could someone help me

[stuff4beauty2]

Hi,

I am stumped. We built our site in Dec and in Jan and Feb we were getting 3-6 order PER DAY and sometimes more. About 3 weeks ago, due to the suggestions of this board, we rebuilt some things on the site. We took away the page link buttons and put in a floating menu. We threw the buttons away. Since then, we have recieved no orders. It came to a complete stop. We were showing on google, now we are not. Can someone PLEASE look at our site source and tell me what we are doing wrong. Does one have to pay to be listed on a search engine? I was thinking not, because we were showing and showing strong. It just quit like overnight and I am so frusterated as to why.. ANY help would be appreciated.

www.stuff4beauty.com

[Dave Hawley]

Hi

Here my list of advise (for Google), in what I believe to be in order.

1) Add quality content and lots of it. Then add some more. Keep pages small and fast loading. The idea is to get 100 visitors from 10 pages, NOT 100 visitors from 1 page. Think human, not robot.

2)Links all pages together with links like See Also:Big Nuts ;o) Spread these links out as evenly as possible.

3) Set up the Title tags and H1 heading of each page to target no more than 1 or 2 keywords/phrases. Don't waste the Title and H1 headings with non-searched words, like you company name. This is fine if you are Microsoft, Ford Motors etc but not for 99.9% of us.

4) Get as many links as possible from external sites with some keyword anchor text. Try to avoid having ALL (most is ok) links point to the homepage.

5)Focus heavily toward 'on page factors', that is, what the user sees, such as text on the page. If you add a content page on "salted peanuts" name the page 'salted-peanuts.htm'. Keep the names to 3 word max.

6)Give the visitor a reason to come back. Newsletters etc are good for this.

7)If possible, add a forum. These are great for adding lot's of content pages. best of all, other write for you for free! Just ensure the forum can be spidered by Google. This normally means NOT using Session ID's.

[stuff4beauty2]

2)Links all pages together with links like See Also:Big Nuts ;o) Spread these links out as evenly as possible.



Thanks, I did all those things, but tell me, when I put the floating menu in, I removed the button links to the other pages on my site. Then I noticed no search engine results. Would the removing of the button links caused my search engine results to fall off? I just put text links on all the pages, to all the pages in my site, do you think that will help the site come back? And when you say link all pages together with links, do you mean link the pages on your site together? Like put a site menu of the main site pages on all your pages? And, what is big nuts?

[Dave Hawley]

Originally Posted by stuff4beauty2

Thanks, I did all those things, but tell me, when I put the floating menu in, I removed the button links to the other pages on my site. Then I noticed no search engine results. Would the removing of the button links caused my search engine results to fall off?

Quite possibly.

I just put text links on all the pages, to all the pages in my site, do you think that will help the site come back?

Yes, but A site map would also be good.

And when you say link all pages together with links, do you mean link the pages on your site together? Like put a site menu of the main site pages on all your pages?

Sort of. Basically, no pages should be orphaned (no links to them). You should aim to have to have to same PR for all pages, linking 'like' pages together helps with this. Also, when a user visits, looks at a product/service he/she will then either,

1) Buy.
2) Close or back-out to their Search results.
3) Click another link on your page.

# 1 is best, while you should avoid # 2! This can be done with links like: See Also:<similar page link with keyword anchortex>

And, what is big nuts?

LOL! It's an example of a keyword anchor text link for a site that sells nuts.

[stuff4beauty2]

Oh my Gosh! I think I have been at this too long :-) I get it now. Couls someone please look at my site to see if I have it set right for the search engines? I added a forum and have links to ALL the pages to view other products of interest. Since falling off the search engine results, I have order taking withdrawls and really need to know if I fixed everything to satisfactory or if I have more to think about. Thanks so much to whoever could do this for me....

[Mel]

HI If you want to be ranked for particular keywords you should target then in your page content, in your head section and in the links in the menu system.

Without knowing which keywords you are having problems with its difficult to help.

