I dont know how my site got ranked.

[chandrika]

Hi,
I am trying to work out how a website I built a couple of weeks ago about hairstyles, has done so well in the search engines. It is getting 400+ hits a day after just 2 weeks of submitting the URL, mainly from google all hairstyle related search terms.

I dont know much about SE except the basics, which I did follow when building, but still it seems surprising the result,I hadnt even got any links to it so soon, so I wondered whether it could be anything to do the fact that the site promotes a product from one of the top ranking hairstyles websites and has a flash presentation of the product that connects to that sites database for hairstyles.

Could it simply be that the search engines are viewing my site as a kind of extension of the top ranking one because of the use of their database from the flash presentation and that is how it managed to get such good results?

Obviously I would like to repeat the success, and am building anoher site right now, but it just occured to me that maybe the only reason it got ranked was because of this association and so I may not be so lucky next time round.

[roam_dx]

It is very unlikely its because of the association you are mentioning, expecially if it's in flash.

Look for other factors - domain age, a recent link from a trusted site that maybe google know about but is not displaying, or...you maybe onto something. Let us know if you figure it out, plz :).

Can't tell much without looking at the site.

[JuniorOnline]

True - whats the site url ;)

[chandrika]

hairstylezone.com is the site, i didnt post it because im not very proud of the design of it, i warn you in advance if you dont like pink and purple get a bucket ready.

When I do a search for links to the site I dont find any at all, I think Alta Vista shows 14, but they send very little traffic. It is mainly Google, at 68% and they show no links at all.

You will see at the bottom of each page the flash presentation that I am referring too.

[collusion]

I would say that you have alot of content which is most likely the reason for the ranking. You have the files named after the keywords, mostly. Alot of alt text. I am impressed that you say you are new to seo and have done a pretty nice job.

[chandrika]

Thanks, yes its my first site, i have read a few things here and there and been taking an interest,I did consciously use key phrases in the file names, i wasnt sure whether that would make a difference, but basically tried to put the phrases in the main areas and near the start, that was what I read to do. I think you could be right about the content as the last few days I have been looking at the search terms that bring people, and they are so diverse, they are all hairstyle related, like curly affro bob cut crop hairstyles and things, and when i look at the contenet all those words which i didnt even consider as keywords they are being picked up on tagged onto the main word hairstyles and that seems to be what is happening. Like for the term hairstyles alone i dont think the site is ranked, but for so many related haisrtyles terms it is and in a way it is found for haisrtyles, just types of hairstyles, which is quite clever of the search engines that they can pick up the theme and then take little words out the content, string them rogether and base their search results like that.

I did want to put a searchable database of hairstyles there using plogger, its cool, you can subscribe by rss to the photo gallery, so whenever a new pic is added you can get it via rss, i need to find out if the se spider php pages or whether i would lose the benefit of the pages that are in the current galleries that are html.

[collusion]

If you do switch over to php simply do a permanent redirect on every previous file to the new location. That will ensure that your hairstyles.htm is reindexed as hairstyles.php etc... Also, make sure that you do not use session id's which are common in php. You can do that by adding

php_flag session.use_trans_sid off

to the .htaccess file in your root directory. There are other ways to remove session id's but that would be the easiest.

[chandrika]

Thanks for that tip, I better find out what a session id is, I think it may be the ?etcetc at the end of the path. thanks again

[collusion]

that is exactly what they are. It looks sort of like this

php?&sid=f2096854c17fff4f63c40af29dce0aed

[roam_dx]

that's a well done site.

As collusion mentioned, you've done a great job with the content which is paying off. It is usually the related keywords that bring in good traffic to a site, especially during the sandbox period and looks like you've used them very well on your site. Congrats and good luck :)