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Website SEO & Layout Advice

Mr Porridge

Hi,

I have a website online for my small business but it's not doing very well in search results. If anyone could look at the site for me with a fresh set of eyes and give me some advice that would be much appreciated. What can I do to get more traffic to my site?

www.irishcelticcrosses.ie

and

www.irishcelticcrosses.com

Thanks

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pixiel

Hey,

I'm no web designer but I think that the site looks decent enough!

Mr Porridge

Thanks pixiel it took me a while to get it looking like that!!

M.T.D

You have a lot of duplicate content, the pictures change but the text is the same
What do the analytics and webmaster tools show

vincychan

Both the domains are pointed over a same website, so make sure you notify Google that both belong to same registered company.

I hope you have a webmasters tool, if not start it(free) and submit both your websites to the same account. Moreover, why have two domains pointing on same website?

Consider making some changes to either one of the website. For example: .ie website is targeted for Ireland, so write content suitable for Irish visitors and make the .com website suitable for US visitors.

Mr Porridge

Hi thank you all for the advice you have given me - it is much appreciated. I will attempt to implement it!

Mr P

Smash The House

;)I did a google there for 'irish celtic crosses'

i looked at the first and 2nd page results and your site is no where to be seen. have you even submitted the site to google for them to index it yet?

According to adwords keytool 'Irish Celtic Crosses' gets 1000 worldwide searches and competition is High.
I know this might not be one of the keywords your targeting but still, if it's the name of the domain AND the business, it should be first result and you shouldn't accept anything lower...well imo

EDIT: dont sign your posts with 'Mr P'.....you'll have Mr Pudding after you

Mr Porridge

Hi Smash The House,

I submitted www.irishcelticcrosses.com yesterday to be indexed. What exactly does it mean to have the site indexed? Does it mean that Google is being informed directly of its existence?

I have resubmitted the .com and .ie sites again just 5 minutes ago (just to be sure I did it correctly). Does it usually take long for them to index a website like this?

Thanks,

Mr Po.

PaulPinnacle

Mr Porridge wrote: »

I submitted www.irishcelticcrosses.com yesterday to be indexed.

In reality, submitting a site for indexing to Google does absolutely nothing.

If a site is 'worth' crawling and indexing, Google will find it on their own (with the links that are built promoting the new site and telling everyone how fantastic it is... and those people telling their friends, etc. etc.). If the only thing making Google aware that the site exists is the manual submission, it'll have a horrid crawl budget (you'd be lucky to get more than a single layer deep in the site architecture) and wouldn't have enough authority to rank for anything other than an extremely targeted or low competitiveness keyword (so it's a waste of time, go build a backlink to your site instead which will do all of the same things for it and more besides).

Mr Porridge wrote: »

What exactly does it mean to have the site indexed? Does it mean that Google is being informed directly of its existence?

The manual submission informs them of the existence, the indexing is including the content from your pages into the the 'index' of pages that are potential results when someone does a search on Google. If a page isn't in the index, it can never appear as a result in a search.

Mr Porridge wrote: »

I have resubmitted the .com and .ie sites again just 5 minutes ago (just to be sure I did it correctly). Does it usually take long for them to index a website like this?

Your problem isn't with them 'finding' your site, they have a cached version of your page and a search for a very specific chunk of text like "Irish company that have been selling high quality Grave Marking Crosses" will return your site.

It's more likely a case that the term "Irish Celtic Crosses" is simply too competitive for your site to compete with the domain authority of the ones that are on page one or two of the results (also potential for your site to appear over optimised for that term and to have been punished as a result, but far less likely to be honest - check your Google Webmaster Tools account to be safe).

Smash The House

Yes it looks like they have been indexed alright.

I did a search for 'Irish Celtic Crosses worldwide shipping' (two words in your meta site description...and your site comes up on the first result.

However, your still no where to be seen when Irish Celtic Crosses is searched.

I think you should wait a day or two and see if that changes. If your still not then you'll need to do some proper SEO

Mr Porridge

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

In reality, submitting a site for indexing to Google does absolutely nothing.

