website frustration

oldtoolie

Google Adwords may be more effective and cheaper. You can limit your daily spend and you are only paying for people actually looking at your site. Select location words that focus narrowly on your desired neighbourhoods & towns.

The most important thing is that your site is informative, neat and builds trust. Far more important for a small business to get that right than to worry about complex SEO.

Much of your traffic will or should be people looking you up after seeing a card in a shop window, reading a story in the local paper about how you are doing voluntary work for people in need, word of mouth references or the card & leaflet you dropped in every house on the streets where you already work.

NeverEnough

terra_ferma wrote: »

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

I still don't think its extreme, based on personal experience. Google can and does sandbox sites for no apparent reason.

Recent updates have thrown web searches into disarray with thin holding pages sometimes ranking high and good sites actually vanishing into the sandbox.

Still, reading up about it and understanding the process will help the OP even if they choose to outsource in the end.
I am not disagreeing with everything you have said, just that its not "extreme" to see sites with no traffic - it certainly is something which is quite common following the google updates. Most sites do recover to at least some degree, like showing up in searches again, though, given time, even if nothing is done to them.

Other reasons for them not showing up is possible malware on the site, where google has stopped the site showing up.

Webmaster tools would help OP find Googles opinion of the site and if any problems were identified by Google when they spidered it - free to sign up and use.

robrooo

I have managed to get a couple of my sites coming up on page 1 of google, and even number 1 position for certain queries. It takes time though, and you need to invest some time and effort.

My company is in the UK, but I pay for hosting in the US, its cheap, about $5 per month, and that allows me to create my own sites. This helps because I can then tweak things for SEO (see later). If you can't or don't want to write a site from scratch, most hosting companies provide you with scripts which will build a site for you using a template but that you can customise. Perhaps the easiest to set-up is wordpress (although hackers seem to like to target WP sites) and you can add themes and plugins to customise its look and behaviour.

Anyway, back to the SEO.

Here is what I did.

1. Register with google webmaster tools (requires you to add a file or id code on your site to validate it). This will give you some useful stats. Its free.

2. If you want more in depth stats, register with Google analytics. This gives you more in depth analysis of who is visiting your site, how they got there and what they did. Might not be required at this stage though. This is free too.

3. Get as many links to your site as possible. One way I did this by registering with as many on-line business directories as I could. You need to be prepared to write some spiel on your busness, and also add photos etc if relevant. You will then get a barrage of calls from the directories' salespeople trying to sell you a premium listing. I ignored all of those, all I was after was the link from their site, and I wanted google to see this, not necessarily a real person! This is free. I registered with about 12.

Also consider setting up a facebook page or fb business page, make sure this has your website details on it.

Online discussion fora - maybe there are discussion fora on the net that are relevant to your business area. So post comments on articles and other posts on these fora and make sure you include your website address on your posts (most give you a box to fill in).

Also look at getting your business listed with any relevant industry bodies that may keep a directory or register. Also local business groups. Some do charge for this though.

There are many other "social media" sites that you could register on. Remember the purpose is really just to get links back - some have a policy of "no follow" which means in theory that a search engine will not follow the link to your site, but I suspect some search engines ignore this! And so do people. The number of people hitting your site will contribute to your rank.

The best kinds of links to get are ones that use targetting key words in the link. Not your business name - that only helps if people already know about your business. But for a housekeeping wesbite say, the link would point to your site, but the words in the link (the bit that people click on) should maybe contain something like "local housekeeping townname" (where townname is where you are located). Or something similar. Google then associates your site with those words. Think about words that someone might use to find the service you are providing without knowing your name.

So, going back to the discussion fora above, if your user name was "reliable-housekeeping-london" and you posted a comment on a site, in most cases the link would be from your user name, thus adding those words to your ranking

Also consider getting a listing on the other search engines too (such as yahoo and bing). They have site submission links (they might ask you to pay to guarantee a listing, but I've never done this).

Another ranking site is Alexa. Some people argue that its rankings are not reliable, but nonetheless apparently google uses it in its mix. If you validate your site on there, you can get some stats. It can also help to tell you who is linking to you, and people can review your site/service which might boost your ranking. One thing you can do is use it to find out who is linking to any of your competitors' sites - you might just find a directory site or discussion board that you did not know of, and then you can add your site to it...

4. Consider adding links FROM your site to other relevant sites, maybe suppliers, those online fora and industry bodies etc that you found. This lets google know you are not a "dead-end" site.

