My website Noah's Ark Gifts has become somewhat neglected on the SEO front. I need some inspiration and motivation.
Can anyone recommend any blog posts, broadcast or articles that have been written recently (as a lot of the stuff I have found is a few years old), which could help me tweek my website and get it back on track.
Also, any suggestions on how to keep content fresh, as it's a retailing site a lot of the content is static, despite a few minor changes and additions here and there.
I suggest for you to search using Google and then narrow that search by being specific with what you need. And then narrow it more by choosing the time span of the uploaded articles and posts. By the way, do you also sell real pets?
No I don't sell real pets, just soft toys. Thanks for the advise, I've tried the google route but with all the retweets and blog copies around still get loads of out of date rubbish which i have to trawl through, whcih is why I was hopng for some recommendations.
The real pet thing gives me some inspiration, maybe I'll do some articles and tweets on pet care.
Whilst a lot of SEO is still guesswork and experimentation, some fundamental rules have been gleaned over the years. Such as having more written descriptive text content than page code is a good thing as this gives the search engines 'meat' to chew on. The code itself behind the screen you may also want to tidy up a bit as well because I'm pretty sure this snippet from inside your site is not helping.
<!-- Begin: User-defined HTML Head area --> <meta name="google-site-verification" content="XwPYznXCdQp0N1wpR3EpkDpfvXogD3MdxiObpQZjo1E" /><meta name="alexaVerifyID" content="vVq0FLN75ZF39KGwOFI4zymzEfQ" /><<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="6F03C573AE070FF70099AEEA55DACA05" /> <html> <head>
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="6F03C573AE070FF70099AEEA55DACA05" /> <title>Your SEO optimized title</title> </head> <body> page contents </body> </html> <!-- End: User-defined HTML Head area -->
Thanks for that. I have removed the Alexa access code.
How does that affect the SEO? Does the google algorithm mark me down for having it and why?
On the subject of the google algorithm, I managed to get listed on dmoz but instead of the shopping category (which I requested) they have put me in the regional listing.
I would be interested to know if this still has weight or should I try to get the category changed as I understand this could take a couple of years, and don't know if I lose the dmoz listing n the meantime.
<body>
page contents
</body>
Could be giving any search engine that reads it a hard time, as each web page is supposed to have only one body section and this is where they expect to find the written content of the site. Web browsers can of course cope to some extent with badly written HTML and the same is probably true of the googlebot. Your Google webmaster tools has a section that lists any serious flaws in your HTML and may have some other suggestions for you. Remember search engines have no eyes! they read everything inside the page not just what a visitor sees on screen.
The heading tags <h1>,<h2>,<h3> are also appearing out of sequence further confusing the structure of the content. Think of how a book is organised, Title-> chapter names->afterword etc and the same applies if you are using the newer HTML5 tags like <section> and <content>. A web page should ideally have only one H1 tag, H2 & H3 you can have as needed to organise the page content.
If you look the source code "Nature Babies Raccoon Soft Toy" first appears inside an <H3 class='headline'> tag then as an H1 tag in pink immediately afterwards. Repeating the same text twice is likely to be getting the site marked down for lack of content or worse keyword stuffing. Try fluffing the descriptions a bit more say two or three sentances if you can. I know it's a lot of work but in the long term it will yield better results than blog spamming.
Notes: by law you are required to provide a Full postal address address if operating a business and watch out because HMRC is all over Ebay at the moment looking for tax dodging traders. The EU cookie legislation is also now in effect for UK based websites , few are actually complient yet because the rules are an unworkable mess for many but it's probably worth putting on the to-do reading list because they keep changing the rules.