If a site is 'worth' crawling and indexing, Google will find it on their own (with the links that are built promoting the new site and telling everyone how fantastic it is... and those people telling their friends, etc. etc.). If the only thing making Google aware that the site exists is the manual submission, it'll have a horrid crawl budget (you'd be lucky to get more than a single layer deep in the site architecture) and wouldn't have enough authority to rank for anything other than an extremely targeted or low competitiveness keyword (so it's a waste of time, go build a backlink to your site instead which will do all of the same things for it and more besides).

The manual submission informs them of the existence, the indexing is including the content from your pages into the the 'index' of pages that are potential results when someone does a search on Google. If a page isn't in the index, it can never appear as a result in a search.

Your problem isn't with them 'finding' your site, they have a cached version of your page and a search for a very specific chunk of text like "Irish company that have been selling high quality Grave Marking Crosses" will return your site.

It's more likely a case that the term "Irish Celtic Crosses" is simply too competitive for your site to compete with the domain authority of the ones that are on page one or two of the results (also potential for your site to appear over optimised for that term and to have been punished as a result, but far less likely to be honest - check your Google Webmaster Tools account to be safe).

Hi,

Thanks very much for the advice.

What is the best way to build backlinks to my site? Are backlinks actually links on other existing websites that point to pages on my site?

Kind Regards

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

Smash The House wrote: »

Yes it looks like they have been indexed alright.

I did a search for 'Irish Celtic Crosses worldwide shipping' (two words in your meta site description...and your site comes up on the first result.

However, your still no where to be seen when Irish Celtic Crosses is searched.

I think you should wait a day or two and see if that changes. If your still not then you'll need to do some proper SEO

I actually only added meta keywords last night:

<meta name="keywords" content="Irish grave marker,Irish wooden grave marker cross, Ireland, Irish Celtic Crosses,Crosses,Celtic, celtic crosses,crosses, wooden celtic crosses,engraved memorial plaques, wooden crosses for graves, wood crosses for sale, crosses for sale, grave plaques ireland, Irish Wooden Grave Marker Cross,Oak, solid Mahogany,solid Iroko, solid Cedar, cross engraving,celtic plaques, irish cross, irish grave cross,celtic grave marker, irish wooden grave marker ">

This was not in the code previously. Will/could this make a difference in a couple of days?

Kind Regards

Mr Porridge

Smash The House

As far as I know, Google ignore meta keywords.

As regards backlinks, even the link you posted here will help

Mr Porridge

Smash The House wrote: »

As far as I know, Google ignore meta keywords.

As regards backlinks, even the link you posted here will help

Okay,

So i'll try to get some back-links to my site onto other websites.

Thanks for taking the time to look at the site. Much appreciated.

Mr Porridge.

tricky D

Mr Porridge wrote: »

I actually only added meta keywords last night:

<meta name="keywords" content="Irish grave marker,Irish wooden grave marker cross, Ireland, Irish Celtic Crosses,Crosses,Celtic, celtic crosses,crosses, wooden celtic crosses,engraved memorial plaques, wooden crosses for graves, wood crosses for sale, crosses for sale, grave plaques ireland, Irish Wooden Grave Marker Cross,Oak, solid Mahogany,solid Iroko, solid Cedar, cross engraving,celtic plaques, irish cross, irish grave cross,celtic grave marker, irish wooden grave marker ">

This was not in the code previously. Will/could this make a difference in a couple of days?

Kind Regards

Mr Porridge

The way you have used it there will likely get you a Bing penalty for keyword spamming. The tag is pretty much ignored by any half decent search engine. You could trim it down to a max of 3 instances of each word and its stem. Personally I'd strongly recommend you just remove the tag altogether.

Be careful with backlinks, do not force them. Quality backlinks only; as with most aspects of SEO, they should ideally be natural, relevant and organic.

I wouldn't submit the .ie either as it just redirects to the .com and so is covered.

Be patient and don't force matters.

obliviousgrudge

Look on the bright side, you're number one in Bing for a search of "Irish Celtic crosses".

Just a shame nobody uses Bing.