5. The techie bit. Optimise your site for SEO. I'm not sure how much of this you can do on a 1-on-1 site, hopefully they are already optimised, but there are certain parts of a website that google et al analyse. I use a free online tool called the reaction engine to analyse my sites (google for reactionengine seo). You can put in phrases that you want to target and it assesses your site against them. It might highlight weak areas, such as no keywords in the title, header and first paragraph etc, that you could improve. It also gives you a rating based on how fast your site is, how valid the code is etc.

Well, that is all I can remember doing at the moment. Hopefully enough to get you started!

After doing all this it took about 3 months for my site to start rising in the search engines, and almost 6 before hitting the number 1 spot, and I regularly check and try to improve things because I know that if I don't it will not stay there!

And if you want to be really sad, in your spare time go into any shop displaying tablets and PCs that are connected to the net, google for your site and then only click on your site in the results. This adds unique IP addresses to your search stats...

-- Rob

terra_ferma

NeverEnough wrote: »

I still don't think its extreme, based on personal experience. Google can and does sandbox sites for no apparent reason.

Recent updates have thrown web searches into disarray with thin holding pages sometimes ranking high and good sites actually vanishing into the sandbox.

Still, reading up about it and understanding the process will help the OP even if they choose to outsource in the end.
I am not disagreeing with everything you have said, just that its not "extreme" to see sites with no traffic - it certainly is something which is quite common following the google updates. Most sites do recover to at least some degree, like showing up in searches again, though, given time, even if nothing is done to them.

Other reasons for them not showing up is possible malware on the site, where google has stopped the site showing up.

Webmaster tools would help OP find Googles opinion of the site and if any problems were identified by Google when they spidered it - free to sign up and use.

let's say we disagree on the definition of "extreme" and 'quite common'
but we agree on the general principle that things are not right, and at the end of the day I respect that fact that you are giving correct information, as so many times you see people giving poor advice

cobbingstones

Thank you all so much for taking the time for such informative posts!

Very appreciated.

cobbingstones

ps. If anyone has the time to check my new site I would be very grateful. This is a huge learning curve for me and any advice on how to improve or general comments would be appreciated.

The info is in my details.

terra_ferma

cobbingstones wrote: »

ps. If anyone has the time to check my new site I would be very grateful. This is a huge learning curve for me and any advice on how to improve or general comments would be appreciated.

The info is in my details.

looks like your site has not been indexed, even when searching for its exact domain name it doesn't come up

robrooo

OK, here is what I found.

First, can I point out that your site is google indexed as "welcomehousekeeping-dot-com" not "www-dot-welcomehousekeeping-dot-com".
(sorry, I am new, so the fora is making me remove links above, I have replaces "." with "-dot-"!).

If you google for "site:welcomehousekeeping-dot-com" you get 5 results (one per page?) but "site:www-dot-welcomehousekeeping-dot-com" gives none (replace -dot- with a dot!). That is OK though, it means your rank is not split over the www and non-www site. I think this is related to how 1-on-1 set-up their webserver (part of how they handle multiple sites on one server). If your site ranks well it will be in google results no matter if it is indexed as www or non-www, so don't worry about this.

The reaction engine gave you a score of "E" for the target word "housekeeping", "E+" for "cleaning", and "D-" for "house cleaning" (A+ is best, I think F- is worst).

Main problems (and some things that are ok) I can see are these:
1. first page title is "home page" - this is meaningless to most people searching for cleaning services. Receommended to fix this, use up to 64 characters - put your keywords in here, something like "housekeeping and cleaning services blah blah etc...".
2. Meta description is also "home page" - although this seems less important to seach engines, but still nice to fix.
3. Main heading mentions cleaning and service, which is good , but could put more keywords in here (this is where you currently have your phone number).
4. There is no first paragraph according to the analyser, although I can see it in the code, so maybe this is a layout problem (they seem to use multi-nested div's in the code). You could try entering <p> around your text (if 1-on-1 allows this), but not sure it will fix it.
5. Body of first page is very good, with lots of keywords present.

I think this is not bad as a first pass - my sites started very similar to this. If you fix the title, and add another keyword into the main heading, my next step would be to start a link-building campaign.

--Rob

InsideInsurance

Add to the above you're missing alt descriptions for images - bad for the partially sighted as well as for google

Given you've used GoDaddy's website builder the code is to horrible but it certainly could be cleaned up a lot.

On the www -v- non www, this isnt technically a big issue but you need to remember that google will see them as two separate sites (along with any other subdomains you create) and so you need to become consistent in either using or not using the www prefix otherwise you will split the "google juice" across the two separate sites.

Personally I would be pushing localisation more given you clearly have a geographic area you operate in and wouldnt be very interested in queries from people on the other end of the country.