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| RYKE1 |
 Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:49 am |
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Joined: 27 May 2004
Posts: 154
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Anyone have any success with using a SEO service to drive more traffic to their sites? I am done with Google Adwords that Is a total rip off. If you have any recommendations please let me know...  |
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| DomitianX |
| Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:05 pm |
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ORDER OF THE SKULL
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
Posts: 2473
Location: Faribault, MN
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RYKE1 wrote: Anyone have any success with using a SEO service to drive more traffic to their sites? I am done with Google Adwords that Is a total rip off. If you have any recommendations please let me know...
I have been doing SEO consulting for almost 10 years. Its not rocket science really. And it really depends on your target market to know how you will show up. Once you know the basics and understand how the search engines work, its pretty simple.
PM me and I can lend a hand.
--Mike |
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Old School Skaters Online
Pool and old school boards. Run by skaters, for skaters. |
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| PlayGod |
| Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:21 pm |
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ORDER OF THE SKULL
Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 3882
Location: Dirty South
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I wrote this email to somebody else... more on the development end of the spectrum than the pay-to-play, but it is a good strategy that works. DomitionX definitely does all the right stuff on oldschoolskaters.net.
Quote: Steve,
Here's a brain dump on search engine optimization for OSCommerce. Most search engines are pretty smart these days, so you have to "fool" them with relevant content... which is not really fooling them, but playing by their rules.
Tailoring search engine abstracts: You have to take a look at what content your SE results are displaying, and strategize to place content where it's most likely to get displayed. Different engines display different results, obviously. Search "chattanooga ego systems" on Live Search and on Google. Many different pages, many different displays of page content.
Most search engines don't place much credence in meta Keywords anymore, because it was so abused. Title is still relevant: it's what usually shows up as the linked title. Description may or may not be used; generally just the first several words. Most modern engines attempt to isolate and display a portion of actual text from the page that includes your search keywords. So, it's important to have a pertinent verbal description on each searchable page, as close to the top of the code as possible.
Another major key to search engine stickiness: no tricks... Provide prominent, relevant, dynamic, fresh, searchable content on a related site or a different section of a site that points to the main catalog product pages, or to specific products. Simple solution: the blog.
You might suggest your clients launch a simple blog that describes their products and their industry. Depending on how the site is structured, it might be the home page, or it might be a separate URL. It's a good replacement for the static News page that a) never gets updated b) has no relevant links to inside content c) has no archives, publish-date hierarchy or interlinking.
Something like a Wordpress blog makes a simple and functional website. All of the normal static pages can still be static pages, but the front page is a blog that is easy to update via browser... No need to set up a wyisiwyg editor and FTP. No need for an organizational chain of command for publishing. Content creators create articles, which are put in queue for editor approval and publishing approval. Different users get different levels of authority, which can be tied to whatever legacy db tables hold user-level info.
On a blog, you can run banner ads linked to catalog products. Write articles and case studies about how customers are using the products. Do press releases, etc. on the blog. It'd be simple enough for a low-level marketing/comm person to keep updated.
You know there's always somebody in the company who's asking the webmaster... "Hey, I have something that needs to go on the homepage... Can we get it up there?" Early on, the answer is "yes, no prob." But after a couple of months, it becomes a bit more complicated. How to archive the older info? How to keep one entry at the top? How to turn content on or off? How to make an intro with a "read more" link to an inside page? How to sort by categories, etc. etc. Most in-house folks give up trying to keep a static News page fresh because it's inconvenient and there is no easy way to maintain navigation or keep archives... Blogs solve those problems.
It takes a little more time to have a fresh, relevant website... but it makes a huge difference in your search engine rankings.
Basic suggestions for osCommerce SEO from Satish Mantri:
1)install SEO ultimate by Chemo http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2823/category,all/search,seo
2)Dynamic meta tags
3)Google site Map
4)Some dynamic content on Home page (e.g. blog entries linked back to blog) 5)Kill spider sessions and update spiders.txt 6)change image folder name 7)Add category description 8)have all products page with product descriptio.
Apart from this
10)Develop some reciprocal links
11)Do some directory submissions - Yahoo, Google, AltaVista, etc.
Here's a good thread that outlines a detailed placement strategy for osCommerce, with some additional hacks/tweaks...
http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.ph...pic=89723&hl=
...and finally, here are some FireFox SEO extensions worth checking out:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1668/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3036/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1471/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2279/
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Ain't no way I'm gonna be anything I ought to be. |
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| RYKE1 |
| Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 1:47 pm |
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Joined: 27 May 2004
Posts: 154
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| script |
| Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 2:33 pm |
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Joined: 09 Aug 2007
Posts: 7
Location: Connecticut
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If people need real SEO and are willing to pay I can recommend some friends. I can also recommend some people who could manage your PPC.
More free advice for you.