Mr Porridge

obliviousgrudge wrote: »

Look on the bright side, you're number one in Bing for a search of "Irish Celtic crosses".

Just a shame nobody uses Bing.

WOW!

Lol, I cannot believe that it is at the top of a search engine result!!

Okay fair enough - it's not Google!

Thanks for pointing this out

Mr Porridge

tricky D wrote: »

The way you have used it there will likely get you a Bing penalty for keyword spamming. The tag is pretty much ignored by any half decent search engine. You could trim it down to a max of 3 instances of each word and its stem. Personally I'd strongly recommend you just remove the tag altogether.

Be careful with backlinks, do not force them. Quality backlinks only; as with most aspects of SEO, they should ideally be natural, relevant and organic.

I wouldn't submit the .ie either as it just redirects to the .com and so is covered.

Be patient and don't force matters.

Okay, I will trim it down as you say and not duplicate the keywords as much as I have done. I also take on board what you say about decent search engines not taking meta keywords into account.

Thank you for your advice.

Mr Porridge.

tricky D

More info on Bing keyword penalty: http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

PaulPinnacle

Smash The House wrote: »

I think you should wait a day or two and see if that changes. If your still not then you'll need to do some proper SEO

The homepage is in the index, the keyword in question is on the page and in the domain name (though it could be optimised further) so it already has relevance for the keyword search so then it's purely down to the other sites outranking it. Waiting a couple of days won't change anything there.

There's huge improvements that can easily be made to the site from an SEO point of view, so that's the good news (the bad news is you'll have a hell of a lot of work to make all the changes). I'd suggest throwing it up in the website reviews section to get a nice critical analysis of it from a few points of view (things like the logo being way too large and you ending up with a 1/3 of the most valuable real estate on your site being wasted are an issue, one where the designers could give far better feedback than I could). I'll do a quick SEO run down on it if/when I get a little free time too. The two biggest problems from a glance are a severe lack of content on the site (textual content, you've tonnes of images but not enough words) and of the content that is there there's a huge amount of it that's repeated page after page (a major issue where the search engine will view your site as containing major duplicate content with only minor changes between pages and your performance will suffer as a result)

Mr Porridge wrote: »

What is the best way to build backlinks to my site? Are backlinks actually links on other existing websites that point to pages on my site?

Yes. A backlink is a hyperlink, which just means you can click on it, that appears on any page on the internet that points at your site. If the page in question is on your own website that's called an internal link, if it's a link on your site pointing to a different website that'd be called an external link and if it's anywhere else on the net and pointing at your site we'd commonly call that an incoming link or simply a backlink. So, for example, the links in the original post of this thread are backlinks to your site.

The search engines use backlinks as votes of confidence in a site and assign trust and authority based on them, which then plays a major part in how your site ranks. There are a huge number of factors that play a part in rankings, but links are still right up there at the top in terms of their weightings and importance (think about how you manage to stumble across new sites, in most cases it'll be following a link on a site you visit a lot, on a forum like here or on a social site where it's shared by a friend type of thing).

The 'best way' to build backlinks to your site is to have others do it for you. I don't mean hiring a team of people to do it, I mean having a site that's so good, having content that's so valuable, giving a user experience that's so positive that anyone who visits your site is happy and even keen to share it.

You're in the unfortunate position that it's a delicate area you operate in and needs to be handled in a slightly more reserved manner than most. People, I'd imagine (happy to admit I've never worked in the area and to be honest could be very wrong in some of the assumptions I'm making), would be slower in linking to a site that has even a slight connection to graves or death. I think here in Ireland we're super keen to simply avoid it as a topic of conversation, never give it any thought and simply fight our way through it blindly when the situation does arrive on our doorstep.

Having said that, a little creativity and thinking outside of the box and you can still achieve great results I'm sure. Something like the release of the anglo tapes could easily be turned into an opportunity, in spite of the disconnect between your business and the banking scandal. A short investment into one of your own plaques, a short bit of time to etch out a quick joke related to the story (I've a few that come to mind but I'll hold off as they are only borderline acceptable :P) as a tagline under a "In loving memory of Ireland's Reputation" and you've created a piece of content for less than €20 or so that could potentially land you a lot of attention. If you can get the timing right (as in extremely fast) and the tone of a joke like that right (that's the difficult part to be honest) it's very easy for it to greatly expand your reach and get your name in front of a lot of eyes.

