website frustration

cobbingstones

Hi all,

I started my company (housekeeping) in May and set up a 1&1 website for £10 a month. I soon realised that without some optimisation web stuff no one would be looking at my site. So I added their extra package at £40 a month and i assumed the work created from this would pay for it.

I have never seen my site on google and I am very disappointed. I called in June to cancel it and was told it would be finished in August. However, the site (with no views whatsever) is still up and running and I've now been told that I have to wait until my year is up before it will end.

My issue is that believing this website was to finish in August I have paid up front with GoDaddy now and have received another domain free. So now I have 3 websites and I still see nothing on google.

Any ideas? Totally unsure of how to get on google and i have had no luck with adwords.

NeverEnough

For a website to appear on the first page of google, you will need to invest in Search ENgine Optimisation, or SEO - if you google this you will find masses of info. Google has issued several updates this year which has affected the rankings of virtually every website, so its a good idea to read a bit about it and make your self more aware of SEO.
The paid for services from 1and1 and Godaddy and the like are not the greatest and do not guarantee results, as you have found out. There are loads of independent SEO advisors out there, some really expensive and not approriate for a small business, but if you look at sites like https://www.getseoconsultant.com, which I have used before with some success, you may get a flavour of relatively inexpensive services which could help your website rank.

There is no single remedy to ranking a website- yu need a mixture of backlinks, content, social bookmarks and even off line campaigns such as handing out leaflets in yur local area advertising yr website and services your business also offers.

You could also read the Dummies Guide to SEO and similar books to give you a better understanding of how to improve your rankings.

Don't give up on your site though, and perhaps try to get a site going which is independent of the hosting, so yu can move the site and redirect domain whenever you want, which you cannot do with the website packages such as 1and 1 's packaged site builder package or Godaddy's similar package. You could buy a website coded for you via a service like Odesk and have it hosted on say, a Baby Plan at Hostgator, while a domain you purchased for the site at Godaddy as registrar is simply pointed to the nameservers at Hostgator. Qualified website developers via Odesk will set up the site for you, help with SEO by adding Wordpress Plugins which deal with this, and all for a price under £40 or £50.

Definitely better than the all in one packages that hosts like Godaddy and 1 and 1 are offering. Then outsource SEO via sites like I mentioned above or use odesk or Fiverr gigs as well.

NeverEnough

PS Adwords is a pricey business unless you know what you are doing - best avoided at least initially, until you are more savvy with SEO and getting the website optimised.

InsideInsurance

Website design and marketing is not as simple as a lot of people like to think or certain companies tend to claim. There is a reason why companies spend millions on professionals to assist them with both elements!

That said, it is certainly possible to achieve something on a much smaller budget but you do have to decide if you want to invest a fairly sizeable chunk of your time learning about SEM & SEO and putting this into practice rather than actually being out there doing your housekeeping or if you'd be better off paying for a professional to do some or all of it for you whilst you are out there generating income?

If you have multiple domains, you should do a 301 redirect from the all the others to the one that you intend to be using unless you want to run different sites for different purposes but from what you say it doesnt sound like it.

NeverEnough

The thing is, someone with a small business they want to build up like a housekeeping service that will hopefully expand to several employees in time to come, will not have the budget to blow on expensive SEO so learning about it as much as posssible and doing the right things while the domains age, will ultimately help the website rank, in conjunction with using a few SEO techniques and adding regular fresh content to the website for the search engine spiders to index. An investment in time to understand more about SEO and how you can do at least some of it yourself, will pay handsomely ultimately.

InsideInsurance

Things don't have to be expensive and whilst inevitably sole traders have to be a bit more jack of all trades rather than experts there are certain lines that need to be drawn.

