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Many of you may have noticed some of my posts in various forums. But for those that have not, a quick background.
I'm not an SEO specialist. I had an e-commerce site that had done well till summer, when we changed to dynamic. During the florida update, we did not improve at all on our dismassal ranking in google. When we knew we had a problem in the summer, we began an adwords campaign. Between Aug and Oct we did some minor tweaking, we spent most of the time reviewing and rechecking our navigation, we made a site map.
In November, I started devoting myself full time to the problem. By full time, I mean I increase my daily work hours from 9 a day to 16-18 hours a day, plus 10-12 on Saturdays and Sundays.
In the last 3 days, we are back from oblivion, We have begun ranking very well on most relevant terms and phrases. We are still ranking terrible on our most common key phrases. But that is only about 6 phrases out of several hundred and it might just take a little more tweaking, but at least I know that all my time is now paying off and that will make it much easier getting back in the good graces of my very patient wife.
Tomorrow, I'll continue this post by discussing what we feel was wrong, what we feel has worked and what didn't do diddly for us. Hopefully, I can give something back even if it is only the assurance to someone to not just give up, to keep plugging away and be patient. As Brett said in one of his articles, its a matter of refine, rinse, repeat and wait. Don't plan on the results coming quick, it may take a month or two.
Let me end tody by saying thanks to all the people who post here and watch over these boards. Being able to come here, ask questions, listen to your thoughts and read your ideas gave me much of the motivation I needed to get up in the morning and go at it again even when I way too tired.
Thanks Everyone!
It is such a buzz when someone who you have helped remembers to say thanks, so many people post question after question, receive so much help, yet do not bother to thank..
Well done mate
[edited by: pageoneresults at 9:54 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]
Remember, I'm writing this for people that are struggling and frustrated. Some people will say that what I recommend it not necessary or may not be a problem. They can point out several examples or even have a site that is performing well with things that I point out as potential problems. I can find several sites as well, but that didn't help me climb back towards the top. If your struggling and frustrated, you need ideas to try. This is merely what worked for us.
1. Our Dynamic URLs. I spent alot of time trying to find somebody discussing dynamic urls that would say something that re-assured me that this wasn't our biggest problem. I had a suspicion it was. Some said they were ok, some said they were not.
Most of our urls went something like this: [widget.com...] or [widget.com...]
There has been much discussion about "id" in the dynamic url and when it's ok and when it not. I will simply say that in my opinion, unless your considered an internet powerbroker by many of the search engines like amazon or best buy, keep "id" from being in the url at all. Better yet, eliminate them or the appearance of them altogether.
The first thing I did was take all of product category pages and make them static with urls like www.widget.com/category567.asp. I did it this way because at the time we could not do a rewrite on our windows server because our host would not allow ISAPI Rewrite or any other rewrite software to be installed. I will talk more about this in a minute, but in my scramble to get us on the upswing, I just made them static any quick way I could. In a couple of crawls, all 30 of our category pages where now getting indexed in google.
About rewriting dynamic urls. If your on a windows server, you have to use or your host has to allow you to use something like ISAPI Rewrite, an isapi module for windows. If your on an apache server, you can use an existing function called Mod-rewrite, it is standard and does the exact samething as ISAPI Rewrite, just start reading about it and implement it.
For those on windows servers, /it might be a little more complicated, but I'll cut right to best advice I can give you. Use a rewrite product like ISAPI Rewrite. If your on shared hosting and your host is not willing to allow you to use it, find a different host. I'll repeat that again, if they are not willing to let you use it or don't already offer it, find a different host. If you need a recommendation, sticky me and I'll share with you who we are now hosting with. The main point here is you should definitely rewrite those dynamic urls.
To experiment on how beneficial and worthwhile rewriting the urls was going to be, I first moved a new site of ours to a new host that offered the ISAPI Rewrite module. The site was pretty much completely dynamic beyond the index page. It had 50 categories and 3000 products. I moved it on Dec 12th and at the time it only had 2 pages indexed in google. As of this morning it has 1023 pages indexed and appears to be increasing each week.
Tomorrow, I'll continue on as promised.
