Website Ranking Low. Requesting advise

Kev O C

We recently launched our site (I'm an intern who helped with the launch) for Tom Murphy Formal Menswear

www.tom-murphy.ie

However our Google hits are not ranking too well at the moment. We've tried using the tags and titles to help boost it. We researched the key terms we wanted to be associated with. We tried a few in-bound links to other pages within our site.

Is there any other tips people can offer. I'd greatly appreciate it

dotcom13

place it on google maps it should come up tops in the local area at least..

Kev O C

dotcom13 wrote: »

place it on google maps it should come up tops in the local area at least..

We did that in the contact us section
http://www.tom-murphy.ie/contact-us/

Hopefully that helps. Thanks

Slinky>

Slightly off topic but I do like the design of the website.

Kev O C

Slinky> wrote: »

Slightly off topic but I do like the design of the website.

Never off topic if you're complementing the site
Seriously though, thanks. I'm just hoping for more feedback so that we can ideas to get it more popular

RedFly

Kev O C wrote: »

our Google hits are not ranking too well at the moment.

That says it all really

Joking aside, your site has only 20 links to it. Quite simply, you need to build more links to the site and product pages. There's only so much a title tag can do for you. Assume that all your competitors have all their on-site SEO done perfectly...what next? Build links. It really is as simple as that.

Also, due to the recent MayDay update, I'd focus a little on building out your product page content. A few lines is not enough.

Here's a list of some good ideas for you:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

Hope that helps.
Dave

Kev O C

Thanks Redfly

I am currently working on building the inbound links. I'm trying to sort all the tags. I'll then move onto the links. Thanks for bringing that up.

We'll be adding more product description also. We want to get a nice detailed and direct-to-the point message put across. And I realise that our current information is too short

RedFly

You're welcome.
Remember though, not all links are created equally. Stay away from link farms, spammy directories and paid links.

Think about a blog. Think about creating some quirky content relating to your products (I know, it might seem difficult now, but it's possible for EVERY market). Think along the lines of "What the world cup's heroes wear on a night out, things like that.

You might also want to try using opensiteexplorer.org or majesticseo.com to see what links your competitors have, get some ideas and maybe even find some sources where you can get identical links for free.

Best of luck.

Vurnon San Benito

Might be a silly question to ask but have you submitted your site to Google for crawling?

RedCardinal

You could also set up your site in Google Places (formerly Local Business Center). Right now your maps listings actually goes to whoesview.ie:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=58+St+Patrick's+,+Cork+City,+Ireland&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=47.435825,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=58+St+Patrick's+St,+Cork,+County+Cork,+Ireland&z=14&iwloc=r1&ll=51.898453,-8.474755

That's not great, and you'd likely pick up a few visits from local searchers. Adding a Google map to your contact page is not the same.

Kev O C

RedCardinal wrote: »

You could also set up your site in Google Places (formerly Local Business Center).

That's not great, and you'd likely pick up a few visits from local searchers. Adding a Google map to your contact page is not the same.

Thanks for that. I think we are now added to it. I tried to add a video and photos but they haven't gone up yet

Kev O C

Doocey wrote: »

Might be a silly question to ask but have you submitted your site to Google for crawling?

I don't know are we using the Gogle Crawl. We have the Google maps and analytics used. Is Crawl part of that?

bigjohnny80

Try some of the Irish classifieds sites. Some of them allow you to place a link in the ad.

Kev O C

Lads-thanks a mill for all the feedback.We have signed up for webmaster tools so next week we will be analyising how google crawls and indexes our sight.Since i last posted we have moved up the rankings for important keywords like suits,suit hire,suits cork,suit hire cork.We changed our titles and put these keywords into them.Since we did that we have improved a lot.I need to promote the site outside cork.I want it showing in national searches.By putting suits cork in title am i comprimising a potential national audience.Should i put in suits ireland for example.Before we had cork,ireland at the end of the title but we did not seem to get anything great out of that.
None of our competitors are doing seo work so i think we should get ahead of them all.I need to work on links as well i know.any feedback appreciated.

Kev O C

Lads-thanks for the comments again.By now i thought we might have started moving up the search rankings but we are still showing up behind irish websites that have no seo work done,We are putting in fresh blogs weekly,optimising page titles ,building anchor word links etc.Other sites are coming up first and they have very few inbound links either so i do not understand what we are doing wrong.I know the whole site has been re-develop[ed but i thought by now we would be featuring highly for keywords like suits and suit hire.Even for uncompetive terms like suits cork and suit hire cork we are down low.Sometimes when i do a search we appear towards the top but most of the time we are well down.A competitor has just redeveloped their site and they are straight to the top.They have the word suyits in their domain to be fair but ithought all the seo work we did would compensate for us not having suits in our domain.
Has anyone any ideas on what we might do to get us up for the keywords.I need to start getting more serious traffic to the site and make sales.I am going to buy some adwords but i would like to see our organic stuff improving

Vurnon San Benito

This is done?

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Kev O C

Doocey wrote: »

This is done?

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

I just did that now so hopefully it will work for us now

Shaneod21

Ok by google hits I suppose your referring to your keywords are not ranking too well. Title tags are definitely paramount and one of the first steps in the on page setup.

Just took a look at the site. Great design, unfortunate about the lack of content. I'd seriously recommend having a minimum of 250 words on the index.

I just analysed your website and you only have 20 backlinks. Most importantly your site seems to contain absolutely no links back with a relevant anchor text. There is one that says, Tom Murphy Formal Wear, but if your looking to rank higher you need to be creating backlinks with keyword optimised anchor text in them. This would look like this <a href="http://www.tom-murphy.ie">Suit hire</a>, however this has not been done what so ever, it seems your relying on title tags and a few url links to increase your rankings, which is not going to happen. It will just take a few good links to get much higher as some of your keywords are not that competitive ie suits cork.