Any good professional should be able to generate more income (or save you more money) than their fees or shouldn't take the job

paddyrg

You will be overpromised and underdelivered constantly on SEO, which is smoke and mirrors covering some basic things. Most important thing to realise is there are MILLIONS of your competitors also wanting to be on the first page of Google results. If someone can promise to get you from page 7150 to page 8, who cares? By page 3 the punter is gone. Just make sure you're in DMoz.org so all the engines find you, and that your page bodies are topical and useful. Pretty much everything else the engines will see through anyway.

BTW your results for a google listing are different from mine, many SEO companies will either exploit/misrepresent this, or don't understand what they are doing (the latter for the majority it often seems, they repeat what they read verbatim, but have no clue).

InsideInsurance

Lets assume the OP lives in a normal sized UK town then I would be fairly concerned if there are MILLIONS of companies wanting to provide house cleaning for a less than a hundred thousand houses.

Being a little more sensible and realistic, the advantage of being small is you are localised/ specialist and so can focus in much more closely to your target market than an organisation that tries to be everything to everyone. This makes all marketing, including SEO, relatively simpler and cheaper as long as you target your market

terra_ferma

No views is a bit extreme, there must be something seriously wrong.
What about impressions? Is your site coming up at all when you search on google?
Has it been indexed (a bit like google cataloguing your website pages to show them in searches)?

NeverEnough

terra_ferma wrote: »

No views is a bit extreme, there must be something seriously wrong.
What about impressions? Is your site coming up at all when you search on google?
Has it been indexed (a bit like google cataloguing your website pages to show them in searches)?

It isn't really "extreme" at all not to have any views for a website which is neither optimised for keywords nor set up in the most search engine friendly manner, particularly since googles recent updates. There are loads of websites which get no visitors at all - the amount of web-based "junk" real estate has increased exponentially over the past few years. Its well known that unless your website is on the first page of google, It is likely to get very little traffic unless there are specific searches for its Url etc, as most people only look at the first 5 search results on the first page of Google.

There may not be a serious problem- it might be as simple as having the correct keywords, and joining Google Analytics / Webmaster Tools ( free ) and getting the google spider bots to reindex the site. If its a very small site with no content, Google might be penalising it as a "thin" site.

In cases like this, where a small fledgling business really doesn't have the budget to pay local SEO gurus silly money, outsourcing some aspects via cheaper, recommended online services or fiverr, makes sense and the OP should learn some of the techniques to implement themselves - its not about smoke and mirrors stuff, just about providing appropriate keywords, content, social bookmarks and backlinking in small amounts to authority sites.

terra_ferma

NeverEnough wrote: »

It isn't really "extreme" at all not to have any views for a website which is neither optimised for keywords nor set up in the most search engine friendly manner, particularly since googles recent updates. There are loads of websites which get no visitors at all - the amount of web-based "junk" real estate has increased exponentially over the past few years. Its well known that unless your website is on the first page of google, It is likely to get very little traffic unless there are specific searches for its Url etc, as most people only look at the first 5 search results on the first page of Google.

There may not be a serious problem- it might be as simple as having the correct keywords, and joining Google Analytics / Webmaster Tools ( free ) and getting the google spider bots to reindex the site. If its a very small site with no content, Google might be penalising it as a "thin" site.

In cases like this, where a small fledgling business really doesn't have the budget to pay local SEO gurus silly money, outsourcing some aspects via cheaper, recommended online services or fiverr, makes sense and the OP should learn some of the techniques to implement themselves - its not about smoke and mirrors stuff, just about providing appropriate keywords, content, social bookmarks and backlinking in small amounts to authority sites.

I still think it's extreme, based on personal experience, I even got some traffic from holding pages, or sites with 3 pages set up for direct traffic/downloads. Or from keywords where I'm at page 20+.
Little traffic OK, or wrong traffic (misspellings and synonyms) but no traffic at all is a bit strange.

I don't think my advice about making sure the site has been indexed and shows in searches is wrong.

going back to the OP:

here's a beginners guide, haven't read it myself, but it's from a reliable sources
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate