Why Isn't My New Website Getting More Traffic?

A lot of people think if they build a website and submit it to search engines the world will beat a path to their door, but this isn't how the Internet works. It used to be that way, but not any more due to so many websites on the web now.

Google will usually boost a new website for a few months but then let the rank drop, even if you have gathered plenty of links. One of the major ranking features is age so older websites will likely outrank newer ones. New websites usually don't start ranking well until they are a year old.

The best thing to do is build the website a year before you expect it to gain much traffic and to keep adding more pages and gathering backlinks during the first year.

However, if you build your website in Frames, with the whole home page in Flash, the menu or links in images, build it a CMS site (a program where someone who knows nothing about web design can build a site by cut and pasting text and images) or a site built in a WYSIWYG program like Front Page or Dreamweaver when the person is not experienced in cleaning the code in those programs your website may never gain any traffic due to all those features or programs causing indexing problems in search engines.

If your website is over a year old and still isn't geting much traffic, contact Lori to have your website evaluated to determine what else might be the reason for lack of search engine traffic.

Lori Eldridge
© 9-12-08
All rights reserved

Reasons to Not to Hire Offshore Web Designers

I've helped several clients that had hired offshore developers to design their website and inevitably they were ripped off and needed their website redesigned. The following are some problems to watch out for when considering hiring offshore web designers.

1. Unless they speak and write good English you may experience language difficulties.

2. Time zone differences may mean you can't call each other during business hours.

3. The designer being located in another country means you cannot meet face to face.

4. Cheaper hourly wages don't necessrily translate into quality work. Language difficulties can result in longer hours and higher design costs.

5. They cannot possibly understand marketing in the USA when living in a foreign country.

6. By hiring design work offshore you are hampering the employment of designers in the USA.

7. Paying for services in other countries can be very difficult, requiring foreign currency exchange and may incure extra banking expenses.

8. Even if "they" provide an escrow account you have no protection if it's located in another country.

9. There is an increased risk of identity theft when transfering funds from your bank to a foreign bank account.

10. Designers from other countries do not always operate with the same morals as designers in the US, i.e., they may copy the content off other websites and you won't know it until your site goes online and is penalized by the search engines. Guess who will be sued if this happens???

11. You'll have to give the designer the password to your hosting account so it should be someone you trust.

12. If you allow them to purchase the domain name for you they may put the domain in their name as the registrant, in which case you will be paying the domain fee, the design costs and hosting for a domain you don't even own. If you fire them you can loose everything and have to pay an exorbitant fee to get the domain back.

13. If they don't perform as they promised you have no recourse because US courts have no jurisdiction in other countries.

14. You may have to hire someone else to fix the website.

The old addage is true in this case:
You Get What You Paid For!

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 7-22-08
All Rights Reserved

How to Outrank your Competitors in Local Search

There are several things you can do to outrank your competitors for local search. The following applies to the home page because it usually has higher PR (Page Rank) and likely to rank higher than your other pages.

1. Chose your major keyword phrase and include the name of your city and use that in a few places in the text of your page, i.e., "Blue Widgets Spokane Wa"

2. If you only want to rank well in your own city and you don't care about international or worldwide ranking then put the name of your city first before your keywords in your title, description and keyword tags.

3. If you want to rank internationally and worldwide put the name of your city after your main keywords in the description and keyword tags and last in your title.

4. Include the name of your city in image alt tags where appropriate.

5. Put the name of your city in your copyright statement

6. List your address and other contact information with the name of your city,

7. Write a page focused specifically on your city, including the city name in the alt tags of related images on that page, and include the city name in the file name of that page also and link to it from the home page.

8. Submit your site to Google and Yahoo's local search for your city.

9. Submit your site to local directories featuring your city.

10. Submit your site to directories that require you to submit in a regional category listing your city.

11. Consider moving to a host in your city if you live in a large metropolitan area. Otherwise a local host may not be a good idea unless you check them out thoroughly.

It won't do any good to stuff comment tags because search engines don't use them. Over doing repetition of your city name in the title, description or the text on the page or image alt tags can cause an overoptimization penalty so take it easy.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 7-20-08
All Rights Reserved

A Bad Host can Affect your Keyword Ranking

I've been working on a website for a client for over 2 years trying to get his 3 main keyword phrases to page one with generic ranking to no avail. Cleaning up the code helped a lot and slowly gathering links helped some but all 3 phrases were lagging around page 3 on Google, UNTIL he moved his site off the host.

