A whopping 8 hits a day despite good listings

Desperatly Seeking Help

[rdcracing]

I paid a web designer alot of money to design a site (about 300 pages). The site is almost a year old now and I only receive about 8 main page hits a day. I did a paid submission twice now and still only receive about 8-12 main page hits. I optimized the main page myself and it now ranks in the top 10 in many catagories but with no success. Anyways I would appreciate any help on how to greatly improve this.
Have a great day.

[edited by: heini at 8:49 pm (utc) on July 6, 2003]
[edit reason] please don't use urls, thanks! [/edit]

[heini]

rdcracing, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

If you are really coming up in the top ten for many keywords in the important searchengines and still get no visitors I can only conclude those keywords are not used by many searchers.

Did you at some point try and find out what people looking for what you offer really use as keywords and phrases? Did you look up the competition, seeing what keywords/phrases they are targeting?

[rdcracing]

If I target the main keywords such as Binoculars I cant seem rank high enough to get noticed (I even did a looksmart feature listing that didnt put me in the top 20 pages and a tech from looksmart even helped optimize it for that catagory) but when I target the seconday words such as wholesale-Binoculars I rank high but those keywords arent very heavily searched (about 500 month according to the overture suggestion tool).

[rdcracing]

Some things I forgot to mention.
The designer that is not available anymore created the entire site in cgi script. I think every page shares the same page template which means all the pages shares the same frame and meta tag. If this is the case then the only thing that makes the pages different are the pictures, part# and price and I'm sure nobody will search for my specific part#. It gets worse! I decided on my own to create genaric html pages and have them linked directly off the main page which gives the customer an extra step before they purchase but it alows me to optamize the meta tags for each individual page. I did this 8 weeks and still havent been indexed (at least not that I know of because I'm still not showing up as being indexed) keep in mind I did a paid submission 9 weeks ago. So now I have twice as any pages and still average 8-12 hits day.
Thank you for the help

[Slade]

What kind of paid submissions are you doing?

If it's one of those "pay $10 and get listed on 10 thousand search engines", just stop, and don't waste your money any more.

[rdcracing]

Its not that type, It was a paid submission through a friend. I know the submission went through because my main page is being updated every 48 hours which is exactly what my robot revist tags says to do. But none of my other pages have been indexed or crawled.

[deejay]

paid submission with an update every two days? Sounds like an inktomi listing.

If so, then the payment will cover the one page only, and won't get other pages included unless they are paid for also.

Ink will crawl the other pages... eventually... and will eventually list them too, but it's likely to be months away.

[deejay]

If you are ranking well for your chosen keywords, then there are really three main possibilities to consider:

1 They're the wrong keywords. If it's a straight physical product you're selling this is less likely - a banana is a banana is a banana - but don't rule it out immediately. A sweater in the States is a jumper in Australia is a pullover in the UK.... or something like that.

2 Something about the way your site is listed in just unattractive to the viewer. Check the SERPs, compare your listing to those either side of you. Which one would you want to click on?

3 No 1 in all the wrong places. High rankings are lovely but pointless if the search engine you are ranking on doesn't get any traffic to speak of, or if it only gets academic traffic and you are a retailer, or any number of other reasons.

Suggest you have a read of the following two URLs to help you identify where to concentrate your efforts.

[webmasterworld.com...]

There is also a wonderful post from Brett somewhere that I couldn't find that lists the relationships between the search engines, which may be more up to date than the Bruce Clay one.

[le_gber]

Here is Brett's post on the search engine relationship chart:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Leo

[Maxformed]

It's a tricky, tricky world. I found some good info here

www.spider-food.net/

but again, it's only an opinion. My company site lists well, but I'm always searching for more hits, rather than ranking alone.

Good luck.

Max

[edited by: heini at 12:26 pm (utc) on July 8, 2003]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[g1smd]

As search engines index text and product catalogues are often devoid of text (except part number, price, and a very brief description - which may be almost exactly the same on hundreds of pages) maybe you should add more text about what the products can be used for to the product pages. That way you'll start coming up in more diverse searches.

[rdcracing]

First I want to think all for the help. This is truly a great place for advice. I believe you are correct deejay and it is a inktomi listing which means I will have to wait some time to be crawled (unfortunantly). The reading material you provided (including Bretts post)is also excellent and I need more time to soak it all in and learn from it. I have recently done exactly what you said g1smd and updated my text on each cgi page by including keyable words but again I now I have to wait until its crawled. I have to rely heavally on the intenet because we are a warehouse distribution center and I rely on both my sales reps and the internet for exposure to our new company(advertising is just to costly at this point until we can start to generate profits). We are actually a manufacturer for a very well know company and now prodcuing our own line (which I cant say here). I didnt think getting our own product reconized would be so difficult. I think the new pages I created and optimized will do well provided they are crawled. Are there any ways to get all my new pages crawled more quickly?

[le_gber]

Hello rdcracing,

To market your products you could also go for overture PPC and/or Addword. I believe once you paid, you see the bots more often.

You could also increase the number of links to your site (you could ask for example to exchange a link with your well known company - providing they've got a website and it's best if they have a good PR ;) )

For overture info: [webmasterworld.com...]
For addword info: [webmasterworld.com...]
For link development info: [webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps

Leo

[rdcracing]

Thanks Leo,
I did exactly that and did a addword yesterday. In the past week what I have noticed ... that 1 or 2 of my new pages are being added every few days (even the addword page I did yesterday). Although these pages are not yet listed, it does seem they are being indexed. Is this normal for Google to slowly come in and add a few pages at a time? and if they are being indexed how long thereafter before they actualy show up in the engine?

Rich

[edited by: heini at 12:26 pm (utc) on July 8, 2003]
[edit reason] please don' t drop urls thanks [/edit]

[le_gber]

Up until a few month google used to crawl the pages with 2 different bots: fresh and deep.

The deepbot usually crawlled the whole site a couple of days after a google dance/update and what it found was indexed the following month.

The fresh bot was crawling continuously and your pages were sometimes in the index and sometimes not: it was called eveflux.

Nowadays, nobody's sure what exactly is going on (I think), and if somebody knows he/she forgot to tell me ;). Some believe there's now only on bot, deepfreshbot, doing a continuous update.

For more info check the google forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

and for current theories check these threads:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

and if you're in the UK
[webmasterworld.com...]

Leo

[onlineleben]

2 things to consider to get your site crawled and indexed.

1) get it listed in directories like DMOZ (free but takes time) and/or Yahoo. Get qualitiy links from sites related to your topic that are already indexed by major SEs

2) make sure that the navigation of your site is OK and accessible to spiders. Also creating a sitemap that is accessible from the homepage is sometimes a good idea.

Regarding PPC/adwords: you may try it on a limited budget to get an idea how it works. use keyword combinations that users would type in to find your site. combinations are often cheaper than using generic single keywords.

Hope this helps a little.
Good luck!