Regarding PPC
Make sure you are only displaying ads on Google and NOT the search network. You don't want your ads displaying on all the partner sites. That is where a majority of the fraud is.
Also make sure that you use negative keywords. So for example "free" would be a negative keyword. You don't want to match any of those terms because those people are not interested in buying.
Regarding SEO
Get GOOD links to your site from other skate sites. The actual text that is used to link to you is important. So you want to convince people to use the same kind of phrases that you want to rank well for. So for example you would want to make sure that they use words like "old school skateboards" to link to you.
You can buy links, but if you do you want to buy a permanent link. You don't want to use one of these services where you buy a link for a month... One thing that we use successfully is buying blog posts. There are a bunch of services where you can pay people to write about your site or your product for $5-10 each. These are permanent links so they have been working really well for us. The best of course would be to get links from other skaters but any links you can get will help. If you do buy links make sure the site is on their own domain name. Don't buy links from some blogger on blogspot if they don't have their own domain name.
There's a lot more to it than that obviously, but that's a good start. |
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Benjamin Fitts
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| brianzig |
| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:13 am |
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Joined: 25 Aug 2006
Posts: 342
Location: South Carolina
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Great stuff in here. We just got our shop's online store off the ground and will be working out our SEO kinks. All of this is a good start for us. Any other ideas or advice? Mind you, we are still finalizing some things and fine tuning.
How about I start with a link:
www.zigboys.com |
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| PlayGod |
| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 9:16 pm |
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ORDER OF THE SKULL
Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 3882
Location: Dirty South
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On your homepage, do an fairly long H1 or H2 with keywords... make it somewhat organic. It can be hidden via CSS or visible, whatever you prefer.
E.G. here is one I just did for http://ultralightflying.com:
Ultralight aircraft or ultralights: microlights or microlite aircraft in UK, and ULMs in Europe. Some countries differentiate weight shift (microlight) and 3-axis aircraft (ultralites). US Light-Sport Aircraft is similar to Microlight. US Ultralight is a separate class.
(it contains all the important keywords, with different spellings, and it's an actual paragraph with meaningful content)
I didn't design the site, just tweaked out their SEO for them.
Use a single, descriptive H1 level heading on each page.
Use multiple h2's to organize content within the page
Nice Job on your Joomla site. You would do well to use sh404SEF -- it creates SEO optimized URLs, which are very important, and it also creates h1's and h2's on the fly from the Joomla Pages. If you need help installing & configuring, let me know, I have done several sites with it and it pays off in searchability. It's a bitch to get set up properly, however...
sh404SEF works with Virtuemart... see it in action on the site mentioned above. They do thousands per month in subscription sales.
You are doing well with lots of fresh relevant content in the news/blog section. Bravo. That gets you lots of incoming links and relevant keywords.
If you know how to set up a cron job, I can give you a script that will daily create a weighted sitemap.xml from your apache logs, and submit it to MSN, Google, ask.com, yahoo. See http://ultralightflying.com/sitemap.xml
Sign up for google analytics and drop their NEW urchin script into your template file.
If you are transitioning from an existing site, be sure to either recreate the URLs with lots of existing incoming links (check your logs or stats for 404 errors), or add into an .htaccess file the proper 301 (permanent move) redirects:
redirectMatch 301 ^/oldurl.html /newurl.html
redirectMatch 301 ^/oldfolder /newfolder
redirectMatch 301 ^/oldfolder/oldfile.html /newsection
redirectMatch 301 ^/oldfolder/oldfile.html /
Also, your site/server seems super slow. Where's it hosted? Are you using Joomla in cached mode? Caching any static content and modules? |
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Ain't no way I'm gonna be anything I ought to be. |
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| brianzig |
| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 9:02 am |
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Joined: 25 Aug 2006
Posts: 342
Location: South Carolina
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Wow Playgod! I can't thank you enough for the advice. Most people either give some stock answers that don't seem relevant or worse yet, they have no idea about Joomla.
The H1 and H2 headings make perfect sense...I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Thanks. Like I said, I think I've looked at everything so much I don't see things anymore.
I downloaded sh404SEF and will work on it this weekend. I installed SERRBIZSEF and had it running successfully but the site ground to a halt. I emailed them and they said I had to many dynamic links because of the sheer number of inventory items (10,000). They are going to let me know if they can provide a fix in the next update. Until then, I'll try the sh404SEF. I read the notes on it and really like the features it provides.
Speaking of slow down...I've noticed the slowness of the server as well. I'm hosted by www.dreamhost.com and I've liked them but have been concerned about the slow down once I got the store setup. I've been using this domain for our store for two years now with no problems, but it was pretty much just static info on the store. Cache is set to "yes" in global configuration and at 900 seconds. I'm going to look into the mysql to see if it needs to be optimized. I also need to go through and get rid of all the modules and components that we no longer use. Most are leftovers from our old site design. I'm hoping that removing some of them will help. If nothing else, it will tidy up the backend.
