Hello all. I am in need of some advice regarding a keyphrase that I cannot seem to get anywhere with in google. The key phrase is cross stitch. Now I have limited capabilities as far as seo is concerned with my site. The page title tags are all the same and I can't change that. I have done a lot with what I can do and still nothing for this very important key phrase. Am I missing something? Can someone spot where I have gone wrong or what I can do that I have not? I do know that I have been using the wrong linking methods. Just a plain site description with no anchor text. I have changed that and all future links with other sites will contain some anchor text for this key phrase. I do continue to search for sites to link to daily as I know this is very important. Anything else I can do? Thank you in advance. This has been a tough one. Here is the site in question http://www.thecraftnook.com/
I've got the site www.cross-stitch-pattern.com and, though I havene't really optimised it yet, I suspect we can help each other... give me a while and I'll have a look around your site and see what we can do
Hehe.. more Ontarian Canadians.. welcome (I'm UK.. but love your part of the world) I wonder what the Canadian vs Rest of the world ratio is here>
I wonder what the Welsh v Rest of the world is here. It amazes me that considering 6 of the first 8 presidents of the United States wer first to third generation Welshmen, why so many Americans have no idea where, or indeed what Wales is
Thank you Adam. I look forward to hearing back from you. P.S. Are there a lot of Canadians on this forum?
I was adopted and recently re-united with both original parents who are welsh by birth, and my original mother now lives in Ontario... so I can put feet in both camps
And now Wales is missed off the map by the EU http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3715512.stm which, when you consider that Wales is an international unit of measurement ("an area of rainforest the size of Wales") is something of an oversight
Why are you limited in seo with respect to your site? The reason I ask is that all your navigation is done by query strings. While not a total problem for Google, it does appear that Google is not a major fan of query strings, and it prevents you using search terms as part of each pages URL (I have known sites that work in this way, presumably database driven, being very succesful... www.haworth-village.org.uk for example, but I know the designer exploits the database so that he gets 1000's of pages by combining and recombing his entries in different but consistent ways) You are also very graphic heavy... I know www.cross-stich-pattern.com uses graphic buttons as links, but that is not ideal... you deny yourself the opportunity to use anchor text in internal links. The site is incredibly slow to load and actually put a significant drain on my PC's resources... I don't know, but I suspect Google wouldn't like that. We are also in an incredibly competitive field. Overture shows that over 64000 searched for cross stitch last month on their search engine alone... I get most hits on my other pages for things like "nursery rhyme cross stitch".
As far as being limited in seo, it is because I only have access to one html file. Most of the site is pulled from the database which I don't have access to. I also don't have access to the htaccess file. Not sure if that matters but I had wanted to do a mod re-write which I cannot do. Even if I had access to the database, I am not sure what if anything could be modified. And I wouldn't even know where to start. The left navigational buttons must be used because I cannot change the template (don't know how) and if I use text links only, they are black and they don't show on the burgundy background. I also cannot make the text links bold or put them into any sort of categories so it would just be a long list of links with no definition. I did add text links at the bottom of every page to get around this and this allows me to use internal anchor text linking. When you say the site is slow to load, is the main page slow to load? The second page? I know that some category pages are still slow to load and I am re-sizing the picture files everyday. The images were originally not resized so I am working on re-sizing about 3000 images. If the two main pages are still slow, I will have to do some more work on them. Thanks so much for your input Adam.
It was a category page... though the two main pages did not whizz. Why do you have two pages to go through before you get to the categories? And why are you so limited? Not being critical, just need more information before I can offer something useful.
I have two pages because my webhost says she can't actually get rid of the first page the only thing she can do is a re-direct to the next page. What this means is that when you type in www.thecraftnook.com, instead of going right to that page, it goes to http://www.thecraftnook.com/store/Default.asp which isn't good. I wish I could explain the rest more clearly. This is the only database driven store I have ever had so I don't know what people can usually do with these. I think the main problem is that it is actually a shop - the program is called feature cart. All I do is hit enter product, choose the category or sub-category and then enter the product information. I have one html page. The meta tags go on this html page. This html page is called upon for every page this comes up so the tags are the same. So, I don't actually create pages and upload them. As far as the htaccess file is concerned, my webhost said that even she doesn't have access to that. If I have confused the issue more, please let me know lol. Should I give up thousands of hours of work and start a new site using static pages which I create myself? (I have been considering this as I am not sure I have any other viable options).
I've not had much of a look round, because the time it takes to get some pages up is prohibitive (and I do have a broadband connection)... My inclination is to suggest you need to plan this whole venture from scratch again, new design, new host, the lot That said, I'm nowhere up to the standard of some of the guys here, so maybe some useful stuff will come from another direction Still, if you want to swap some links, let's do it
See if you can find some craft blogs to write guest posts for. Then use your anchor text in the links within the content of the post (if it's allowed.)