Request for site review and SEO help

[pete machin]

Hi All,
New poster here so be gentle. Started my website over a year ago now and it has evolved from rubbish to not to bad ( in my oppinion). I know it has a way to go yet but the problem I have at the moment is SEO and getting it seen on the google natural listing pages. Can anyone spot any reason why google doesn't like my website? It has appeared a couple of times on the first pages for useful key phrases like "women's lingerie" but then it is dumped . Is this just doing the google dance untill it settles down or have I made an obviouse design error? Any help would be appreciated as what little hair I have left is now turning grey. Reviews also welcome http://www.lucieswardrobe.co.uk
P.S I am not a designer, just a simple engineer who wants to get out of engineering.

[Mike Hughes]

OK. A quick question. What are the top keyword phrases you're optimising for and what have you done so far in terms of SEO?

Mike

[pete machin]

Hi Mike,
Top key phrases that are being optimised mainly by way of backlinks are :-
sexy Lingerie
womens lingerie
women's lingerie
women's underwear
I have employed an seo company who are building backlinks for me. On the odd occation when the site drops in it is ranking on page one for the womens lingerie phrases and page three for the sexy lingerie page. But as I said, it doesn't stay there for more than a day when it disapears again. I just feel that something is wrong with the onsite optimisation. The backlinking is doing it's stuff but google just doesn't like something.
Thanks again,

Pete

[pinbrook]

My reply is based on experience I gained over 3 -4 years ago....

i was set the task of optimising a lingerie store for similar keyphrases. I found it nigh on impossible to get anywhere on the phrases you site, mainly because ofthe competition having budgets 100000s x more than yours.

where I did have sucess though was with more specific product phrases - eg red lacy bra, white corset etc. The first thing I notice is all your products are referenced by a product number. Potential purchaser are not going to type TS-1028 into a search engine with the hope of finding Opaque Back Lace Socks.

My advice would be to rename all products more descriptively ie product descriptions including key phrases. Also add more descriptive text to each product.

[Mike Hughes]

I have employed an seo company who are building backlinks for me.
I just feel that something is wrong with the onsite optimisation.

So is it you or the seo company that's stuffed the page with hidden text?

Edit: Point taken by OP and quoted text removed as it's no longer necessary and apparently is ranking quite well for certain terms in Google.

[pete machin]

That text is not hidden. It is accessible from the "more info" link at the bottom of the page.
It was added by the seo company but I would be interested to hear wheather it is regarded as hidden or not. Obviously if google think it is being hidden then it would have a huge negative effect. Thank you for bringing this possible cause to my attention, I will put it to my seo company and see what they say.

[Mike Hughes]

That text is not hidden.

Of course it's hidden. It's not exactly visible is it?

My honest recommendation is:

a) drop your SEO
b) start again with a new domain.

All you have with your current domain is lots of spammy links and a spammy website. If I were you I'd start again and do it cleanly the next time.

Mike

[pete machin]

Thanks for your thoughts Mike. If you are right about the text being hidden I have just waisted a lot of time and money and will not be a happy bunny:mad:
Could you elaborate on the spammy link bit, I'm not sure what you mean or where the spammy links are?
Thanks

[Mike Hughes]

If you look at the backlinks to your site the vast majority are from poor quality sites that have no relevance to what you sell.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lucieswardrobe.co.uk%2F&bwm=i&bwms=p

There are lots of links from sites and pages on things like 'car selling', 'Cleaning equipment', 'Outdoor shops in the Phillipines' (could that last one be any less relevant?).

We all can see that these links are just there to try and boost your sites ranking in Google. The thing is Google can tell this too so they aren't doing you any good and are probably harmful (although Google do deny that anything done externally to your website is likely to harm it).

Mike

[pete machin]

OK Mike, I got it now.
About 8 months ago I signed up (and paid up) for hundreds of backlinks thinking it was a good thing to do. I didn't realise that if the backlinks were not relevant it may in fact damage my google ranking. Crappy free non relevent backlinks is what I probably ended up with. Hey ho, you live and learn.
The seo company I am now dealing with are building backlinks to established and relavent websites at a rate that is acceptable to google. I believe it is something like 40 per month.
Thanks again Mike for taking the time to explain a few things to me and to point out possible problems with my website, it is much appreciated.
Pete

[Duncan Rounding]

I also agree with Mike in that all that text hidden inside a class display:none is just asking for trouble. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

Rather create some brochure pages and make valid use of the text for your vistors and SEs.

[pete machin]

Do you think the three routes back to the homepage are damaging my google ranking?
I have a home page link on the top bar, a home link on the footer and another link saying "women's sexy lingerie UK" that also links back to the home page from the footer. It's the latter I am particularly worried about.

[guccij]

I think your links to your home page are normal. If you're not taking on board what the guys up there ^^^^ are saying, yours is a lost cause. Engineering you say? Sounds like a great job. Stick to what you know.

