SEO not working....

[nashville]

I have paid a company for SEO, and paid to have some copywriting done and so far nothing has worked.

I really do undertand the concepts very well, as I have studied this quite a bit and active in several SEO forums. I did SEO on my own for the last year and could only get to 10-20 in Google so I thought I would give someone else a shot at it.

They did a good job, but the traffic actually went down (so did conversions) and I am not sure if I missing something.

I am wondering if the quality of the code could be an issue?

Anyone know what to do next?

Quick facts:

Domain est 2001
Google Shows IBL's of 201 (likely around 300)
over 500 URL's in engines
Some "light grey hat SEO in 2004", none in 2005.

Thanks very much.

[ADAM Web Design]

Hi Gary,

You do have some coding issues that may be hindering your site's performance and fixing them would do no harm to your search engine positioning (it might even help it slightly).

First off, You've got a javascript error related to your Google ad syndication. On my end they don't show up. That might be the first issue: people see that little yellow "errors on page" graphic in IE and may be turned off. Not only that, by fixing it the ads might show up (which they don't seem to now) and you'd make some more money.

Second, you've got CSS in the body of your document. Try externalizing this type of thing so that it's in its own CSS file. It makes the code that much leaner and meaner, which decreases load time.

Third, it looks like you copied and pasted from MS Word into an HTML editor/CMS of some sort. There are certain pieces of HTML output that are somewhat unique to Word when it's converted.


Some editors (and I'm not sure about Mambo, which you appear to be running) have a button specifically for copying and pasting from Word. Try to use those.

Now, as far as why your traffic is down, there may be other factors (and since I'm not sure what time period we're talking, I'm going to assume the last month or so):

1) Your site isn't retail-based, and it's (sing it with me now) The Most Commercial Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiime ooooooooof the Yeeeeeeeeeeear. So...more people tend to gravitate toward retail types of sites.

2) For a site focusing on something as generic as "flight training schools", you really don't have that many on there. If I'm a pilot, I'm expecting some sort of regional directory of them or something.

I can't think of anything else, but this should get you started (and I'm sure others will come up with stuff too.)

[CreditFN]

Hi Gary,

Depending on your companies strategy, you may want to attempt to focus your SEO on the schools that currently pay you the most for leads. This way you can more geographically target keywords, and it will cut down on the number of sites you are competing with for specific keywords. Once you start to penetrate the specific geographic markets you can then focus on the broader keywords.

Hope this helps, if you have any questions e-mail me.

[vwebworld]

external CSS - not a big issue.

If you think about how a programme would parse a page, you'll quickly realise that one of the first things it will do is get rid of the html code, and all the other bits that are not wanted. Then it will look at what's left - the stuff that's printed on the screen, and it will make evaluations of the words on the page then. That's a general overview, because some html codes are recorded - font sizes, etc.

So when you get down to it, the only valid reason for putting the styles in an external file is so that only one file needs to be changed to alter the same thing throughout the site. That's a good reason to do it.

~Roland