Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi Kerrian, welcome to StartupNation.  Could you possibly provide any further details about the specific nature of your business offering.  Not to cast aspersions on any business, but your site, businessnet2u.com, doesn`t show up in the top results for your primary keyphrase `web traffic generator` on either Yahoo or Google.

It`s simply that this area of marketing is open to a wide range of offerings, and it would be helpful to our community if you could provide some more detailed justifications for the claims on your web page in a broader setting than an individual email.


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chuck fuller

The results are in! Despite the grade I am posting the SEO Report Card here, as promised, because a) many of you have pointed out the exact same things b) hopefully others can learn from it BEFORE they build their online store;

CoolBugStuff.com has been graded and nothing much has changed since high school - Overall Grade C- 

The following article was writing by Stephan Spenser for the November 2006 issue of Practical Ecommerce magazine and I have been given permission to post it here for the SUN community.

 

This month I’ve chosen a fun, quirky ecommerce site about insects. Seth Prezant, founder and “bugmaster” (gotta love that title) at Cool Bug, LLC, explains he had an outside company assemble the website for him, and it has been in operation for almost five months. Unfortunately, the site gets effectively no traffic—an average of 37.5 visitors per day. Seth admits, “I am nowhere to be found on Google, but I seem to get most customers through MSN.” So let’s help Prezant supercharge his website traffic. After all, there’s only one place to go, and that’s up.

A necessary prerequisite to good rankings in Google is getting indexed. However, www.coolbugstuff.com’s indexation is quite minimal, a mere 59 pages, with all but a few in Google’s dreaded “Supplemental Index.” There are several reasons why they are not indexed well. One is that their link popularity and importance score (PageRank) are so low—a PageRank of 0 for the home page. Google isn’t reporting any back links to the home page, other than one internal page, which doesn’t bode well for Cool Bug Stuff. Microsoft Live Search (formerly MSN Search) reports only 18 links. This site needs some serious link building.

Another reason for the poor indexing is the fact that the URLs have session IDs in them (at least for first-time visitors and those with cookies disabled, which includes search engine spiders). This is very bad from an SEO standpoint for reasons stated in my dynamic URLs article in the January issue of Practical eCommerce. In addition to dropping session IDs from the URLs, I recommend “rewriting” the URLs, through the use of a server plug-in like mod_rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite, and eliminating all stop characters (?, &, =) from the URLs for maximum spider-friendliness. For example, the category page URL coolbugstuff.com/stuff.php?capth=27 could be rewritten to coolbugstuff. com/category/27.html.

There are two copies of the home page indexed in Google: one at www.coolbugstuff.com and one at coolbugstuff.com (both versions with a PageRank score of zero, unfortunately). Combining the two versions into one will aggregate the PageRanks together. Start by changing the URL on the links pointing to the home page from “/index.php” to “/“ — including the logo and the “Home” link in the top left, and the “Cool Bug LLC” link in the bottom footer.

I would suggest dropping the <base href=coolbugstuff.com> from the HTML head. Instead, let the spiders index all the pages at www.coolbugstuff.com, which is the URL they would normally favor by default, and then set up a 301 redirect on coolbugstuff.com One of the links in the category navigation leads to a page containing no products. Pages like that are wasted opportunities. In fact, all the category pages would benefit from the addition of some keyword-rich intro copy.
There are too many keywords in the meta keywords tag; I counted more than 250. That’s completely over the top; it looks very spammy. Cut it down to fewer than 20.

They have a great start at “link bait:” a section for teachers, a section for parents, a monthly photo contest, bug recipes, ways that bugs are used in medicine and the Cool Bug Club which offers discounts, enewsletters and a free birthday gift. And because of the site’s unique niche topic area, further “link bait” opportunities abound, such as interviews with bug experts—people like David Bellamy and Rudd Kleinpaste—and well-known bug photographers. However, getting that link bait noticed for such an invisible site will require proactive measures like participating (i.e., commenting) on relevant blogs and online forums.

I was pleased to see that they have a discussion forum, but unfortunately it provides very little SEO benefit in its current form—with session IDs in the URLs and a minimal amount of activity (fewer than 50 posts in total).

When getting a discussion forum off the ground, it is important to get to critical mass quite quickly. That means tapping all your friends, co-workers, customers and relatives on the shoulder asking them to do a quick burst of posting for a month or two. Also promote the latest posts in your email newsletter to stimulate activity.

The site employs breadcrumb navigation, which is good.

The title tags on the category pages are rather repetitive. For instance, “Cool Bug Stuff Cool Bug Books” is not a great title. A better one would be “Bug Books about Bugs and Insects at CoolBugStuff.com.” That has the word “bug,” in plural, as well as the synonym “insects;” it would also match on a search for the phrase “books about bugs.” The title tags of the articles are in better shape.

 

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Have a Creepy Crawly Day!

