Hey all, I am really trying to get some traffic to this site and start ranking it much better than it is but the niche is a pretty tough one to crack. Diabetes Info It is a diabetes related website and I actually have diabetes myself so I am passionate about getting this runng so if anyone could give some ideas or suggestions it would be much appreciated. So far I have simply submited the website to a few directories.
Build tons of relevant links, do social bookmarking and syndicate your content. I hope it'll work pretty good for the niche!
Nice site BTW. I like to see peeps creating sites like your that is something they live and breath every day. There is a lot you can still do as far as on-page SEO. These are merely suggestions to get you thinking a bit like an SEO. I'm not suggesting you implement all of them... Just food for thought! For example... Home Page On-Page SEO: <title> Element: This is the MOST important on-page factor in most search engine's ranking algorithms. This deserves the most thought when creating a new page. Having "home" in your <title> is diluting the keyword density of the keywords within your <title> that you might actually want to rank for. Only 50% of the words in your home page <title> element is really a keyword you're targeting - "diabetes". Do you want people searching for "Home" to find your site? Not going to happen even if you do. I would remove "home" and either go with <title>Diabetes</title> or more likely something like <title>Diabetes - Diabetes Information - Diabetes Resources</title> since those words appear in your logo and seem to be a good description of what your site is about. Logo: Your logo image has Talk Diabetes / Diabetes information and resources embedded in the image. You get no SEO benefit from the text inside the image. Crawlers cannot read text embedded in images. Change it so that the image only contains the background. Use CSS to overlay text Talk Diabetes / Diabetes Information and Resources over the background image so the spiders can see those words. You should bold "Talk Diabetes" AND "Diabetes Information and Resources" using <strong>. <h1> Element: This is the 2nd most important on-page ranking factor. You don't have an <h1> on your pages. Every page on your site should have an <h1> (and only one). I would suggest changing the "Welcome!" to an <h1> and changing it's value to something like <h1>Welcome to Talk Diabetes - Your Diabetes Information Resource</h1>. This reinforces your <title> by working every word from your <title> into the <h1> (well... except for "resources", but you have the singular version and it's less important because it's at the end of your <title>). You don't always get to do this. But I always try to work in at least the most important keyword phrase from the <title> (the 1st one in the <title>). <h2> Elements: This is the 3rd most important on-page ranking factor. You have none. You should typically have several of these on each page. For example your Articles section in the middle of the page might be a good place to use <h2> tags. I would consider making the title of each of the articles in the article section be an <h2> such as: <h2><a href="blah1">Obesity-Related Cardiovascular Damage Prevented By Decreasing Insulin Resistance</a></h2> <h2><a href="blah2">New Obesity Staging System May Help Doctors Measure Up</a></h2> <h2><a href="blah3">NHS Failing People With Diabetes, UK</a></h2> <h3> Elements: Typically these are used to subdivde an <h2> section. But they don't have to be nested within <h2> elements. You can actually place them anywhere on the page. I would consider changing the left navigation so that it included an <h3> for the header of each sub-menu in the left navigation. This will leave you an <h1>element, multiple <h2> elements, and as many other <h3> elements as you want to include on each page of the site. But the left nav sub headers should help reinforce the topic of any page on the site if they contain the keywords "diabetes", "diabetic", "diabetics". You might consider changing the current headings in the left navigation to something similar to the following: Header in Left Nav--------------->Changed to Navigation-----------------------------> Drop it... not needed (have word "Navigation" already right above it). Diabetes-------------------------------><h3>About Diabetes</h3> Medication-----------------------------><h3>Diabetic Medications</h3> Nutritian & Recipes--------------------><h3>Food for Diabetics</h3> General Health-------------------------><h3>Diabetes & Your Health</h3> Word Separators: It's probably not worth changing now unless you don't mind doing 301 redirects, but Google prefers hyphens over underscores as word separators. I would always use hyphens to separate words in your URLs going forward. Link Text: The hyperlinked text you use when linking to another page tells Google and other engines what the target page is about. If Page A links to Page B, then the hyperlink on page a should use a keyword phrase from the <title> of Page B or some slight variation of that same keyword phrase. Never should you always use the same link text to link to a particular page. Link to it MOST of the time using the most important keyword phrase or phrases from the target page's <title>, but also include links with variations of that phrase or phrases. Use different conjugations of verbs, singular instead of plural, etc. Link Building: For link building ideas, you have to get creative especially if you want one way links from relevant sites. Put on your marketing hat. Think of how you can benefit other sites and their visitors. Use this to get inbound links. Getting one way links from other sites requires talking to them in person or on the phone. You will have very little success getting a positive response from an email. Perhaps you can write articles for recipe sites about cooking for diabetes. You could embed a few links in the article (with their permission) back to your site. Or perhaps you can find recipe sites that would let you link back to your site from any diabetic recipes you submit. Perhaps you know doctors that you go to or support groups that you are a member of which have web sites. Perhaps they would be willing to link to you. Perhaps they could write articles for your site as well in which you allow them a link back to their site. IMO this is a totally legit way to reciprocal link... relevent sites, contextual links. Create a blog on a separate site. Use it as a journal of your experiences w/ diabetes... Link to your Talk Diabetes site when appropriate since they would be very relevant to one another, but different. Just don't over do it. You site can be more factual, objective. Your blog while still factual, could be more subjective... about how you feel about having diabetes, more a blog of your opinions and personal experiences with diabetes. Use your imagination Warning: I would either add a <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> element to http://www.talkdiabetes.net/links/p16_sectionid/3 OR add a rel="nofollow" attribute to each of the outbound links to external sites on that same page. You don't want to get penalized for linking to other sites that are not relevant to your site. It looks ESPECIALLY suspicious if those irrelevant sites you are linking to are also linking back to your site. Should you ever get reported to Google, this page in particular might NOT withstand a manual review. Exchanging links ONLY to increase rankings is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Again, the above is just to give you some ideas of how you might increase your rankings. The on-page stuff is the easiest because you have total control over that. You can apply the same techniques above on every page on your site. The link development is not always in your control, especially natural links. So I tend to take care of what is in my control first. Then work on link development.