6 replies to this topic

[Gunji]

First off.. thanks for having on this forum. I think I have come across a few of you before and you have been extremely helpful.

I have re-written my website (Wordpress) and I have been constantly changing things. I have a friend who is a successful marketeer. I have also had some great feedback from Dr Marie who I know online.

The layout of my site seems to be ok. The problem arises from search rankings on keywords.

As a Nutritionist I'm finding it hard to rank for specific keywords. I have more lower level or less populated keywords - such as 'Nutritional consultant'. Yet, I'm unable to rank at all for these keywords.

WM tools shows that I'm being ranked for words that are not any keywords, or related to my profession / website e.g. I'm being ranked for 'Mark', my name. The closest keyword to my aims / profession is 'Nutritionist', however it is non-specific and is used by hundreds of other sites. If you do look at my site, my keywords are in my header.

I have 72 404's found in WM tools and I'm still unable to lose them despite asking WM, re-submitting sites maps, asking for googlebot etc. Though I understand that 404's do not affect SEO?

Previously I'd written shed load of articles. This time I placed those articles on the site, rather than on other repositories. I was finding that they were giving me little return. I've also been told by my friend that some of those articles have little relationship to my services. So I will begin to sort this out over the next week or so with newer more relevant information.

I did think that I was un-intentionally blocking my site in some way. So I removed SEO plugins and just used Meta headings instead. Even though they are meant to have little benefit. I was trying to start back at square one. I have the usual FB and Linkedin pages, I also regulalry update all three with tips and articles links etc. Yet, I'm sure they're no follow. So I'm doing it more from a socialising perspective, getting my name networked.

I have an extremely low number of hits. Lucky if it's 1 a day. I reckon that's low by anyone's standards. My friend mentioned that he found it hard to find my site on the net. An issue that I agree with. I just don't exist or I do but not very well. I feel I am doing something fundamentally wrong.

I'm very happy to provide further stats / info if requested. If someone could gives me some pointers on how to get more visibility I would appreciate it.

healthchange.org.uk

Thanks again.

Edited by Gunji, 04 September 2011 - 12:35 PM.

[jonbey]

Regarding traffic:

1. It seems most if not all your page titles are the same. They should all be unique and in Wordpress, generally same as the post/page heading.

2. Not many inbound links. 2 year domain and 13 links (according to Yahoo). You need to do some link building.

One thought - why not go local? Focus on the local market, people do search for "nutritionist in Hackney" etc.

oh, and posts need to be longer. e.g. "USDA pyramid now a plate" is just 3 lines. And ... the UK does have a plate - we did it first - The Eatwell Plate.

Edited by jonbey, 04 September 2011 - 02:02 PM.

[Gunji]

Thanks Jonbey.

Great advice. Will look at page titles as suggested.

Good point about the plate by the way, but they're different. Compare the two and see.

cheers

[A.N.Onym]

I second Jonbey's recommendation to make your title tags unique for each page:
- use the most relevant and concise description of the page
- don't repeat the same keyphrase (a combination of [key]words) at the end of it. Repeating your site/company name is debatable and a matter of preference (I choose not to do it, some do)

Also, if you are using a meta tag plugin, use unique meta descriptions for each page - that's the sole reason for using it. If it's the plugin that makes all the title tags the same, remove it and find something better.

Moreover:
- getting links is paramount to getting more traffic
- the articles have to be on topic - I'd remove offtopic articles altogether from the site, if there are any
- don't change page URLs too often and/or without 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs of the same pages.

Here's how to create content that might get you some links.

1. Subscribe to other blogs on the topic and see what they are writing about and what's popular.
2. Check topical social sites, similar to Reddit, a category or two in StumbleUpon, etc on what's popular on the topic. Try to create the best piece on your topic in the angle that'd interest the social site-visiting humans. Typically, it's something that'd surprize them, make them think, laugh or just enjoy checking the photos. Food is a vast topic, there has to be an angle that's popular (again, check what's been popular on social sites).
3. Invest at least 40 hours into crafting the article, picking photos from Flickr and writing an engaging headline with 2 reasons to read your article (a headline might take 5-10 hours).
4. As you check the recent popular submissions on the topic, find an interested person/submitter and share your article with it. Ask for feedback and thank profusely.
5. Perhaps, discuss (via email or comments) your article with the other bloggers on your topic that you are subscribed to and/or link to their related articles.