If you are creating backlinks optimised for particular keywords and they just haven't been found yet, just ping them to get a quicker response from google. You could then mash them up and create an rss feed and submit it to all the rss directories for more link juice.

You said "They have the word suyits in their domain to be fair but ithought all the seo work we did would compensate for us not having suits in our domain."

To me it doesn't seem as if you have done much seo work at all. 20 links is nothing. I would start off by going back to each site that you have a link from and request them to give you an anchor text. For example I am fairly sure no one searches Tom Murphy Formal Wear, get that replaced with suits cork or tom murphy suits cork.

Start commenting on relevent blogs leaving good posts and keywords in your title. Write articles, even place the anchor text in the signature in the forum here on boards. Install google analytics on to the site aswell.

You can use a site like seosupporter.com to track all your keywords and competitors as well as receive alerts when your site reaches a particular target.

Hope this helps

francophile

SEO - you need to concentrate on "on page" and "off-page" factors. Google these terms for more help.

Great content will get links - so concentrate on getting original informative content.

Kev O C

Shaneod21 wrote: »

.

Just took a look at the site. Great design, unfortunate about the lack of content. I'd seriously recommend having a minimum of 250 words on the index.

I just analysed your website and you only have 20 backlinks. Most importantly your site seems to contain absolutely no links back with a relevant anchor text. There is one that says, Tom Murphy Formal Wear, but if your looking to rank higher you need to be creating backlinks with keyword optimised anchor text in them. This would look like this <a href="http://www.tom-murphy.ie">Suit hire</a>, however this has not been done what so ever, it seems your relying on title tags and a few url links to increase your rankings, which is not going to happen. It will just take a few good links to get much higher as some of your keywords are not that competitive ie suits cork.

If you are creating backlinks optimised for particular keywords and they just haven't been found yet, just ping them to get a quicker response from google. You could then mash them up and create an rss feed and submit it to all the rss directories for more link juice.

You said "They have the word suyits in their domain to be fair but ithought all the seo work we did would compensate for us not having suits in our domain."

To me it doesn't seem as if you have done much seo work at all. 20 links is nothing. I would start off by going back to each site that you have a link from and request them to give you an anchor text. For example I am fairly sure no one searches Tom Murphy Formal Wear, get that replaced with suits cork or tom murphy suits cork.

Start commenting on relevent blogs leaving good posts and keywords in your title. Write articles, even place the anchor text in the signature in the forum here on boards. Install google analytics on to the site aswell.

You can use a site like seosupporter.com to track all your keywords and competitors as well as receive alerts when your site reaches a particular target.

Hope this helps

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. The feedback you gave is brilliant. I must admit though, that I don't understand all of it so if you could please explain some to me I'd really appreciate it.

I have a vague understanding of the SEO work. My boss is doing most of it and he is using my profile here to get feedback aswell.

As far as content goes, we believe that since our site is fashion oriented, the images we are using are more important. But we thought we still had sufficient amount of content.

We're still working on the backlinks. We never thought of the anchor text in that detail so thanks for bringing that to light. We haev already been in contact with a few of them and are still trying to expand. What do you mean by pinging? I haven't come across this term before. I realise I can google it but I think you direct response might be more understandable.

We are trying to use more blog sites to direct traffic to us. I never thought about anchor texting on these sites. Thanks for that also

worc

Your "h" tags aren't being used as well as they could - don't really have the time to go through them all but for example, on your main page you have no h2 tags at all - the text you have that is bold such as "Suits & Menswear Specialists" should be a h2 or h3 tag - these will let google know they are more important information, bold text means nothing really to google. So instead of this:

<p><strong>Suits & Menswear Specialists</strong></p>

...it should really be this:

<h2>Suits & Menswear Specialists</h2>
or
<h3>Suits & Menswear Specialists</h3>

These h tags (headings) are like chapter headings in a book that Google will use to understand the content of your site better - the lower the number the more important the information, so a h1 is most important followed by h2, h3, h4 etc. Look at your h1 tags as the main page title so make sure every h1 tag on every page is accurately written and keyword rich - but don't spam them with keywords either and only use one h1 tag per page (there are some reasons for using two h1's but I don't think you're content really requires this).

Also, some of your pages don't even have a h1 tag at all - for example, when clicking "Mens Suits" on your left vertical menu from your main page not one page from there has a single h1 tag. To relate that to a book, it's like you've written your book without any chapter titles so a reader (e.g. google) would have to go through the text to understand what's on those pages - and google is blind and doesn't like to have to do this, google likes to use h1 tags to understand the content...so you're losing out without these. If you don't know how to change them ask your web designer to do it, they really should have done that already.

Clicking on "Suit Hire", then going through your "navigation menu" on the left, the links don't seem to be SEO friendly, if you hover your cursor over these links, for example, the first "Wedding Suits" link, it show up as

"http://www.tom-murphy.ie/?page_id=25"

instead of

"http://www.tom-murphy.ie/wedding-suits"

though when clicking through the first one it goes to

"http://www.tom-murphy.ie/designer-wedding-suits/wedding-suits/"

so I'm not really sure if the "?page_id=25" is much of an issue but thought I'd point it out. Make sure to maintain the use of dashes between words in these and don't accidentally start using underscores - dashes are good, underscore not so much.

Last but not least, your page title for your store is "Latest Products" - change this because that phrase means absolutely nothing for what you do and could mean latest products for refrigerators for all search enginges know.

There's a hundred other things you can do to improve your SEO but can't go through it all, only had a quick look at your site but using the stuff above has worked wonders for sites I've set up for friends and hopefully be of some use to you. Hope it helps.