Help me with my new website SEO diagnosis

[Johnsui]

Hello every SEO professionals. I am a newcomer here and I know very little about SEO. Recently my company decides to do international trade and construct a website. But the problem is how to make SEO for it? How to make it crawled by google as soon as possible? what should I do to make the website better?
I also use SEO tools and generate some report and sitmap file. But I don't know what to do with this file. Anyone can help me?
A million thanks in advance!

[RedBar]

Recently my company decides to do international trade and construct a website.

You are jesting?

Simply build a website to your totally inexperienced company and they will come?

Go on, tell me, everyone has MBAs?

[not2easy]

Everyone started somewhere. I remember when I had a product to sell and decided to build a website to help me sell it. Of course, that was long ago and things were a little different.

Welcome to the forums Johnsui. If your job is to help get things going, try a visit to the Webmaster Guidelines and from there you find out how to get it started right: [support.google.com...]
It isn't so much about secrets and tricks, more to do with the right way to give your visitors what they are looking for when they visit your site. The guidelines also tell you how to let Google know where to look and what they want to find. If you can do that, and do it better than others, you can have a chance for a successful business.

[lucy24]

Recently my company decides to do international trade and construct a website.

What was your company doing before? How long had they been doing it? How much did they know about it, and how successful were they?

Did they previously have no website at all, or is this about moving from dot in or dot hk or similar to dot com?

[RedBar]

This is my 47th year in international business, this will be my 22nd year in constructing international business websites...don't expect that kind of experience and knowledge to be posted for free, if something is then it most probably isn't worth very much.

I do realise you are not asking for business advice however it is all very intertwined.

[Johnsui]

Thanks for everyone's reply. In fact, what confused me is what I can do to promote my website and need a diagnosis over the website.
the site is <snip>

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:55 am (utc) on May 11, 2015]
[edit reason] Please no links or calls for site review as per Forum Charter [/edit]

[RedBar]

One thing you will have to consider and that is the global market demand for your product. In some countries the demand for your product has been completely wiped out, you need to discover which countries have a thriving production base, visit the country, investigate the market demand, exhibit at national trade shows and go from there.

Expecting your English language website to automatically attract international trade buyers has an extremely remote possibility of success.

Here's a question for you. How do you promote your products in your country?

[samwest]

One word of advice on SEO "It will give you exactly enough rope to hang yourself with". If you know "very little about SEO", hire a pro but don't expect any miraculous results.

[tangor]

Johnsui... welcome... and...

One step at a time. First, know your business and know your market(s). Build a website. G (and Bing) will find it... as well as Y and the other Y. Make the site user specific before you attempt any so-called SEO (which is a BS term for keep pluggin' the product). Six months minimum for any kind of metrics, two years for any sense of trend/growth. This is not overnight magic UNLESS YOU HAVE the world's best mousetrap... something so utterly necessary (or desirable) that folks just can't say no to expending whatever they have to get it. By the way, if you have that kind of product, don't worry about SEO or your website. :)

What you CAN do and SHOULD do is avoid all the traps and tribulations (such as link exchange, paid links, black hat, etc.). Run a clean operation and give it the time necessary to get started. Oh, and oodles of cash for print, radio, tv advertising and/or film endorsement spots in the next James Bond or Star Wars movie (examples) ... or pay into Adsense to get the word out.

Call it 7 billion on the planet. 4 billion know what a smartphone or a computer is, 1 billion use those, 2 billion websites with at least 2 trillion pages (and a million more pages each day!), and... wait for it, about 500 million ( that's million not billion) with income sufficient for cost of living, housing, AND discretionary funds to buy products not related to the necessary.... so the market is pretty small, even with those huge, grand numbers. And the sharks trying to get a piece of that pie are starving daily with their billions and billions of pages selling, in come cases, snake oil.

It's a hot mess and only gets worse with time... but time is what you have to invest to get through the signal to noise ratio, to find that market, that sweet spot where your product and your company can shine.

Good Luck!

(And as has been said prior in thread, if there is a magic bullet you can be dang sure we, or me, will never share it on the web!)

[Nutterum]

First and foremost, welcome to the webmasterworld forums.

A peice of advice. The folks here (including me) are willing to help out. However what we can do for you is answer specific questions. How to do SEO is like asking how to get to the moon. Believe me when I tell you that the answer "Via Rocket!" is not one you are looking for.

Do your research, read the support forums and info provided by Google and Bing and start from there. And another thing, if you are looking for international presence be sure to write quality content, A LOT of content and maybe after 6 months to an year you can come back and share your results and ask more detailed questions the community can help you with.

As a starter let me give you some broad food for thought tips that I believe can be helpful to you in the long run :
1) create your perfect international website visitor. Make his imaginary profile so detailed that you can easily envision him or her shaking hands on a business deal
2) create your website with that profile in mind. Colors, usability, image and text content - the works
3) Once the website design and initial content is done - host it on a .com or .net domain using your brand name(if possible)
4) Link your website with google analytics, webmaster tools and third party monitoring services(if needed)
5) Create, polish and update your social media profiles
6) Define the niche you are. What you want to sell, how do you want to reach your potential customers. What keywords do you think those visitors will use to search for your or related products
7) Write _quality_ content your "dream visitors" would like to read. The more the merrier.
8) test - test - test

Hope this helps.