That's a very specific example, but the general idea is to simply create content that people enjoy and want to share. If it saves them time or saves them money, great. If it makes them laugh, even better. As long as it creates the image you want for your business and is of value to your users, then it should be very helpful for your site.

(That's more for the long term though.... in the short term, get links anywhere you can that's a good site. Avoid anything that sounds questionable or strange. Spammy backlinks would cause far more trouble than they're worth. But if you can gain links from your local chamber of commerce, other businesses you work with, suppliers you have existing relationships with, friends or even strangers, get out there and get the word about your site out there.

Mr Porridge wrote: »

I actually only added meta keywords last night:

<meta name="keywords" content="Irish grave marker,Irish wooden grave marker cross, Ireland, Irish Celtic Crosses,Crosses,Celtic, celtic crosses,crosses, wooden celtic crosses,engraved memorial plaques, wooden crosses for graves, wood crosses for sale, crosses for sale, grave plaques ireland, Irish Wooden Grave Marker Cross,Oak, solid Mahogany,solid Iroko, solid Cedar, cross engraving,celtic plaques, irish cross, irish grave cross,celtic grave marker, irish wooden grave marker ">

This was not in the code previously. Will/could this make a difference in a couple of days?

No.

The keywords meta tag was so heavily abused for so long that it's basically just ignored now by the search engines. If you are going to retain one, cut it down a lot. Focus on a small number, say five or less, of keywords that are directly relevant for that page. So, for example, is your homepage the best page for "solid Iroko" on your site? So remove that (and potentially put it on the Iroko page) from the list. Given the number of pages on your site and the work you'll be doing in other areas (which would give a far greater return than rewriting your keyword meta tags), I'd suggest simply deleting all of them for the moment.

Mr Porridge

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

The homepage is in the index, the keyword in question is on the page and in the domain name (though it could be optimised further) so it already has relevance for the keyword search so then it's purely down to the other sites outranking it. Waiting a couple of days won't change anything there.

There's huge improvements that can easily be made to the site from an SEO point of view, so that's the good news (the bad news is you'll have a hell of a lot of work to make all the changes). I'd suggest throwing it up in the website reviews section to get a nice critical analysis of it from a few points of view (things like the logo being way too large and you ending up with a 1/3 of the most valuable real estate on your site being wasted are an issue, one where the designers could give far better feedback than I could). I'll do a quick SEO run down on it if/when I get a little free time too. The two biggest problems from a glance are a severe lack of content on the site (textual content, you've tonnes of images but not enough words) and of the content that is there there's a huge amount of it that's repeated page after page (a major issue where the search engine will view your site as containing major duplicate content with only minor changes between pages and your performance will suffer as a result)

Yes. A backlink is a hyperlink, which just means you can click on it, that appears on any page on the internet that points at your site. If the page in question is on your own website that's called an internal link, if it's a link on your site pointing to a different website that'd be called an external link and if it's anywhere else on the net and pointing at your site we'd commonly call that an incoming link or simply a backlink. So, for example, the links in the original post of this thread are backlinks to your site.

The search engines use backlinks as votes of confidence in a site and assign trust and authority based on them, which then plays a major part in how your site ranks. There are a huge number of factors that play a part in rankings, but links are still right up there at the top in terms of their weightings and importance (think about how you manage to stumble across new sites, in most cases it'll be following a link on a site you visit a lot, on a forum like here or on a social site where it's shared by a friend type of thing).

The 'best way' to build backlinks to your site is to have others do it for you. I don't mean hiring a team of people to do it, I mean having a site that's so good, having content that's so valuable, giving a user experience that's so positive that anyone who visits your site is happy and even keen to share it.