I do not think you should jump to the conclusion that the replacement of your buttons with the text menu system is the cause of your problems, more likely its due to googles continual tweaks. You can use a simspider (do a google search) to see what a spider will see, and this will show you that your menu system is fine for spiders.

But lets see what might be done to improve things;

Your page title uses your URL as the first words. This is a waste of valuable space as this is only seen by search engines and no one is going to be searching for your URL if they already know it. Next in your page title you are using the term
Buy professional salon discount hair care products which seems kind of unlikely as a search term.

I would suggest a session with Wordtracker to research keywords appropriate to your site.

Then select two or three closely related terms with good traffic potential and target them on your home page. Select other search term groups for targeting on each of your other pages.
Now use the search term in your page title in your meta description and in your meta keywords tags. DO NOT put dozens of words in your keywords tags only those you are targeting in that page.

Next use your terms in a header at the top of the page in the page content, (bolded, italicised and list text are high priority places to use them). Use them in your alt tags on graphics and in the title attribute for tables, graphics other page elements.

Next you may want to think about the organization of your site. You appear to sell competing products but do not seem to offer your searchers any way of seeing all competing products at the same time, as they are organized by brand. You will know your customers better than I, but if you are targeting the product names as search terms you are in direct competition with the manufacturers site.
It might be better to organize your products by type rather than brand.


Next redo your menu system to use the search terms in the text of the menu systems. As an example at the moment you are using the product names as links. If that is what searchers are using to search that would be fine, but it seems likely that searchers may not be searching so much for Graham Webb Halo as they might be searching for colored hair shampoos. If your site is organized by type rather than by brand this will be much easier.
Once you have your search terms as text links in your menu system and are using those same terms on the pages they point to, you are going to rank much better.

[stuff4beauty2]

Thanks for taking your time to look at the site. I really appreciate it! Before I took the button menu links off, I wasn't having any trouble at all. I was getting about 1/2 of the business I wanted and being so new, I figured it would grow. Then it just came to a dead stop once I removed the links to the pages and inserted the floating menu. I also had the java script for the menu right under my title, which I didn't think would hurt, but moved anyway and finished that today.


You gave me some things to think about. Thank you again. What do you think about keeping the brand menu, but also adding to that and having some things catagorized by type, having links for both.... I think it would be good, because in speaking with my customers and asking how they found us, they would tell me they searched for brand. But I am sure there are some that search for type because they would not know what brand to use. Great idea!

I know I need to work with my titles, but with 479 pages, and I just recently expanded and made pages that and took the products from being all on one page to splitting them up to lots of pages, I need time to go and work on the titles of the pages, which I didn't realize I needed to do until I was where I am at now, almost finished.


Can you do me a favor and tell me how I can use a spiderspam, where to go and how to do it? I would like to see..... Thanks
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mel]

HI You can use the sim spider at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi, but there are many others.

It easy to usd just put the URL of the page you want spidered and look at the results.

[stuff4beauty2]

Hi! Well, I went to the sim-search engine and did a spider thing. I need help. I have a similar problem going on on some pages, but if these two pages could get a look, maybe someone could see what is wrong.

Page 1)

http://www.stuff4beauty.com/page/gwsilkrepair.htm is seen 100%

Page2)

http://www.stuff4beauty.com/page/gwthickinfusion only gets seen up to the end of the meta tags and the page content and links are not seen.

I cannot figure it out. I have the same problem on other pages. Some are seen 100% and others stop after the meta tags.

Please, please help me. Thanks!

[Mel]

actually the page is http://www.stuff4beauty.com/page/gwthickinfusion.htm and I suspect that the problem may be that you have not declared the table in your page properly.

YOur html starts out like this
<body>
<tr>

[stuff4beauty2]

Thanks for trying Mel, I found the problem. When I take out the code for the music, then the spider sees it all. So, now I took the code out of all the pages and when I did a sim spider, it looks great, all the pages are viewed and all the links are showing. Could this have been my problem before of why most of my site does not show on a search?