One week after he moved the site, all 3 phrases started slowly climbing higher than ever, breaking all past records, one of which just jumped to the first page and is still climbing. This was not due to submitting to sites that allow anchor text either because I've never used one of the terms in anchor text. This is a rank increase affecting the whole site. Currently there are no competitors above this site now, only Wiki, CNN and another useless site featuring the same keywords.

There are no new links pointing at this site so that's not the reason for this jump either. It can only be because of extricating the site from that bad host. This major leap to the top of Google's results means 2 years of effort were put on hold due to a bad host.

I won't mention the name of the old host to protect the guilty, however it rhymes with High Tower.

If you want to see a host that I recommend see my article on hosting scams.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 7-8-08
All Rights Reserved

.

Beware of Traffic Generating Schemes

I just analyzed a traffic generating site for a client and want to relay this information for others so they won't be taken in by these kinds of ploys. I'm not linking to the site or mentioning the name but you may be able to recognize it by the details below.

This particular traffic generating scheme encourages you to post links to other sites and other sites will be asked to link to your site. They put code in the links so you can track your traffic and you pay according to how much traffic you can afford. The problem is YOU must tell them who you want to link to and also who you would like to link to your site too, and you also have to provide contact emails for each site, i.e., you're doing all the work to find those links and yet you're paying them for this "service". All they do is send out (automated) emails to all those people and try and get them to sign up for their service.

They don't have any other info on their website, no testimonies, no proof that their service has helped others, no list of subscribers, etc. Also their site has PR 0 (Page Rank Zero) and they aren't even indexed in Google.

If this is such a great service why are they doing so poorly? Surely they would use their own techniques to boost their own site. It's a new site that went up in Feb of this year but even 4 months is more than enough for their whole site to get indexed. They may have already been banned from Google because their plan is designed to manipulate Google.

The problem with these kinds of services is that it's likely that related sites will be linking to each other and the links to other sites will have extra code in the link so they/you can track the traffic. This produces a pattern that Google can identify as a network which can incur a penalty in Google.

Also exchanging links with other sites is known as reciprocal linking and they cancel each other out as far as their ranking benefit is concerned. They may bring traffic but if Google penalizes this particular bunch of links for being involved in a "network" then none of them will rank high enough to gain any visitors/traffic.

Google is bound and determined to penalize sites that are manipulating their engine so I wouldn't get involved in such a scheme.


Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 6-24-08
All Rights Reserved

Mini Mac is the Best!

I picked up one of my laptops from my Mac repairman yesterday and he said, after I told him that my main computer is a Mac Mini, that he never sees those in his repair shop because they are so dependable.

I believe it's true because I've had my Mac Mini for at least 3 years now and have never had it in for repairs when I've had 3 laptops in for major problems. My Win XP won't even turn on any more, my Powerbook G4 lost it's monitor and my iBook G4 has narcolepsy. The laptops were all bought used but they were good computers while they lasted.

GO MINI MAC!!

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 6-13-08
All Rights Reserved

Beware of Using Free Web Templates

I've checked out several sites that offer free web templates and most of them contain the following design flaws that will cripple your website.

* Navigation in Javascript (search engine's can't read text in Javascript so they won't see the links to your inner pages).
* No Doc Type (which tells the browser what kind of Code the site is designed in, HTML, XHTML, etc.).
* No Character set (tells the browser what kind of language to expect- english, etc.
* Images in menu buttons use numbers instead of keywords affecting keyword ranking.
* They put their own business name in image alt tags so YOUR site will rank for their business name.
* File names are all relative (index.html) which causes a duplicate content penalty in search engines.
* Code bloat due to deprecated code and not fully utilizing CSS.
* Nested tables causing indexing problems.
* Not tested in all browsers.
* Inadequate instruction.

They ALL require a link back to their web site as the designer, so the template isn't really free becaue you are providing them a free link. You can't ever remove it either, unless you do a complete redesign, because you never paid for it.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 6-6-08
All Rights Reserved

Linking to Bad Neighborhoods Can Ruin your PageRank

.
Did your website or one of your webpages drop in rank recently (both in page rank and keyword rank). It could be the result of linking to a bad neighborhood. A bad neighborhood is a site that the quality search engines won't link to. Google's Webmaster Guidelines states:

"In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

WHAT IS A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD?