You're in the unfortunate position that it's a delicate area you operate in and needs to be handled in a slightly more reserved manner than most. People, I'd imagine (happy to admit I've never worked in the area and to be honest could be very wrong in some of the assumptions I'm making), would be slower in linking to a site that has even a slight connection to graves or death. I think here in Ireland we're super keen to simply avoid it as a topic of conversation, never give it any thought and simply fight our way through it blindly when the situation does arrive on our doorstep.

Having said that, a little creativity and thinking outside of the box and you can still achieve great results I'm sure. Something like the release of the anglo tapes could easily be turned into an opportunity, in spite of the disconnect between your business and the banking scandal. A short investment into one of your own plaques, a short bit of time to etch out a quick joke related to the story (I've a few that come to mind but I'll hold off as they are only borderline acceptable :P) as a tagline under a "In loving memory of Ireland's Reputation" and you've created a piece of content for less than €20 or so that could potentially land you a lot of attention. If you can get the timing right (as in extremely fast) and the tone of a joke like that right (that's the difficult part to be honest) it's very easy for it to greatly expand your reach and get your name in front of a lot of eyes.

That's a very specific example, but the general idea is to simply create content that people enjoy and want to share. If it saves them time or saves them money, great. If it makes them laugh, even better. As long as it creates the image you want for your business and is of value to your users, then it should be very helpful for your site.

(That's more for the long term though.... in the short term, get links anywhere you can that's a good site. Avoid anything that sounds questionable or strange. Spammy backlinks would cause far more trouble than they're worth. But if you can gain links from your local chamber of commerce, other businesses you work with, suppliers you have existing relationships with, friends or even strangers, get out there and get the word about your site out there.

No.

The keywords meta tag was so heavily abused for so long that it's basically just ignored now by the search engines. If you are going to retain one, cut it down a lot. Focus on a small number, say five or less, of keywords that are directly relevant for that page. So, for example, is your homepage the best page for "solid Iroko" on your site? So remove that (and potentially put it on the Iroko page) from the list. Given the number of pages on your site and the work you'll be doing in other areas (which would give a far greater return than rewriting your keyword meta tags), I'd suggest simply deleting all of them for the moment.

Thank you for taking time to visit my site and for replying with such helpful advice. You have touched on things there that I would never have thought of myself. It is not very often that somebody goes to such lengths to help another person out like that. Your advice is greatly appreciated! I will start to slowly make the changes that you have suggested and I will also ask for some critical analyses on the website review section.

Sincere thanks,

Mr Porridge

cgriffin

Decent looking site OP and I noticed you have gone with a Shopify platform which seems to be growing in popularity at an impressive rate.
Paul has certainly given some fantastic advice here.
One thing that I think you need to focus on is that your SEO strategy should not focus on your homepage only. Instead every single page on your website needs to be optimised for traffic.
You got a much better chance of converting a site visitor to a customer if they click through from a search engine to your product pages such as "51" Irish Wooden Grave Marker Cross - Solid Mahogany - 3 Silver Effect Plaques - Teak Oil Finish" as opposed to your homepage.
You need original content on every page and you need to be clever with your Title and meta description tagging.
Incidently I would remove the "Shipping Worldwide" from your Meta Description on your homepage as its not doing anything for you.
As Paul said some Off Page SEO work is well worthwhile. I guess you have taken a first step by getting a link on Boards.ie;)
A simple way to get some external links is setting up social media accounts (Note the social media links at the footer of your site are currently directing to the shopify pages)
Try to get links from funeral director websites, church sites and anything in anyway related to such occasions etc.
Start a blog section on the site and write original content about celtic crosses (the history of the celtic cross, why people order a celtic cross, etc)
Might also be worth opening an account on Ebay to see if there is a market for your products on that platform as it can take a long while to get a lot of traction through a new website.

RobGJ

You've gotten a lot of great feedback and I concur with the majority of it.. One site that is very useful to help sort out your onsite SEO is http://www.seocentro.com/ - have a look at it and systematically go page by page through your site until you get green lights there.. To date your efforts seem to be paying off as well as before you weren't on the top two pages for "irish celtic crosses" but now, with my google.com search at least, you're coming in in 12th spot. Keep chipping away at it, page by page and as suggested by others get some social backlinks at the same time and you should continue to rise..Good luck..

