Problems Bringing People to my Site

Tony255

Hi,
I am having problems directing traffic to my site i can only find it in google if i search by the name is there something that i can do to improve this, any help would be appreciated.

Regards
Tony

aidan_walsh

http://www.google.com/search?q=SEO

Rollo Tamasi

What's your site's URL? And what do you want to rank for in Google/Yahoo/MSN?

the Guru

Whats your site? post it, theres some regular users to this forum that will offer you advice on driving traffic to your site.

Tony255

Thanks All

my site is www.tradeseeker.ie it doesnt show up in google if i search for something like carpenters in cork, etc... so i dont really know what my rank is or how to get one. Apologies but SEO is completely new to me.

the Guru

Firstly Tony your site is new and it takes time for the Search engines to pick it up,

secondly there is not much content on the site search engines love lots of content, Consider setting up a newsletter or a blog write in it everyday this will not only add new content to the site but will add may different keywords, which will make it easier for people to find your site from searching. if your not great at writing (as I'm not) get a content writer to do it for you.

Thirdly, Pay Per Click search engine placement is the only guaranteed way to hold top placement in the search engines. Anyone who has the budget and is willing to spend what it takes to be #1, can be. These results are immediate and will bring targeted traffic instantly.

Forth - Link Building
The major search engines, including Google, now track the number of incoming links to a Web site in order to determine the Web site's popularity. The Web site's popularity is then given a corresponding Page Rank , which is used to help determine search engine rankings. A high Page Rank will not guarantee you top placement, but it is a very important factor to achieving good rankings.

Fifth- Put your hand in your pocket if you want the site to be seen cough up some cash. And add your link to your sig here in boards these pages are crawled daily for new content this will help you.

http://www.submitawebsite.com/free_tools.html check out this link it has some tools to help you.

Also only a suggestion get rid of that blinking "Quote me now" it will cause some to have a epileptic fit

Liam Byrne

First things first; having the results appear from a form selection will mean that Google can't index them (since it can't select from the list box like a human being). Also, there's is no sense in having it as a POST query; visitors want to GET the results, so the method should be GET.

This will also allow you to put some sort of expandable tree menu on the home page with direct links to the results (e.g. ShowTrade.asp?Lstbx_Trade=1&Lstbx_County=Limerick).

Secondly, I've done a few quick searches with random entries and gotten no results - if there's no content, Google won't think it worth listing.

Thirdly, both the content and the meta tags should reflect the page content - e.g. results for carpenters in Cork should have a title of "Trade Seekers - Carpenters in Cork"

Fourthly, dump the frameset - it serves no purpose and it will not help the aims of indexing.

The above are only the bare minimum that you should do; there are lots of other things relating to the presentation of the results that all add up (e.g. how the headers/categories and counties are displayed) but without any actual results in the database, there's no point in discussing them.

Do the above, add the content, and then pop me a PM if you want me to look at it in detail.

the Guru

also - your using frames http://seo.gympieonline.com/frames-seo-article.html and consider using alt tags for your images, blind and deaf people may want to use your services too......

who designed this site for you?

destraynor

Also, Google and Yahoo! both give precedence to sites using well formatted HTML. By that I mean, if there is a heading titled "Welcome to TradeSeeker, Irelands Trade Directory", you're much better off representing it as...

<h1>Welcome to TradeSeeker, Irelands Trade Directory</h1>

instead of your current solution, which is ...
<b><span lang="en-ie"><font color="#9acd32" face="Arial" size="5">Welcome To Tradeseeker...</font></span></b>


Also, submit your sitemap to Google, have a read of this article, it explains it reasonably well.

http://andrewjpage.com/index.php?/archives/88-Search-engines-and-sitemaps.html

Tony255

Thanks All, I will try to make these changes as for the site design I did pretty much all of it myself I asked a guy I know to help (for a fee of course) but after a while it was pretty obvious that all he did was copy a previous site that he made and did a few changes here and there. I got him to setup the database connection and tried to do the rest myself and as you can see my skills are pretty limited, but i think at the end it came out pretty ok the optimization part is what i have trouble with but with your helpful comments above hopefully i will be able to sort that out. Thanks again all.

fintan

Personally I think you should spend your time builing the database of trades people

Any of the searches I did returned no results

If people visit your site right now and get the same results, will they ever return again?

However best of luck with the new site!

Cheers
Fintan