SEO suggestions for a recently launched site?

bmeyer2 · May 2nd, 2008, 06:34 PM

Hello! I recently launched a site and it's definitely been a learning experience with the SEO. I'd sincerely appreciate any feedback! I'd like to focus on keywords like "Google Maps sightseeing", "Google Earth sightseeing", "interesting satellite images", etc. I have both HTML and XML sightmaps linked in the footer and the XML is (re)submitted to Google often. I'd like to think that I've done well in optimizing the title bars and meta tags, but the traffic from Google has been minimal in the month and a 1/2 it's been up.

The site is: SatelliteSights.com

AskLinkExpert · May 6th, 2008, 08:14 AM

Hi! Why dont you go in for a link buidling campaign. It will help you increase rankings and also bring targeted traffic to your website. Keep in consideration that dont pick up random links from non relevant sites. The BEST thing to bring targeted traffic to your site is to go in for links from Highly relevant article pages. These pages are similar to the theme of your website.

bmeyer2 · May 6th, 2008, 11:35 AM

By link building, do you mean attempting to exchange links with other site owners, or posting a link on comment forms within specific articles? Thanks for the response!

Does anyone see anything specific within the site that I could be doing better? (content, title, meta, etc)

spinal007 · May 6th, 2008, 05:06 PM

URLS: poor
these are good:
http://www.satellitesights.com/satel..._United_States

these are bad:
http://www.satellitesights.com/satel...p?category=134
could be: http://www.satellitesights.com/animals/
or even better: /animals+satellite+images/

http://www.satellitesights.com/satel...php?country=CN
could be: http://www.satellitesights.com/china/
or even better: /china+satellite+images/

HEADINGS: very poor
H1 isn't used at all. First heading is a H3 follow by H2.
Poor use of heading text - few keywords.

That's enough for you to get stuck in...

bmeyer2 · May 7th, 2008, 12:01 AM

Thank you for the in-depth response, spinal. I will be working on the page headings -- that's definitely something I over looked.

As for the satelliteimage_results.php having unfriendly URLs, the main reason I left them like that is due to the complexity of the URL parameters in use. Take the following for example:
http://www.satellitesights.com/satel...n=CA&popular=y

I could not figure out how to correctly make a rewrite rule to parse all of those parameters and make a static url.

Any other suggestions other than those already mentioned? Thanks again!

spinal007 · May 7th, 2008, 06:02 AM

Ok, I don't use URL rewrite but I do know about regular expressions, so let me try to help... I'll give you a list of URLs and regexps, you stick them wherever they need to go in your .htaccess file:

FOR: /US/California-CA/
^/(\w{2})/\w+\-(\w{2})/$
/satelliteimage_results.php?country=$1&region=$2&

FOR: /US/California-CA/CategoryName-999/ (where 999 is the category id)
^/(\w{2})/\w+\-(\w{2})/\w+\-(\d+)/$
/satelliteimage_results.php?country=$1&region=$2&category=$3&

FOR: /US/California-CA/CategoryName-999/start-30/
^/(\w{2})/\w+\-(\w{2})/\w+\-(\d+)/start\-(\d+)/$
/satelliteimage_results.php?country=$1&region=$2&category=$3&start=$4&

FOR: /US/California-CA/Animals-1/popular/
^/(\w{2})/\w+\-(\w{2})/\w+\-(\d+)/popular/$
/satelliteimage_results.php?country=$1&region=$2&category=$3&popular=y&

Instead of the 2 letter code, you may want to use the name and the code, like I did for the regions, so that, instead of /CH/ you have /China-CH/ (which is better)

Hope that helps...

AskLinkExpert · May 7th, 2008, 09:54 AM

Who are we No not link exchange. I am talking about getting one way links from highly relevant article pages that are in sync with the theme of your website. In doing this, your link will be placed on pages related to your industry. This ways you will not only improve your rankings, but will also bring targeted traffic to your website. What you can be sure of is that links from realting articles (Related to the theme of you site) will drive more relevant traffic to your site, increasing the possibility of repeat visitors (as you already know they are interested in the subject and not just "stumbling" across your site).

bmeyer2 · May 7th, 2008, 02:17 PM

Thanks Spinal and AskLink. I'll be looking into that!

mercurybiz · May 12th, 2008, 03:27 PM

Hi anyone can suggest why my website didn't get any PAge rank..thank you hoping you help my website to have great PR..http://traderbillonline.com/ did i get something wrong

spinal007 · May 13th, 2008, 06:25 AM

#1 - PRs update every 3-6 months. It may take a while if this is a new site.

