Hi all, It would be greatly appreciated if I could get some serious help on my website. The site is http://www.adigitaldreamer.com It's a career site for graphic designers, but also is expanding into other areas such as video game design, photography, animation.... The main index page does quite well in google yahoo, msn for terms like graphic designer, graphic design career, and so on. It's the sub pages that are killing me right now in Google. Almost no sub pages come up for key words that I am targeting. Just my index.html comes up. The pages I am most troubled with are: http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/schools/graphicdesign/ http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/schools/videogameschools/ http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/schools/animation/ Other sub pages as well just don't rank, and these have all been up for months. I'm obviously doing something wrong here, so please don't hold back. What am I doing wrong so that my sub pages don't do well at all? Any feedback at all that can help me steer this ship back would be GREATLY appreciated. Please don't hold anything back. I'm thick skinned, and need to hear whatever I need to hear. Thanks for your time. Brian
To give you some tips to make it look better: -Align the Text not so far from the top, like you did here: http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/schools/videogameschools/ - Round of the left corner to, and center the whole site. - Bring the Silver content box closer to the header / menu Good luck, just some tips, that I think make it looks better, but follow your own instinct. Eiso
Hey, thanks for the advice. I like those ideas, and will look into them further. Does anyone have any SEO advice for my sub pages? Or a reason why my sub pages stink ranking wise? Brian
Try adding much more text - the template of the site is alot of code - the content in the subpages is a fraction of the whole code - pages maybe regarded as similar. If you can get it to 60% different.
play some more with your site. it's text-heavy, and right empty. it is neat-looking but has a tendency to be boring. try to have a better proportion of texts and graphics.
Hey thanks for being honest with me.That's what I need to hear. To be honest,I think it's kinda blah too. I'm trying to find a balance between SEO friendliness and looking nice. Brian
"Its text heavy and right empty." "Has a tendency to be boring" I don't follow this logic. As I understand it, Google indexes text and I am almost certain the Google spider never gets bored. It looks to me like the pages are very light on text. Certainly you want to keep visitors interested but it seems to me a lot more text would give the search engines more material to work with.
Brian, There's always so many levels one can offer up critique of a page or web site from, and you didn't mention what your intentions are. Should the site only turn traffic into money-making clicks or offer up some useful content, or something in between? Good for you that the home page is ranking. It has no content, so I guess the mass of links are helping you there. I glanced at a couple of the pages you were unhappy with briefly, and there was little on those in the way of content, particularly unique content. Starting with the home page, though I'm not engaged in the video/animation field in any way, I found it way too confusing. My attention couldn't latch onto any one thing. Maybe it would be different for your target audience. But I'd rather land there and get a sense (from good copy, an intro to the site) what I can hope to find there, then be guided off into one of a small number of sub areas. I'm into animation, so I'll follow that path, for example. From there you can widen the options more, but on that child page you should also have good content focused on your topic and key terms you want to rank for. each child page down to 3 or 4 levels should focus more specifically, and do your SEO around that. On each page, find a way to make your content unique. Change the phrase "graphic design" in that paragraph to: stock trading, the restaurant industry, truck driving, trash collection, being an SEO guru... and still you've said nothing unique. hell, take "graphic design" out and the paragraph is mostly the same and applicable to nothing in particular. Get involved with your content. Tell a story. Write something however inane that will suck some people in and make them want to read the next paragraph. my $0.02
Looks pretty clean to me! But I agree with the right empty thing.. seems like a site best centered on the page, and the blue box on the bottom has quite a harsh contrast on my LCD's, may not be as bad on a CRT. Not bad!
Hey, thanks for the advice. I find it harder for some of these pages to have more content because I just want to get to the point. The main purpose of the site is to get leads for schools. So I don't want to really yap too much on some of these pages. The story is totally different for articles and so on. But for school search entry pages, I want people to get searching quickly and not get distracted. Perhaps for the schools pages, I can keep the school search closer to the top, and yet have more discussion about schools below it. Thanks for this advice. I will start adding more real content to the pages. Perhaps the way I explained. Brian
Thanks for the detailed response. As for my site aims, I want to make money with the site, but not at the expense of good content. Perhaps I've swayed too much away from good content of late. I think that is more and more obvious. I think what happened is my sub pages used to work and rank well. Animation ranked well for the sub pages dealing with animation, and video games ranked well on the sub pages.... And so on. But then with a few google updates, they dropped off the face of the earth. The only thing ranking well after those updates was the main index page. So basically, I freaked out and wanted to rank well with more than just graphic design. So I put the keywords I wanted to rank well with all on the main page. I think this is where I am making the first page confusing, not really giving a strong direction to the site. Graphic design used to be my big fish for the site, but now video game design has grown huge. So how do I make sure video game design for example ranks well if it's not well represented on the main page? Perhaps I can have some of my articles has "featured articles" on the main page, describing a bit more about what they feature. This would add more content and keywords, could keep the page fresh, and I could move video game design where animation and photography is. Any thoughts? Thanks for your honesty Brian
"The main purpose of the site is to get leads for schools." I am reminded of a saying from the real estate industry. "The purpose of the ads is to make the phone ring." Notice, the purpose of the ads is NOT to sell the house. So I would say the purpose of your site is to educate, inform and entertain visitors who might also be looking for a school. The leads follow from that.
Hey thanks. That color looks harsh? You're probably not the only one seeing it like that, so I'll tone it down. Thanks! Brian
That's a good point. I think that I've fallen away from that,at least a bit. The site started out as a passion for graphic design. I then started writing articles, and people appreciated them. It wasn't perfect, but I did a good enough job. Then I was introduced to school commissions, and some of that got lost in the translation. But when it comes down to it, 'good' content is what makes things fly in SEO anyways. Thanks for reminding me of that. Brian
I agree with Mhdoc, Text heavy - uhm, no! You want content, textual content, the more the better. Perhaps Voltaire means it should be re-written to make it more punchy, in which case he should say so. Try this with one of your troubled urls. Instead of graphicdesign, when what I think you are aiming for is graphic design schools, graphic-design-schools. Don´t go over two hyphens though.
Thanks for the reply e10. When you say for the url to be graphic-design-schools/, do you mean it should read: http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/schools/graphic-design-schools/ Also for 'content', I thought I'd try something more. Should I be trying more stuff like this perhaps? http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/indexcontent.htm Instead of my normal: http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/index.html In other words, having a lot more supporting text and supporting words? Thanks for your help! Brian
Hey, I did what you said, used the Google Sitemap to spider it quickly, and my rankings are starting to come up. I used the graphic-design-schools.htm move. I also moved some of my pages on the top level. Just the main ones. And yes, I did the 301 redirect or whatever it's called. Thanks! Brian