Please review www.quad-atv.za.net

[McClaw]

Hi All

I have been running www.quad-atv.za.net for the last year an a bit, and the site seems to be doing well on google and MSN, but Yahoo is not sending me much traffic.

Can you guys give me some suggestions on how to better the rankings from yahoo (or even just general suggestions)
Site: Quad bikes and ATV's in South Africa (http://www.quad-atv.za.net)
Thank you in advance

[Paz]

Hi,

Welcome to the forum! It's a very well optimised site with excellent content for visitors.

It seems to do quite well in Yahoo for a search for "Quad bikes specs (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=quad+bikes+specs&ei=UTF-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&fr=moz2)".

Tell us which keywords you are targeting and I'll do a more thorough check. In general though, Yahoo likes any old sort of backlinks and lots of them, as well as fairly high keyword densities - either of these could hurt you in Google though.

Cheers,
Paz.

[McClaw]

Thank you for the comments.

Having a look at your search yahoo results, it seems that I am actually doing well in yahoo.

The first 4 pages are all my sites :lol:

www.quad-atv.za.net
www.quad-atv.za.net/Honda_FourTrax_Recon_TRX250TM5_specs.aspx
www.sulaco.co.za/sitemap_quad_bikes.htm
quadsa.blogspot.com

I ran few queries on yahoo to have a look, and it seems that I do rank well for most of them.

ATV specs : rank 6
Honda ATV : not on first page
honda quad bikes : rank 5
kawasaki quad bikes : rank 5
yamaha quad bikes : rank 5
polaris quad bikes : rank 8
etc...

So it seems people ar just not using yahoo that much to search for quadbikes / ATV's

I must be honest, I generally dont worry too much about yahoo since it takes care of it's self (and I dont know alot about that search engine:oops: )

Thank you again for the comments on the site, if you can think of anything that I am not doing, I will greatly appreciate it. :smile:

[Chatmaster]

Hi McClaw

Have to agree, it is a very nice website. In the SA market you will need to perform well on Google. The best way for your site to do this is to obtain contextual deeplinks.

I personally feel your homepage is to loaded and that your site have several usability issues. I found myself lost when I was looking for a Honda Foreman. This quad is my absolute fav :) It is also the quad in my MSN pic :)
To get back to my point. I felt lost in finding specific information. Although the site has fantastic onpage factors it lacks direction. I can only imagine how many people are lost or overwhelmed by the quantity of content on the home page.

Your internal pages are wonderfull and a true resource for people who wants to have more info.

I would also have one more links level as it will definately improve your rankings in Google for more niche keywords. Instead of having every single model of every type of quad rather have only Polaris, Honda etc. linking from the home page and the from the individual manufacturers pages have the different models link from there. This will increase the targeted themes that they receive from their individual pages.

So in summary:
*more deeplinking backlinks
*usability
*internal linking structure could be better for increased keyword weight through themed content.

[McClaw]

Hi Chatmaster

Thank you for the feedback,

I will definately have to make a plan with the navigation, as you said it is very "deurmekaar" at the moment, I suppose that happens when a site like mine grows so quickly.

It was initially just a site about my first quad, but turned into a monster almost all by its self :-o

I am a little aprehensive about changing it though, because I get quite a few hits from key phrases like "Polaris Rustler" in stead of "Linhai Rustler" because Rustler text also appears on the polaris page.
eg:
Polaris Rustler (http://www.google.co.za/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-31,GGLG:en&q=Polaris+Rustler)

Also the heavy interlinking of pages seems to be working well in google to spread my page rank evenly accross all pages.

Perhaps I should gently start reworking the navigation (one page a week) in order to properly guage the effect it will have on my google traffic in the long term.

Yup, deep back links can only make the site better.

[Paz]

Hi,

Well chatmaster beat me to the thorough review.

The ranking list looks pretty impressive. As I tried to suggest; I don't optimise for Yahoo because the optimisation necessary to get ranking quickly in Yahoo will hurt you in Google - and Google sends a lot more traffic than Yahoo in most of the markets we work in.

You rank for a lot of other stuff too, eg "quad bikes for sale SA". Do you ever look in your logs to see exactly how people are arriving at your site?

You might be suprised!

Cheers,
Paz.

[Glen]

Nice site, maybe the title tag could be a little shorter but thats just me being picky ;)

I noticed a blog style front on the site, is it actually a blog on the homepage? as if so you could do more to spread your search engine spread with a few tweaks...

~ Glen

[McClaw]

Hi,

Well chatmaster beat me to the thorough review.

The ranking list looks pretty impressive. As I tried to suggest; I don't optimise for Yahoo because the optimisation necessary to get ranking quickly in Yahoo will hurt you in Google - and Google sends a lot more traffic than Yahoo in most of the markets we work in.

You rank for a lot of other stuff too, eg "quad bikes for sale SA". Do you ever look in your logs to see exactly how people are arriving at your site?

You might be suprised!

Cheers,
Paz.

Hey Paz.

Yea, I check ranking on a few thousand keywords every week, and I rank pretty well for most of them, but in middle january google changed something in their algo, and the quad site tanked for two weeks :-o

It did recover eventually, but now I'm scared that it will happen again.

That glitch cost me about R2000 :sad:

I wrote my own system to analyze the logfiles of all of my sites at the same time so I can very quickly see any problems with any of my sites at a glance.

So yea, I am a compulsive logfile chekker :oops: :D

[McClaw]

Nice site, maybe the title tag could be a little shorter but thats just me being picky ;)

I noticed a blog style front on the site, is it actually a blog on the homepage? as if so you could do more to spread your search engine spread with a few tweaks...

~ Glen

Hey Glen

Thanks Dude :)

I used to use title tags specifically targeting one small set of trophy keywords, but I found that the competition on these where to hectic.

By changing the title tags to longer text I target lesser searched longer key phrases, but the competition is also ALOT less.

Normally I only have to compete with about 32000 or so other pages in stead of millions

Traffic from these keywords turned out to be higher that for the trophy keywords.

This site started out as a blogspot blog, but some of the stuff on blogger started irretating me, so I "stole" some of the theory behind the way blogs work, and built the site around those.