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I'm sure Craig will help on this but first impressions are that your web site may not be very Google friendly - have you submitted a site map? Is the site getting indexed properly - I believe Serif has a reputation for slightly idiosyncratic ways of doing things. Remember Google takes note of content not meta tags or keywords so your content must be readable to the robots.
You site has a zero page rank at present - it will help if you can build that by working at content quality, appropriate words in your body text, plenty of outward links and hopefully some back links - you have none listed at present. Google only reviews page ranks at quite long intervals - three months I think so don't expect instant results.
Have you tried Google Adwords? - it's a very powerful way to get on the first page of searches but you have to pay - however it costs very little to dabble and test the effectiveness. You can target the ads very precisely by time of day, day of week, geographical locality etc. so that you can avoid exposure to all those folks in the US who spend so much time browsing around the UK.
Have you investigated the origins of the hits you are getting - Google analytics will give you masses of info - it may be that many of the hits have no value as prospective customers being from well away from your locale. Statcounter will also give you loads of useful info.
Sorry if this stuff is all familiar to you,
Cheers
Richard
I have tried adwords several times and it definately drives traffic.
I'll have to look at the content again and tweak that, and I've not come across the submitting a site map before so will get onto that.
many thanks for all the suggestions,
andy
Richard Loader said:
I had a quick look at making a site map for your site but my site map creator couldn't spider the site. I think it's down to the frames structure of the site and the referencing to : http://www.westacottgardens.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
You might want to look at making your site more robot friendly - eg. your blog shows up on a google search for westacott but your main site does not.
I think the hits you are getting are from third parties rather than organically direct to your site..........or am I missing something.
Cheers
Richard
As Richard says the frames with which you have built the site is a real break on any progress, search engines will not be able to crawl the site properly.
To get an idea of what search engines see if you go to View and then Page Source this shows the HTML code, with the frame in place there is very little for search engines to read.
I would also pay a few pounds to host the files properly, free domains such as blueyonder are again seen by search engines as a bit of a no-no.
Having your own server space would then let you give every page it's own title, a very important consideration as again search engines use this as a way to tell what the page is about.
If you look at your own blog and the pages on the network you will see at the very top of your browser the page title and often how descriptive this is, something that's not happening on your main site.
Once you've made some tweaks I would feed your blog posts into the main site and offer readers the chance to follow your new articles via RSS as you are doing, but sign up for the free newsletter service provided by Feedburner and they also have a tool that lets you feature your blog posts on the main site.
Hope this helps.
Craig
My only concern is with the way the site is built, basically I decided to build the site myself obviosuly to save a bit of money and I found the serif application easy to use and the results not too shabby. However, if the site is then constructed in a manner that will restrict it being found by google etc I may have to look at that again.
Something few websites do, both big and small, is to look at ways to be in front of potential clients on a regular basis.
On the internet the simplest way to do this is via a newsletter, so that maybe once or twice a month you update subscribers with a little news about your work, offer tips and ideas, so that when they are ready to get a landscaper in there is a good chance you will be 'front and centre'.
And because people are so used to forwarding messages you have a simple way of getting in front of potential new customers by ensuring your newsletter is sent on to the friends of existing subscribers.
I know a company that sells the best part of £1 billion of services a year online and the constant thing throughout their whole site is a newsletter sign-up form.
I've written a little more about the value of newsletters on my own site, please see:
The value of a newsletter
Any questions just shout.
I was in telecoms for 5 years before selling the business and moving back into landscaping - our only source of marketing was web based via the website so i have a good understanding of it.
I just know that for me, most of my clients dont have a computer, or if they do, its used by their children. I was actually asked if a potential client could come and visit my 'website' that they had seen printed on my adverts... They wanted to know what time they could visit, and if i had directions - thats Norfolk for you ;-)
Craig McGinty said:
At the moment the big stumbling block seems to be getting the site recognised by the google tools that have been mentioned. The site won't be verified although I have added the html google look for, I'm guessing this is due to the site being constructed with frames, I wasn't aware this is how serif worked.
Thinks I will need some time to get things right on this level, I was quite chuffed to get the damn thing up and running on my own!
You have done the hard bit which is put together the copy for the pages, and a possible way forward is to use the service offered by TypePad, which offers hosting and a variety of design templates for about £45 a year.
I won't repeat myself as I have written how you can use TypePad as a way to build a 'normal' website even though it is a blogging tool.
Thinking about it you could have your normal site and your blog sitting side by side.
More at:
Build a "normal" website with TypePad
Build a website with TypePad Pages
Drop me a line direct craig@craigmcginty.com if you have any particular questions as this thread could fill up.
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