[RedBar]

@Nutterum As relevant as all your points are Johnsui has a basic marketing issue, his widget specialised machinery is something that was commonplace in many countries 20/30/40 years ago, however much of the demand for this machinery has been decimated because of very cheap export products from several low cost countries.

They need to identify where their potential markets are for their machinery, an all bells and whistles websites will not do the job, companies who buy any sophisticated machinery have the specialist fairs they frequent. Granted they may search first but in my experience companies spending this amount of money perform massive amounts of in-depth product knowledge first, it is certainly not a spur of the moment purchasing decision.

[Leosghost]

Knowing Johnsui's site ( saw it before the "snip" ) I agree totally with RedBar's post directly above mine..

"1st World "demand for this kind of "widget" was decades ago..

"2nd World" demand for this kind of "widget" was filled within the last two decades and the "widgets" purchased are still running..

"3rd world" ( "emerging nations" ) and countries looking to become manufacturing bases for the kind of "widgets" that are made by the machines that Johnsui's company makes, may be interested..
depending on detailed specs , prices, spares, service contracts, kickbacks to buyers, credit facilities etc on offer, and a whole host of other things that apply to the manufacturing industries that the widgets are for ..

But, trade shows and one to one face to face meetings are where this kind of stuff is discussed and bought..These are large investments..How you treat the potential buyers and the relationships that you are able to form with them are far more important than what your website looks like..

What you will need on your site is very very detailed specifications, throughput figures, running times between downtimes for servicing etc..information about spare parts, your customer service deals and on site repair and operator training etc etc..

You are selling high investment cost machines that allow others to make products..you have to stress the reliability of your machines, and how they can make your customers make money ( without headaches for them about machines idle due to breakdowns, setting up times etc ) You need to stress how fast and accurate your machines are , how they can work hard for the customer, and how that will allow the customer to keep their own customers happy..

This..is ..the..real..world..

Granted they may search first but in my experience companies spending this amount of money perform massive amounts of in-depth product knowledge first, it is certainly not a spur of the moment purchasing decision.

Read what Redbar wrote there..and take it to heart..

Expect your customers to want to visit you ( at your expense ) to see your "widgets" in operation..


We have spent the past 2 years researching machines ( and materials ) to allow us to produce a new product line, purchase will be later this year, we'll run prototypes designs this year ( to see what the reaction of customers is ), real sales and production runs will not be until next year..We are a lot smaller than the kind of businesses that purchase what Johnsui makes, but I know many that use his "widgets"..IME minimum time between deciding to puchase and actually doing so is around 18 months, average time is more close to two and a half to three years, they also are not the kind of thing that a guy from fed-ex delivers in a small truck..

[edited by: Leosghost at 5:29 pm (utc) on May 13, 2015]

[netmeg]

I was just explaining yesterday to a new industrial B2B client - not every business is going to see search (paid or organic) as its primary marketing channel. Some niches are too specific, too small, too narrow, and too expensive. You want to be found if anyone's looking for you, but your primary marketing focus will need to be elsewhere.

[Leosghost]

One other thing..make a Spanish version of your site...and an Arabic version too*. Cuba is likely to be in the market for similar and associated "widgets" in the next year or so, ( they will want to be producing what your "widgets" can make for export ) some African and Maghrebin countries are also likely buyers for the same "widgets" also to manufacture items for export..

*Make sure that you have some sales staff who speak these languages, English is important, but your biggest potential markets are not in English ( as a first language ) speaking countries..

[mirrornl]

sitemap: is your sitemap xml? than upload it to the root of your server, like example.com/sitemap.xml, that's all.

do you have urls like example.com/show/cp/211 ? than make the urls seo-friendly, like example.com/yourmodel/
(after that 301 old url to new url, but that's another story, google it)

after this re-do your sitemap

ps. get other websites to put a link on their site to your website
pps. every single page needs a unique <title> and <meta name="description"......>

[Nutterum]

@Redbar and @Leosghost - I did not saw his website so I could not delve in to specifics. Hence why the first thing I wrote before my tips section was research. And by research I also include, research whether your business can "thrive" on the Internet or not. If NO - then build a respectable "business card" of a website branding your products. It will have next to nothing in terms of traffic but will supplement your business plan and goals.

That said, the points presented by Redbar and Leosghost are very VERY good and I fully back them up!

[Sameera Khan]

The initial thing which need to be done is to find search queries which everyone (target location) which everyone is using to find services or product which you offer.

If your website is in development phase, then you can focus on url structure of web pages where you can include target keywords in it. Along with this, you can also add website tile, meta description and meta keywords while coding.

Also add sitemap.xml for web pages indexing.

Add main categories in website navigation.

You can add keywords in heading tags of website content.

[supercyberbob]

I add keywords to robots.txt