Hi there, I've been doing SEO on my site (www.traditionalirishgifts.com) for a couple of months now and I'm still not seeing any decent results. I spent February reading through forums and a bunch of books and ebooks before I started to give myself a fair chance of knowing what I was doing. I also contacted a few SEO companies and asked them what they could do for me and incorporated their suggestions into my action plan. Here's a timeline of what I've done so far: 1st two weeks of March I submitted to about 400 directories (using submit helper as the source for directories as well as seeing who my competitors were getting links from). They were all free directories and I know they take a while to get into but a fair number have listed me so far. From about half way through March I started doing onsite SEO. I did some keyword research (mostly from knowing what worked on Adwords and using their keyword suggestion tool) and optimized my title tags, meta descriptions and actual page content on all my landing pages (which are my category pages). To solve canonical problem I redirected traditionalirishgifts.com --> www.traditionalirishgifts.com via .htaccess. I validated my html and css to W3C standards and put their logo on my site. Finally, I bought a mod for my site - its a zencart - which optimized my URLs and also creates a dynamic sitemap which was submitted to Google/Yahoo. This mod also removes duplicate content that zencart seems to have. I did all this when I got the chance so that probably takes us up to about the 1st week of April. I then waited a while to let Google etc catch up. About half way through April I noticed that my rank for the term "Irish gifts", the main one I am targeting, actually dropped from around the mid 50s to around rank 100. Not so great - but shows you the base level I was starting at which makes it worse! At the time the drop occurred my sitemap was a bit messed up and I was getting a lot of errors could this have been the reason? The sitemap issue has been resolved now and the number of errors has been dropping. On the 18th of April I decided to give a few paid directories a go and acting on advise in the book "Get to the top on Google" by David Viney I paid to be included in elib.org, joeant.com, abilogic.com, 2yi.net and linksgiving.com at a cost of £100 for the lot. The links went live on the 21st. I also posted a bit on a few forums. Boards.ie - which is pretty active - and a Rangers FC forum which is extremely active and even brought a few hundred direct visitors in 1 day (nothing after that tho) I've been monitoring my traffic throughout and haven't really seen any decent upturn in traffic. Should I be getting worried? Is there something I've missed out? Do I just need to sit tight? Surely after a couple of months I should be seeing some sort of increase in traffic? Thanks David ps sorry for the long post!
A couple of months ? You did your last fix at the beggining of april and you corrected your sitemap the 18th of April. Patience my friend. Now, get more backlinks. Write articles and publish them. Submit to more directories, free one. Irish Gifts only outputs 700k results, should be fair easy.
The thing is tho that Google and Yahoo bots are almost constantly on my site. Surely with the things that I did throughout March at the very least I should be moving in an upward direction rather than dropping like a stone through the rankings for the term "Irish gifts"
I don't blog coz I don't have a lot of time. I don't write articles because my site is e commerce and surely people would just see this as shameless advertising? Same for blogs when I think about it. I'd soon run out of nice things to say about Guinness merchandise and Irish giftys I had thought about social bookmarking (I assume you mean getting a facebook profile or whatever and sticking a link in my profile) but I had heard these are of very limited value? Cheers
The point of article, is not really about gaining visitors directly, but rather gaining backlinks, to increase your serp. In the articles, some articles directories will allow backlink in the content while others will only allowed backlinks in your signature. If you have a backlink in your text or signature with the anchor text being "Irish Gifts" it would give you a boost SEO wise. And if someone actually reads your article and click your links, it's a bonus and a pretty good targeted visitor for your market. Same for blog ppost on blog network. You gain backlinks.
bro u can blog just about anything and heck writing articles is a must if u have time..it's slow i'm sure but the benefits is on the long run..trust me, for some of competitive niche i've seen, they had articles written with anchoring text back to them...and it's do follow too, some articles directory gain PR in short time...that's why u need all those ... and sometime u need visitors as well...it's kinda weird for google to rank sites whereas no visitors are actually coming at first...i know this is absurd but believe me, u need visitors...
Cheers for all the advice people. I'll give the article writing and blogging a bit more of a look in then. Just so you know though. The site has been up and running since Oct 07 and currently gets btw 150-200 visitors per day. But I still don't rank well organically. To put my mind at ease do you guys think that after reading what I have done, and bearing in mind that the majority was done over a month ago, that I should be falling inthe SERPs? Is it normal to go backward before going forwards? I don't mind waiting if thats what I need to do, but in a few more months time I don't want to be in the same position and having wasted time to boot. I'm I doing the right things?
Actually, I'd take a moment to sit back and relax. Due to all the changes you made, it's only natural for Google to adjust your rankings (often lower) temporarily while it recrawls your pages and determines the relevance of the content in them. What you did is basically the SEO equivilent of giving your web site a home makeover - you replaced the carpeting, put up a new coat of paint (new color too), rearranged all the furniture, and so on. Your rankings will likely return to normal, and if your site was developed properly, might even increase significantly. I do have a question though - did you retain your URL structure, or did you change that too? If you changed the structure, you need to 301 redirect the old links to the new ones ASAP. I wouldn't worry too much about what the others said just yet.
Cheers Dan. The URLs all have 301 redirects so thats ok. The zencart mod I bot to optimize the URLs took care of that. I think I'm going to do as you say and sit back and not worry too much about it for a while. I'll prob just spend an hour or so a day posting in forums and trying to build a few backlinks that way in the mean time.