Jonny Blaze

Could take a look at this starter guide published by google if you haven't already?

https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Mr Porridge

cgriffin wrote: »

Decent looking site OP and I noticed you have gone with a Shopify platform which seems to be growing in popularity at an impressive rate.
Paul has certainly given some fantastic advice here.
One thing that I think you need to focus on is that your SEO strategy should not focus on your homepage only. Instead every single page on your website needs to be optimised for traffic.
You got a much better chance of converting a site visitor to a customer if they click through from a search engine to your product pages such as "51" Irish Wooden Grave Marker Cross - Solid Mahogany - 3 Silver Effect Plaques - Teak Oil Finish" as opposed to your homepage.
You need original content on every page and you need to be clever with your Title and meta description tagging.
Incidently I would remove the "Shipping Worldwide" from your Meta Description on your homepage as its not doing anything for you.
As Paul said some Off Page SEO work is well worthwhile. I guess you have taken a first step by getting a link on Boards.ie;)
A simple way to get some external links is setting up social media accounts (Note the social media links at the footer of your site are currently directing to the shopify pages)
Try to get links from funeral director websites, church sites and anything in anyway related to such occasions etc.
Start a blog section on the site and write original content about celtic crosses (the history of the celtic cross, why people order a celtic cross, etc)
Might also be worth opening an account on Ebay to see if there is a market for your products on that platform as it can take a long while to get a lot of traction through a new website.

Thank you for your advice.

I will remove the 'worldwide shipping' from the meta description now. I take on board what you said about optimising every page, not just the home page. It makes a lot of sense. It will take me a little time to do this.

I know its bad but I have not set up any social networking for the business yet but its on my to do list.

I have sold successfully on eBay (I actually have one 51" cross on sale at the minute - the main pic is water marked with my website addy www.irishcelticcrosses.com ) but I find it to be very expensive. The cost of additional photos is a lot and on top of this there are the insertion and sales fees for the fixed price listings. The fees force me to increase the price (and reduce sales) or keep the price the same as the website (and reduce the profit). The single ad on eBay points some eBay traffic to the site.

I'm currently contacting genealogy sites and offering link exchanges and i'm going to target funeral directors next as you say. I've been told that they usually provide temporary grave markers as part of the funeral package. My grave markers are suitable for long term use so there is no harm in asking for link exchanges with them.

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

RobGJ wrote: »

You've gotten a lot of great feedback and I concur with the majority of it.. One site that is very useful to help sort out your onsite SEO is http://www.seocentro.com/ - have a look at it and systematically go page by page through your site until you get green lights there.. To date your efforts seem to be paying off as well as before you weren't on the top two pages for "irish celtic crosses" but now, with my google.com search at least, you're coming in in 12th spot. Keep chipping away at it, page by page and as suggested by others get some social backlinks at the same time and you should continue to rise..Good luck..

Thanks for the encouragement and for the link to that site.

I will use it to help to optimise the SEO. I'll continue to chip away slowly as you say - it takes so much time!

Kind Regards

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

Jonny Blaze wrote: »

Could take a look at this starter guide published by google if you haven't already?

https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Hi,

Thanks for the link to the guide, I didn't know about this. I'm going to have a read of it now.

Many thanks,

Mr Porridge.

Mr Porridge

Hi All,

Just to let the followers of this thread that I have migrated my website to:

www.IrishGraveMarkers.com

I've decided to do this as I believe it is a more relevant address.

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge.

Mr Porridge

Hi all,

I cannot believe the difference after changing my website to the new address www.irishgravemarkers.com

Getting a lot of traffic but more importantly the bounce rate is reducing! There is a lot more engagement and interaction.

Thanks everyone for the advice so far. I'm always open to more feedback, comments, criticisms and compliments!

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge

Mr Porridge

Can anyone advise me how to further improve my website?

I would like to get more conversions and need some guidance.

There might be some poor aspects to my site that I cannot see but a fresh pair of eyes would see.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge.

Mr Porridge

Please tell me if you think my website background image is okay?

www.irishgravemarkers.com

Kind Regards,

Mr Porridge