Seth, Bugmaster
www.CoolBugStuff.com

Okay...now I`m scared. I think I`m never gonna do anything online again. It`s too complicated!


Holy smokes! I think I`m gonna put up a single home page on my domain. It`ll say, "If you wanna know more about this site, gimme a call," and my home phone number. :-)

The article does make a point, though, about delegating to professionals what professionals do, and sticking with what you yourself do best. I know I could probably investigate some of the occult terms in the article, but do I want to?

And that opens up a can of worms: Just because you CAN do something, does that mean you SHOULD do it? I don`t think so!

Really interesting article/report, though. Thanks for posting it.

Steve,

Thanks for all your help with Seth. I have tried all the links you posted and read all the threads. All of us non techies owe you a debt of gratitude. Thanks for all your help.

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“Impossible” is just the degree of difficulty where most people stop trying.

Amen to that! Everyone who posted on this thread offered smart and useful suggestions. SUN people rock!

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Have a Creepy Crawly Day!

Seth, Bugmaster
www.CoolBugStuff.com

Stick with it Seth I think you have been given some great advice. It all start with valid HTML, well thought page titles, good use of H tags, and content geared toward the keywords you are optimizing for. Once you have that correct you can build from there.

Regards,
Howard


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ourmonmouth.com Full-Service Internet Solution Provider and Business/Community directory of Monmouth County New Jersey.

Hi Seth,

When I first started reading this thread, I noticed it was a few months old. Just wondering how things have changed for you since you implemented some of the changes suggested?

Also, one of the first suggestions Steve James had was to change the words in your title line (instead of only having Cool Bug Stuff). When I looked at your site I noticed that wasn`t changed.

Just wondering...

Cari

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Cari Pilon SMART Stagers SMART - Sell More Area Real Estate Today www.SMARTStagers.com

Hello Cari,

Since we made adjustments per the SUN community we have seen out traffic at www.CoolBugStuff.com really grow and our raking go from a 0 to a 4! We are on page one on Google for many of our keywords and on page one on MSN and YAHOO!

Did we "Arrive?" Not even close! We have a long way to go to be where we want to be but the many changes we made helped a great deal. Some of the changes we were not able to make (changing title tags) without revamping the entire website/platform and we are not ready for that stage just yet.

Anybody looking to built a website can do it right, right from the start by reading and following this thread. I wish I had this BEFORE I started with mine.

Seth, Bugmaster

 

 

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Have a Creepy Crawly Day!

Seth, Bugmaster
www.CoolBugStuff.com

Since this thread started, back in 2006, we too have found various ways to improve visibility. One way is to have a good profile on Startup Nation. It`s being crawled regularly, and if you have a link to your Web site, that gets the word out.

Another site being regularly indexed is Squidoo.com, where having a lens puts you into Google much faster than one would ordinarily think. Again, having links to your Web site in that "lens" helps people to find you.

SEO writing is good, but it`s not so easy to develop the various themes you`ll want. The most rudimentary step is to remember that each page you have on your site should have a significant amount of text in real words, readable by a search engine (or text-to-speech program---same thing). It shouldn`t be more than about 300 words, and it should be artistically written to attract human attention first....search engine relevance secondarily.

Feb `07

SEO is about to change..... round and round and round we go, and where we stop, nobody knows.....

As of last Friday... a week back from this past Friday actually (Feb. 2), Google started changing the results you receive through your searches, now based on past history and how often you visit certain sites, plus many other factors. As of this point in time no one really knows how that`s going to affect SEO, but it`s clear it`s going to affect it in a big way. It`s a major change that will set the SEO industry on its ear.

Here`s an article to give you some survival tips on how to handle SEO for the moment....http://searchengineland.com/070208-134406.php

The idea is that it will make Internet usage a more personalized experience for most users. To me it`s the first sign of censorship. Big business pushing its own agenda, since the sites that will show up the most for the searcher will be based  to large extent on past browsing history, among other things. Google claims not to be collecting any personally identifiable information, but that statement leaves a lot of leeway.

Personally, I don`t want my search engines results filtered to that extent. Filtering out the "spammy" sites is fine with me--they waste my time with keyword-stuffed pages that give me nothing but more links to more spammy sites.

There`s plenty I would never have discovered had my results been filtered to the degree that it appears they may be.  What happens to new sites that haven`t yet built up a clientele, but whose offerings may be just as good if not better than the big business sites out there? (Like many of the startup businesses here, which are finding niches that have not necessarily been filled before.) This kind of filtering could well keep them hidden and take away their chances of becoming something big...  The only way a new site could really start building a clientele, in that case, would be a word-of-mouth campaign... like the joke emails that everyone is so quick to send around... that`s what would be needed by the sound of what I`ve read thus far.

Well, we`ll see what happens. Too much unknown yet.



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Pat Toner Toner Design Website Design & Hosting, Graphic Design, PrePress http://www.tonerdesign.com