I have google analytics, but it hasn't been loaded onto this new site design. I'll get that new urchin script in this weekend. Thanks for the heads up on it, I hadn't thought about updating it.
I haven't worked with cron jobs yet, but have been wanted to get started so I can automate some tasks. Dreamhost has a cron wizard that helps you get them setup. I'd love to try the sitemap script and use it. I have Joomap installed for sitemaps, but it only works with google and I have to manually upload the sitemap link. Your idea is a lot better. LOL.
Thanks again for all of your insight and suggestions. I've put a lot of time into the setup and really want to make sure it's optimized. I have lofty goals and am pretty aggressive about getting this site as successful as possible. I want to do it full time (I actually already am but doing the shop as well) and have my shop manager take over the day to day operations of the brick and mortar. On this level it really does take quite a bit of time each day to operate. at least correctly. The store went live in January and we've had a few orders come through already. It's been real random on how they've found us. We also have our myspace page setup as a mirror of the site's front page with links of all our categories, as well as our information in all of our ebay ads. I'm also working with our direct suppliers to get a link from them back to us as an authorized dealer. Most have been supportive and said yes. I'm still working on a few others.
Well, thanks again. Most people have no clue as to how much work it all takes. |
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| PlayGod |
| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 11:31 am |
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ORDER OF THE SKULL
Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 3882
Location: Dirty South
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brianzig wrote: Speaking of slow down...I've noticed the slowness of the server as well. I'm hosted by www.dreamhost.com and I've liked them but have been concerned about the slow down once I got the store setup.
Dreamhost's servers are very overburdened, particularly when you are running php/mysql with large databases. They are a good place to develop a site, you can learn alot via their knowledgebase and access to advanced features. However, once you get as large as you describe your site, you need to move to a dedicated virtual hosting account where you can tweak memory and caching for php and mysql, or to a host that can help you optimize those settings.
I have a DH account that I use primarily for backups and storage now, because they offer so much storage and bandwidth (it's their business-class $59.95/mo account, which I get free via a non-profit hookup). I just ran 'top' on that server, and its load is 25+ (i.e. 25 times more commands than the server can process are currently in the queue waiting to get processed). Their servers regularly run 10+ load. Thousands of domains, hundreds of thousands of users, etc. Many of those domains/users are either 1) doing development work, 2) running exploitable scripts that are getting compromised, etc. or 3) have been compromised due to weak passwords and are running as zombies.
Also they run spamassassin, which does a good job of nuking spam, but it's an incredible load on the server to be processing all the spam that those hundreds of thousands of users are receiving. Couple that with the fact that there are tons of weak passwords for SSH and FTP, and you have a recipe for poor performance.
Basically, you've outgrown Dreamhost.
In contrast, I work for a local ISP that provides all sorts of networking, connectivity, hosting, colocation, development, etc... we can't afford for our servers to get overloaded. When we start having issues, our phones light up and we take care of business. If a server gets overburdened, we start building another and transitioning some accounts over to the new one. We jump into action if our server loads go over 4+ for more than 5 minutes. We have thousands of hosted sites, but the majority of them are fairly simple, local sites. For those that do use db's and scripting, we keep track of and keep updated. Because we are small and have a local customer base, we get notified very quickly whenever even a single customer has trouble. So, these folks pay $9.95-$59.95 per month for hosting, $2.00 per externally-filtered email address (spam never makes it to our servers), and $85-$125/hr for programming and design.
Look around for a good local ISP or developer who has control of their own server, or check the local Linux usergroups and see if you can find a good home where you can get better service and performance.
Quote: I haven't worked with cron jobs yet, but have been wanted to get started so I can automate some tasks. Dreamhost has a cron wizard that helps you get them setup. I'd love to try the sitemap script and use it. I have Joomap installed for sitemaps, but it only works with google and I have to manually upload the sitemap link. Your idea is a lot better. LOL.
I tried Joomap but it didn't really do what I needed, so I took some tools from Google added in the submission to the other se's. I'll PM you with a link to download it, after I pack it up. |
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Ain't no way I'm gonna be anything I ought to be. |
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| brianzig |
| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 2:43 pm |
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Joined: 25 Aug 2006
Posts: 342
Location: South Carolina
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Thanks again Playgod!
Yeah, I've already been thinking about leaving DH. I'm up for renewal in 22 days and have been on the fence about what to do. I think you just kicked me over it. I'll start checking around for a dedicated virtual host and get off the shared. I knew it was inevitable.
I received your PM and downloaded the sitemap file. I'm going to work on it this weekend. I'll PM if I have any questions.
I appreciate you taking the time to help out. That's one of the things I love so much about this site. Everyone is (usually) quick to pitch in and help someone out with their skills or knowledge.
You've given me a great start and some focus on what needs to be done next. I'll PM you with an update as I move along.
Thanks again! Zig |
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