Forum Moderators: mack
There are things that you can do with your site (titles on the auction pages being an obvious one).
I think you would be well served by just tidying up the basics then concentrating on word of mouth and building links with sites that are of interest to your visitors.
Don't be afraid to link out to other sites, it's a sign that you care about your visitors being served well (try not to link to people doing exactly what you do though).
Some issues:
Homepage title - Too long and you need the 'rare, first edition, out of print' to be close to the start (or at the start). Someone reading your title in a search engine will just see you sell books, and may not see that you sell rare books (people scan results, they dont read them)
Links page - Sort it so the most useful links are most visible, to be honest it's a mess in Firefox (an alternative web browser)
Content - Write some interesting stuff and put it on the site
I hope that helps
As has been mentioned, you do need more content pages, and what you do have needs tidying up - titles/headers/metas etc.
3 months is not long to start worrying - it can oftern take 6 months or more for G to index sites properly.
Destroy your rankings.
it's like hiring a writer to write content for your site, or a designer to build your site
a good seo company will market your site
if you don't like the results, stop paying them
there are a lot of bad seo marketers, and you shouldn't join anyone who will market your site for free, as their methods will prolly get you banned from search engines... but, any good marketing company can do wonders for your business - and the good ones will build and host your site as part of the package
but this is obviously somewhat expensive, though not as expensive as marketing via other media like tv, newspapers, etc.
Google likes <h1> and <h2>, and you can amend their effect using a separate CSS file.
Your home page also needs more text relevant to what you are selling. Instead of using an image for the text, use text!
As you are selling books, drop the Adsense adverts. They imply your business is amateurish. Make your money from the auction business, not from advertising.
Similarly, lose the childish web ring. It's not appropriate for a professional site, more for a hobby site.
I hope I haven't come across as too brutal, I am honestly trying to help.
Matt
i find that people are more comfortable knowing they are google ads, because clicking on them won't necessarily pop up spyware, junk ads, etc.
and the google ads for the most part actually do provide some relevance to the site they are on
A skilled SEO team would find which of your products are not already well ranked for the big industry players. Yes it would be rather time consuming. Yes it would need the skills of a programmer and an analyst.
Attempting to compete on thousands of fronts at once in a competitive market is never going to work. You've got to pick your battles. When you're making good sales on the battles you've won, you can afford the additional investment to tackle some of the more competitive products.
Also look for alternative promotion methods. Most products have an image no larger than 200x350px. Providing a high quality image of the product and applying good SEO principles to the name and linking structure will quickly garner you click in traffic from google images and other image libraries. Yes it will take time to get new images of all the products, yes it will take days uploading photos and renaming them, but yes, it's more exposure, which means more traffic, and more sales.
Having read these, make sure you don't pick an SEO firm which offers you a generic campaign of links and changing titles.
