupid to delete their accounts. My care sheet section is pretty good. Not designed the best but does generate some traffic. But at this rate my website is not going to go anywhere.

What was my biggest mistake? Well that is hard to say, because their were so many mistakes. But I would say the top one is my keywords and some of the wording of my site. I put in the basic keywords on my site. The first 3 are "dog, cat, pet care" dumb, dumb, dumb. I have barely started reading about the SEO and I already have learned so much.

The biggest thing that sticks out to me is my keyword choice. I know many of you already knew this but I want to say it anyways. If I go to Google and type in "pet" I get 338,000,000 hits. However if I put in "exotic pet" I get 2,100,000 hits.

So I have been trying to do a huge makeover of my site. I decided to start by making a a new menu for the site and then kind of build around that. Well that has not been going too well. I saw an area in this forum for SEO and decided to read a little about SEO and it has been amazing.

I know it may sound stupid that I had not thought of this before. Heck page 6 of 28 in the e-book I am looking at now and have learned like 8X the info I knew before about SEO. I am starting to feel confident about my site again. I still have a lot to learn but feel that I am well on my way.


Well there is my ramblings for the day. If anyone has any comments on this then please feel free to reply.

Adam Burgi
www.journeyoftheanimals.com

 

What forum software are you using?

 

Would like to use vBulletin but am using mybb. If I can start to get some money coming from adsense I will switch to vBulletin I think

 

Ya, that's best forum software to switch to.
Have you thought about creating a blog for your site?

 

Start with the homepage and some long tail keywords and build out

 

A blog for myself? Like about pets or what?

 

A blog about that kind of thing would probably be the best thing to do. Or even just a blog to go along with the main webstie (assuming the main website is static).

 

I have considered a blog before. But it will have to wait until after the site overhaul because I am too busy with reading and programing. Can anyone tell me of a good blog program? I was thinking about setting up blogging to go along with my forums so people can blog.

 

Blog sounds good. why not try to find a few people with animals who daily or weekly wanna write about it. Get a vet (or fet) to write an article etc.

good luck with it.

 

wordpress is a good blog program, I use it, it's simple and can do quite a lot.