(following words are misspelled on purpose to prevent this page for being tagged as a bad neighborhood)

Link Farms (automated linking and uncategorized)
Triangular Linking Schemes (you link to my other site and I'll link to your site from this site).
FFA (Free For All Directory)
Gammbbling sites.
Pooorrnnnoo sites.
Sexxxxxxx and ADDUlt sites
Web spammers (keyword stuffing on the page or in the code)
Websites that have been banned by Google (gray page rank bar)

You may not receive a penalty or drop in keyword rank for just a few bad neighborhood links but it's not safe to take a chance. Delete anything that looks suspicious.

You can check the links visually but then you have to check the all the outgoing links of the site you are linking to also.

Here is a tool that checks sites for Bad Neighboorhoods. However it is not flawless. It will show bad links for sites that have links to innocent articles warning about Poooorrrnno and Sexxxxx and Gammbbling and even tags SafeSurf as a bad neighboorhood because they have an article doing the same. Christian sites discussing the same are really in trouble according to this tool. I used to have a FreeFind search tool on my site but they had bad neighborhood links so I removed them just to be safe. And I've seen the same problems with Stat Counter linking to questionable sites. The owner of this tool states that when warnings show up it's just an indication that you need to do further checking on that site yourself, not that you will be banned for those links. This tool will also show you where there are 404 errors (broken links) to sites you are linking to so it's useful in that respect.

If you know of a more discriminating tool please let me know.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 3-9-08
All Rights Reserved

How to Increase Website Traffic During a Recession.

.
Consider Main Holidays. Unless your website sells retail items your traffic may drop during the holidays. You can increase traffic for each holiday by promoting something that people will be searching for during those holidays. For instance I set up a turkey animation on my graphics pages and I get a 25% increase in traffic during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. On my poetry site I have a bible study on what day of the week Christ died, which I believe was a Thursday, which doubles my traffic for that site around the Easter Holiday. What time of year does your website traffic slow down? Pick a holiday near that time and focus on things of interest to those people.

Your Favorite Hobby: If your website is commercial in nature you can increase traffic by providing free content. In what area do you have special talents? If you're a good photographer you can offer free photos to increase traffic. If you're a good cook provide free recipies. A good musician can profide free audios of music. If you have a consultant service offer free consulation once a month. If you are an inspector offer free advice in your area of expertise.

Set up a Blog: Keep your blog on the same focus as your website but write posts more like news briefs or items of interest to your website visitors that are too small to put into a web page. Link to your website often and utilize deep links whenever possible. If you allow comments it will require you to monitor posts as it will attract spammers.

Set up a Forum: If you believe your site visitors would like to post messages and communicate with others on the focus of your website then set up a bulletin board or forum. However, the main drawback to forums is you will need someone to act as administrator on a daily basis to monitor posts and software as this will attract a lot of spammers.

Write Articles: If you post articles on other websites with a link to your website in each article then it will bring more traffic. However, don't post the same articles on your own website or those pages could be penalized for duplicate content.

Participate in blogs and Forums: Find blogs or forums that have the same focus as your website and participate in disucssions. The links may or may not benefit your website due to most forums putting the rel="nofollow" tag on links but it will likely bring you traffic.

Hot Topics: Find a hot topic in the news that is of interest to your website visitors and write articles on those topics.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 2-26-08
All Rights Reserved
.

Causes for a Drop in Keyword Rank in Search Engines

.
I recently evaluated a website to determine why it had dropped in keyword rank suddenly when it was previously ranking in the top 5 for it's site name. After a couple hours of reasearch it was determined the cause was due to someone copying his home page on several other websites. The posts were dated 5 days before his keyword rank dropped which made it obvious this was the reason.

Other problems that can cause a website to drop in rank:

Gathering links too fast
Adding too many pages too fast
Linking to bad neighborhoods
Adding hidden text or links to your website
Setting up Doorway pages to fool search engines
Having your website hijacked by a 302, 301 or meta refresh redirect.
Using an automated rank checker
Installing malware, trojans, etc. that can harm visitor's computers.
Having only affiliate links and very little other content.
Requiring visitor to link to your site for a service.
A redesign that installs Javascript on links for puts content in frames.
Installing Flash that takes too long to download and deters search engine bots.
Another site on shared hosting being penalized for any of the above.
Disallowing your website from search engines in robots.txt

Click here to have your website evaluated for a drop in keyword rank.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 2-15-08
All Rights Reserved
.