Status
Not open for further replies.

seanpearse

New Member
Hi Fergus,
Had a quick look at your site. On site SEO is pretty good. Good content Your Alexa rank will go down if visitor numbers are down. The only way to get your rank improved is to drive more traffic to your site. I see you've got some really good videos and a youtube channel. You should submit these to other video sites (if you haven't already). Tubemogul takes a lot of the hassle out of this task. Make sure to include a link back to your main site (obviously). You could then bookmark our video links to social bookmarking sites and try to gain a bit of publicity that way. This will give you powerful backlinks from the videos and also help attract traffic to your site.

Just an idea.
 

link8r

New Member
Alexa is probably less accurate than the Irish governments assessment of houses being built in the last 10 years. Alexa uses a relatively small number of hints (like their toolbar) to judge traffic. It's wildly optimistic at best and a terrible way to assess any site.

A number of things could happen:

1. Seasonal, economic or other changes in consumer demand/interest could reduce actual traffic
2. You're removed good content and ranked pages with pages not as well designed or haven't replaced them as well
3. As a new site, you received a boost that has since dropped as the site matured
4. with all the scripts you're running, could it be slower for G to crawl
5. A multitude of others

Please give us more information on the changes, etc
 

FergusM

New Member
Hi,

1. could indeed be a factor
2. Hopefully they are better designed than before, and with much better content, but the bounce rate went up from 30% to 60 %. We mistakenly amalgamated some pages with some nice tabs thus people could get a lot of info from one page. Fixed that and the bounce rate dropped to 50%. Everybody we ask say pages are nicer and fresher. But maybe they are interacting as well as before.
3. I was wondering about this. I started the SEO and adwords last April and increased traffic quite well. Maybe I have hit a peak.
4. Speed does seem to be an issue. Not sure what to do. I have contacted Lets Host and they say it is OK. My tests say it is bad. My tests say their own site is bad.
5. ??

Thanks for the reply.

Regards
Fergus
 

link8r

New Member
Hi Fergus,

There are some tests you can run on this official Google blog post: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

Whatever way people look at site speed, ultimately, you have to go with the one Google will see.

Page speed may be hosting related but from experience its mostly site or code specifc. Google Webmasters will give you an interesting graph that shows how it finds your site, and that ultimately is what your site will be judged on. But its also just a small signal. And your site has to be quite bad.

The webmaster tools will also tell you 1) what you ranked for and what the click-through-rate is and 2) where you've dropped. This can be quite a lot of data to go through but it is worth it.

The difference between hitting a peak and dropping are two different issues. Hitting a peak would probably mean that traffic is stable (with variance) and traffic going down would suggest something different.

I'd need to get a lot more information - traffic change by source, ranking changes, and so forth.

Whenever a company wants to change their website - we always ask why and what will you gain. For the most part, people want to update their website because they're sick of it - so the only thing they're fixing is their own feeling about updating a website. When we go through a managed process, the move to produce a new website drops to just 10% of instances. Lastly, we'd never be involved in a new site launch unless we fully understand what the placement of the current site is --- to minimise loss in traffic
 

FergusM

New Member
Hi link8r,

I went to the link, great info there. Traffic has gone down but is stable, but still way ahead of what was 6 months ago. Seasonal could certainly be a factor as microlighting is a good weather activity. I checked the results for pages from Ireland in Google today for over 18 different keywords and keyword phrases ( I should have done that before I posted. Then again I would not have got that link you gave me) and I have improved in most of them, some dramatically so. That leaves me wondering about the value of the Alexa ranking, at least how to interpret it. My rank corresponds to the rank I had when I had 1/4 of the current visitors.

As for the reasons for rewriting the site. Well you are correct I was a bit sick of it. But they were a few other reasons, tables, code very messy, non css and a few other things.
 

FergusM

New Member
Hi Sean,

Thanks for the feed back. I will submit video there. I need to shorten it a little as it was the first attempt as editing.
 

seanpearse

New Member
no worries fergus it wasn't overly comprehensive but video marketing is a great seo tool and should be utilised where possible, especially when you already have plenty of professional good quality videos at your disposal. camtasia is excellent for editing and (relatively!!) easy to use and there's loads of free format converters out there to minimise the output file size and make them easier to upload.
 

link8r

New Member
Hi link8r,
As for the reasons for rewriting the site. Well you are correct I was a bit sick of it. But they were a few other reasons, tables, code very messy, non css and a few other things.

Some people place a lot of emphasis on code (particularly 'Guardian' personality type = 45% of people) - thinking that Google will reward their attention to detail. And with each person, it get surprisingly detailed, like that Google will appreciate closing every point for example (it gets anal IMHO). In reality, Google "filters" a page - and looks for specific elements, like text or title tags or alt tags or links and then either ignores the rest or dumps it at the bottom. Simply put, really bad HTML (eg try having two differet Title tags - the old and the current style) - Googlebot won't even open the HTML as far as the second tag - thus everything is ditched.
 

deadmix

New Member
the website is pr3, you don't have lot of backlinks.. and there is a lot of miss on your html code and you use a lot of keywords!!! that's a factor to start ignoring your website by search engines's Bots... i think you have to optimize your website Source code and working on backlinks...

Goodluck
 

brianbaru

New Member
I would pay very little heed to alexa ranking. It's extremely vague. Focus on the amount of traffic hitting your site.
 

ZasonJe

New Member
Alexa is highly irrelevant for your site. Like people said, don't pay any attention to them. If you score high, great, but if you don't, it's no biggy.
 

FergusM

New Member
I have come to that conclusion as well. The visitor numbers are up but Alexa is down. It is not a metric worth watching. Thanks.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top