[pete machin]

Hi guccij,
I have been in engineering for more years than I care to remember and need a change in direction but thanks for the advice.
Not sure why you think I would choose to invest pound after pound and hour after hour into a new venture, then ask for help from actinic experts such as Mike and drounding and not take their advice on board.
Fraid guccij I have been in business (succesfully)far to long to ignore this type of valuable help. I did not ask for help just to ignore it guccij. But thanks for the link reasurance, I was worried that the "women's sexy lingerie uk" link back to my homepage in particular was a no no.
Pete

[pinbrook]

Going back to the original keywords you wanted to optimise for - these are phrases that would get visitors to your front page, but more important than that is to get visitors landing on product specific pages, thus my previous comment to make sure you optimise each page for the product on it.

Ironically yesterday I was trying to install a CMS in the small folder as actinic - I messed up my directoryindexes and couldnt get the site to respond to index.html rather than index.php.

I have to say the orders on the site were the same as any other day, ie the absence of a front page had very little difference on the order and visitor level.

[pete machin]

You are right pinbrook. It is easy to get carried away with optomising your home page and neglecting the other pages and products. In my defence I am waiting untill My homepage is ranking before I turn my attentions to the product pages.

[Duncan Rounding]

You will probably be better off concentrating on some of your product pages than the homepage. The terms you can optimise for each product are much more specific and you are therefore much more likely to see results. Very few poeple will land on your homepage and you will find it much easier to get a higher listing for specific products than general terms that are on your homepage. The competition in your field is vast so rather concentrate on a few specific items first.

The same applies with your link building, I doubt you will do well trying to generate backlinks to your homepage with general terms.

Think about it in tems of traffic. Start a blog, put up some videos on YouTube, get on Facebook and Twitter. Get visitors to your site with something relevant that they want to see - the SEs will do the rest.

[Mike Hughes]

I agree entirely with Jo and Duncan that you really need to spend some time focusing on the sub-section and product pages. There are two good reasons for this:

1. Right now the sites structure isn't great. There are lots of pages called 'copy_of_1234.html', etc which are no good as they don't support any keywords and aren't really helping Google decide if that's a different page from 'copy_of_5678.html'. These will have to be changed and the sooner the better.

2. The closer people are to buying, the more specific their search terms will be. People who search for 'women's Lingerie' are most likely to be just looking around. They're not in buying mode. Once they decide what to buy, they'll use more specific search terms such as 'red lace panties'. These are what you need to focus on. Going for the high volume, generic terms is a waste of time as there's much more competition (who know what they're doing and are doing it well) and the vistors that you'll get are not the one's you want anyway.

Mike

[pete machin]

That sounds like good advice to me. Funny you should mention the 'copy_of_1234.html' url's as I am in the middle of changing them as we speak. This has been mentioned to me before. Thanks again for the good advice.
Pete

[Mike Hughes]

Be sure to use product names rather than part numbers when you do this.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

I've had a look around at smart traffic (your seo) and can't say that I'm impressed with what I'm seeing. Yes, they'll get you links but they're all fairly low quality and from what I read probably overpriced for what they're doing.

It would appear that they're mostly an agency using link services from the philipines? I can't be sure but there's more here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=1pp&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=smart+traffic+site%3Aukbusinessforums.co.uk&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

As many of these links are on pages controlled by your seo company, there's also a question of what happens when you stop paying out all that money? The general concensus is that the links will disappear and you'll lose the benefit of all the work you're paying for.

Anyway, I suspect that if you ditch the hidden text (and link to your seo), make the filename changes we've discussed and use product names rather than numbers then you'll probably be OK.

Me, I'd ditch the seo company was well. That's up to you though.

Mike

[pete machin]

Thanks again for your constructive help guys. I am making some of those changes right now but it's going to be time consuming. I'm not sure weather to ditch the dropdown css text before I have spoken to smart traffic. You kind of hope that people you are paying lots of money to because they know what they are doing.....actually do know what they are doing :confused:
Anyway it's the Reading beer and jaz festival tonight so i'm off soon.
Thanks again,
Pete

[roundman]

i was contacted by Smart traffic last week and they sent me lots of fancy graphs and such, promised me they could get me onto page 1 in 10 weeks and keep me there.
They wanted to put a scroll down bar jammed with keywords on the front page.
and add over a 150 links to my site.
I have since learnt that the scroll down bar is deemed to be more damaging to the site than anything.
And now it seems the links are worthless too.
I could of had all that for small £3500 a year.
Very pushy sales people too, become a little insulting after 15 mins of being told no

[pete machin]

Hi Roundman. It's always useful to hear about other peoples experiences with a company you are doing business with.
I have made the dropdown text visible now. Not sure if I did it the correct or best way, I just changed the css code from "display:none" to "display:all". We all know the text is only there to help with the google ranking. It's a load of waffle but necessary.
I have also got rid of all the copy_of_copy_123.html files.
Pete

[roundman]

yes when i started i had alot of copy of copy files.
my site was built by a friend as a learning project and i have had to learn pretty much everything as i go.
Its been hard but i enjoy the learning side of it, and one day i will be able to say that i understand what everyone here has just told me lol
Maurice

[PatchworkRabbit]

I've also heard that it's useful to name your image files too? Things like 783728.jpg are probably not helping, is that right?