Request for a Site Review www.mommies.co.za

[GavinMannion]

Well Pax has already pointed me in the right direction to get my site optimised but any other help would be greatly appreciated.

I am finishing the development of a site for my wife www.mommies.co.za and now I am trying to get it ranking higher on the main search engines...

Is there something I should be doing to the site to get it's rankings higher, or even worse. Am I shooting myself in the foot somewhere?

Anything you can see would be fantastic...

Some of the things I have tried to do with the site.

Every article has a [Discuss This Article] at the bottom which takes the user to a forum page, the start of that posting in the forum has a link back to the article. This is for usability and to try and get more circular links.

There is a Latest article block on every article page that has links to the latest articles, I heard the more links the better.

I have submitted normally to all the engines I know of and have added a sitemap to Google Sitemaps....

That's about it :).

So yeah hit me....

Thanks,
Gavin

[Paz]

Hi Gavin,

Well it's certainly a great looking site and has some good content. If you want to bring traffic though, it needs to be a bit more focussed ie if you want traffic it helps if you can target key phrases that search engine users will type eg "kids activities", "advice for new Moms" or whatever subject your wife feels passionate about.

You can select keyword phrases using tools on the internet that can compare the number of searches for "advice for Moms" "advice for new Moms" "chat forum for Moms" "tips for Moms" etc. and of course a thesaurus can help too.

This is a good keyword research tool because it suggests alternatives as well as giving the relative numbers of people searching for any given phrase:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

Once you've chosen a keyword phrase, then you'll need to start getting backlinks with you keyword phrases as anchor text (eg for directory subscriptions this would be the title). I've written an article on how to get directory backlinks here:
http://www.digital-m.co.za/articles/directory-submissions-guide.html

At the same time, you can optimise the site a little further too.

For instance, one of the most important on-page factors is the title and I can see you have some duplication in your titles viz:
"The Place For Informed Moms - Articles, venues and interesting debates"

Similar applies for your meta descriptions:
Knowledge and Friendship for Moms, A place to meet people and read interesting articles. Interact with others in your position.

Have a look at another article on page factors for search optimisation (http://www.digital-m.co.za/articles/onpage-seo.html) to see what we mean.

As well as getting backlinks, you'll need to continously keep adding relevant content to the site containing the keyword phrases you are targeting. If you're busy, maybe you can set up some blogging software (eg Word Press) so that you're wife can type in her thoughts and hit the "publish" button and a new page is added to the site for her.

The nice thing about the Word Press software is that it allows you to create categories, which helps focus your content for your users and the search engines too.

Just a few more things about the site. You're using a javascript navagation and the search engine robots can't follow javascript very well, and they're less inclined to work at it for a site with too few backlinks to be honest.

To help with this, I would add a plain sitemap in a footer at the bottom of every page, and at the same time you can also put a "Privacy Policy" and "Contact Us", which will make people more inclined to join your forum.

Getting a forum started is very hard - it can take months because no one likes to post in an empty forum so you are stuck in a catch-22 situation, but like the man said; "If you build it, they will come", especially if you start registering your forum in directories as part of your backlink capaign.

That'll do for now I think. I hope we've given you some ideas about getting more traffic, but I think I can sum up all of the above by saying; choose a spread of keywords you want to target and optimise the site for them as well as getting appropriate backlinks.

Cheers,
Paz.

[GavinMannion]

Thanks Paz,

I noticed the title problem as well and now every article gives the page a different title. I still need to update the other pages as well, but that is not to much work.

The Meta tags I am having a problem with because all the article pages are generated dynamically. The URL changes but it's all actually just one page. So changing those is a bit of a problem. I am working on it though.

The forum thing is killing me, I see a lot of people going to it and not using it. I will add a Contact Us and a Privacy policy. I never thought of either of those.

Is there a standard Privacy Policy I can pick up from somewhere?

The problem I have with choosing a keyword or tag phrase is that the site is meant to encompass the entire pre-school parenting experience. That's a lot.

The only javascript navigation is the dropdowns for party venues and kids activities. Which is not active yet, The site is fully functional if you have javascript turned off it just takes 1 or 2 more clicks to get to exactly what you want. Hopefully we can start populating those pages soon and then it will be easier to see if I have a navigation problem....

Thanks for taking a look and I will make sure I get the forum registered in directories now as well.

Thanks,
Gavin

[Paz]

Hi Gavin,

Getting a forum started is hard anyway, because people don't like to post in an empty forum, but a privacy policy will help.

Here's one I wrote to give you an idea, but the main thing is the promise of protecting email addresses:

We at example.com respect our present and potential customers' privacy and personal information, especially e-mail addresses. We also suffer with spam emails!

For quality control and to develop our web-site for customers all the visitors of www.example.com are automatically logged. We register your IP address and type of browser (such as Mozilla or Internet Explorer), but we never capture or try to capture any personal information such as your e-mail, phone number or your address.

If you contact us via E-mail, we will keep your E-mail address private and confidential.

You can't do an seo campaign on the entire pre-school experience... LOL

If you don't focus your keyword targeting, you won't rank well for any keyword phrases that will bring lots of traffic. I'd go for "advice for Moms" "tips for Moms" and a few more to start with. Once you've got those in the bag, you can expand your campaign to include other phrases after checking them out with the keyword research tool I originally posted.

I would fill out those "coming soon" pages or delete them before you start doing directory submissions. You don't have many I know directory, but editors tend not to like to add sites with "under construction" pages, and if they accidentally stumble on one of yours, it will make a bad impression.

It's a good looking site though, I don't think it will have any problems getting into the free directories.

[GavinMannion]

Thanks Paz,

I have been monitoring my results after Google has indexed the sites and I can now see the real problem of have the same Meta Description on every page.

If I do a search for site:www.mommies.co.za/Articles/ I get 1 result, if I allow omitted results I get 10 but they all have the same description.

I am going to have to change some code to get that fixed. Real problem unfortunately...

Yeah the coming soon pages are bugging me as well, hopefully I will get some venues up in the very near future to populate those pages. The boss doesn't want me to hide them until then so my hands are tied.

I will see what phrase the boss wants to target and then work from there.

Thanks for the help :)..

[Paz]

Hi,

it would be enough to parse the first sentence of each article into a description meta tag. If you can't do that then I would suggest you try dropping the tag completely and the search engines will figure out a description for themselves.

They'll probably just make a snippet using the first sentence too. It's not as relaible as having a unique, user-defined description tag, but it should be OK.

You can check to see how the pages are indexed by the SE's doing a search for site:www.example.com (no spaces).

Be sure to keep in touch!

Cheers,
Paz.

[GavinMannion]

I was going to do the first sentence thing but all the HTML got in the way and I didn't feel like stripping it, but after looking at how much effort it will be changing the DB and retraining the wife maybe I should just strip the HTML after all.

My home internet is uncapped tomorrow so I can then upload my changes and wait for google to stroll past again :)

[GavinMannion]

Finally got my home internet back again, 3 days feels like a lifetime :)

I have now changed the description tags to be the first couple of words of each article and changed my Coming soon page to look like a real page instead.

It's still basically coming soon but it has more information on.

We had two people register for our forum today which is a big thing for us, but noone posted... We have a plan for that though :)

Will let you know how I get on... had a few organic visitors recently which is nice, at least the site is being found...

[Paz]

Hi Gavin,

that's great news!

Yeah, we get a few mystery forum members too, perhaps you can send a follow up email just in case they've forgotten the url or lost their password or something.

Anyway, let us know when you're ready to start a keyword campaign and be sure to keep in touch!