#2 - PR is based (mostly) on incoming links and the linking structure within your website.

Problem 1: Google doesn't any incoming links to your site. That doesn't mean you don't have any, but it often means you don't have enough.

Problem 2: You don't ever link to your own homepage, so your page never receives any PR from within your website. Your "home" link points to...
http://traderbillonline.com/index.ph...tpage&Itemid=1
...when it should be...
http://traderbillonline.com/

Problem 3: You do not enforce a unique domain and your website can be access via http://www.traderbillonline.com/ OR http://traderbillonline.com/ which can lead to PR leakage.

Having said all that, PR is just a number that will come naturally with time and good rankings. You can't fast forward time, but you can work at improving your rankings.

ChainsawDR · June 4th, 2008, 01:01 PM

Quote:

Problem 3: You do not enforce a unique domain and your website can be access via http://www.traderbillonline.com/ OR http://traderbillonline.com/ which can lead to PR leakage.

Hi Spinal007,

I have not come across the term of enforcing a unique domain on your website. Would you mind elaborating on this a little further please?

I presume you mean some links within your own site have http://website and others have http://www.website - and webmasters should make sure that they only use one or the other - however I just wanted to check if this was true.

For the first time I tried to access my own site using both methods and they both loaded (I had always typed in and used the www. version), however if I am incorrect in my assumption above, is there anyway I can automatically forward the http://www.website path to go to the http://www.website path instead?

thank you in advance for your time Spinal007.

Rob · June 4th, 2008, 02:46 PM

Hiya.. yes, thats is what spinal means. You should also eliminate links that point to index.htm, index.php, default.asp, blah.... all those default pages should be linked to as simply '/'

You can legitimately have a different website on mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com, and likewise you can also have seperate resources on index.php and / - google makes no assumptions and treats them all as seperate resources.

if you are linking to a default document AND using non www and www then you essentially have 4 versions of your homepage which is sadly a very bad case of duplicate content, which is not ideal. Always make sure that each seperate resource has one and only one unique url - this *should* hold true regardless of the size of the application (even webforumz uses 1 url per resource).

To answer your last question... yes there is a way...

Is your server running ASP, or PHP or .NET, or something else?

spinal007 · June 5th, 2008, 07:39 AM

What Rob said ^^^

The problems are:

1. domain and www.domain are different URLs, and therefore different website websites with the exact same content so you're at risk of duplicating your pages.

2. when people link to you, the may sometimes link to domain or www.domain. Those links may end up being split over 2 domains instead of concentrating on 1 domain (they way it should be) so you won't get the full benefit of.

It seems Google has become wise enough to turn a blind eye to these common problems, but as far as SEO is concerned, you should minimize the number of problems and ambiguities SEs have to deal with... also because you can't know for sure how the SEs will deal with the issue.

ChainsawDR · June 5th, 2008, 11:02 AM

Great advice! Thank you!

on my own site - www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk - the page you land on is set as http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk/onlineshop.html.

Every page on my website is based on a template, and every page on the site points to this /onlineshop.html URL, NOT the www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk URL.

Am I correct in assuming that I should change this ASAP to point to the later, not the onlineshop.html url?

Also, if I may, could you please explain the difference between http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk and http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk/

Does the "/" have a function? should I point my links to the URL with or without this "/"?

Thank you very much indeed for all your help and advice, it is greatly appreciated.

Dean

PS. The site is hosted on a Windows based server, I use PHP on all my pages except for my homepage/onlineshop.html page

Rob · June 5th, 2008, 01:23 PM

Hiya... http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk and http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk/
are actually the same, however the latter is the best to use as it's a fully valid url.

I would change all the onlineshop.html links to point to the root OR 301 redirect he root to onlineshop.html

The first option would be best.

ChainsawDR · June 5th, 2008, 01:28 PM

Thank you Rob, when you say change all links to the root, do you mean change all links to http://www.qualitytoolsltd.co.uk/ ? or do you mean something else?

Thank you Rob

Rob · June 5th, 2008, 01:30 PM

Nope, you got it

ChainsawDR · June 5th, 2008, 02:06 PM

Cheers Rob, changing the source code now.

Thanks again.