To get content that'd attract customers, it needs to be more sophisticated, but this kind of material rarely gets popular on social sites. So you'll have to create content that both attracts links and converts visitors to customers - whether that's the same thing or two different kind of articles, it's up to you.

Of course, not using the social sites is the vanilla way of doing things. It's good, it's old and it's solid. You will get customers, if you write articles for your customers. But it takes more time and you will have to get links one way or another (by writing guest posts in topical blogs, which is great, btw). But links are a good part of the success online, so it depends on your goals and interests. Do what interests you online and you'll succeed, eventually.

For example, a combination of sorts would be to note the interesting articles of popular health expert bloggers or popular food/health stories from social sites and comment on them in your article. If your commenting articles are good, not only you'll have created something useful for your site, but the blogger might link to you (social sites won't, but it'll still be an interesting piece on your blog). It's not the healthiest way to create content, unless you have something unique and useful to say, though, because the problem of the bloggosphere is regurgitation of the same content all over the place.

Start with what you can and plough onwards

P.S. Please, work on your website text colors. Black on white is perfectly acceptable , but you can use various color wheels to find dark, readable colors as well.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 05 September 2011 - 07:46 AM.

[Black_Knight]

Let's start at the beginning - the Homepage

Frankly, the Homepage is very weak in virtually every regard. Visually, to humans the design looks incredibly basic, has too many colours and poor contrasts, and generally looks rather amatuer. Ultimately you are selling your knowledge here, as a respectable nutritionist, and you can't afford anything that calls into question your credibility. This homepage looks homemade and not the kind of thing a respected and credible expert would put forward.

Reduce the 'funky' colours and remember that black on white is the easiest thing to read (tested time and time again with massive studies of time taken to read a passage of text). Funky is great when selling wacky things, but you don't take nutrition advice from someone dressed in a clown suit.

More space between elements, and especially sort out that top navigation menu so that is doesn't break lines in such an untidy way.

The big prominent mobile telephone number is a big turn-off. The fact it is a mobile number diminishes credibility by a ton and makes it look like someone operating out of their bedroom. If you don't have an office, perhaps consider an answering service. If that is your own mobile number, you either love to have your time wasted, or you have no demand keeping that phone busy. Either way, its a warning sign just when you need to be reassuring people.

There is almost no text on the homepage at all. What little text there is is mostly inside images (pictures of text) which completely removes it from search engines (search engines don't have eyes, they analyze and match text).

Finally, the picture that I presume is of yourself. With all due respect, and not meant unkindly, it is too casual. You look more like you are in the middle of a shopping-trip than about to try to persuade me to make a life-changing shift in my nutritional thinking. Get a professional portrait taken, and think hard about the image you want to present, and the expectations of your visitors. Do you look like a credible, expert in nutrition.

The code of the page is quite horrendous, very heavy in javascripts and massively outweighing the tiny amount of genuine text content. The Code needs to be much, much, much leaner, and the site needs to load fast. A page with so little on it will be expected to load in under 2 seconds. Yours was closer to 20 seconds when I opened it the first time (without any of it being in cache).

The code weight issues continue throughout the site and are a serious problem for a site in the early stages. The code is plain awful, making a very poor code-to-content ratio.

<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 17px;">Weight loss</span></li>

should be more like

<li class="mainlist">Weight Loss</li>

[Dr.Marie]

Hey Mark! Glad you found the forum. You're going to get some great advice here and most of these guys will be very brutally honest. These folks have WAAAAY more experience than me at web design and SEO so hopefully they can help!

[jocelyn]

I have a agree with the above comments... and why have scroll buttons on a text that is basically very small...

It's a small site, and it's hard to find the content... and after 2 pages, I figured it was a 5 page site.

The site: command reports 67 pages... I looked at 2 of them, and could not find the other 67 from these.

If you don't show your pages, people cannot see them... and it's a big usability problem.

Navigation has to be improved big time, or at least put a sitemap, so people can find things faster...