Help?! I'm at my wits end.

wilhorse

New Member
A couple months ago I built a site for my business with yahoo sitebuilder. My site was found about a dozen times in google searches. Since I've moved to wordpress, my site is invisible. It only comes up when I type it in the address bar. My time and knowledge is limited. The business doesn't generate enough $$$ to invest a lot in a site.

Should I go back to the ugly yahoo site, or find a theme that works better? I've researched until I'm cross eyed. I added yoast plugins, etc. but I really don't understand how to optimized them. It's all so confusing.

Is there a simple site builder that gives search results like yahoo, but looks better? Something that's decent looking? With wordpress I'm giving up results for aesthetics.

Here's the original yahoo site: http://wilhorse.com/

Here's the wordpress site: http://www.resolvewound.com/
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Have you redirected the URLs from the 'old' site to the new ones?

Also what you use to produce the HTML that makes up your site make no dfifference at all.
 

wilhorse

New Member
HI, I haven't redirected urls. I will google how to do that. I think the difference is, I was able to hide, or bury, lots of keywords in the yahoo site. I made the words the same color as the background. I understand what people are searching for to find a product like mine, so that helps. I even buried my competitors name in there. Not sure if that's a big no-no or not. Just being creative with words.

The problem with the new site is when I ran it thru google's keyword system, it hardly picked up key words. I just wondered if one site builder over another was better suited for SEO optimization. It's time consuming enough to learn how to build the site in wordpress. I just can't spend even more time learning the ins and outs of SEO.

Would weebly be a option? My hosting service is bluehost. They are so much more professional than yahoo. Just can't believe how the results tanked.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
A couple things:
1:
...I think the difference is, I was able to hide, or bury, lots of keywords in the yahoo site. I made the words the same color as the background. I understand what people are searching for to find a product like mine, so that helps. I even buried my competitors name in there. Not sure if that's a big no-no or not. Just being creative with words.
All of that is a big no-no.

2. A couple of months is a good while in web time. Overloading on SEO this and SEO that aren't going to get you anywhere. Believe me, I've been down that road. There are but two secrets to search engine success:
- Good, quality, relevant content
- Patience

3. Good, clean code helps. Is it the end-all be-all? No. But, it helps. That said, web builders aren't going to give you that. You're probably best off with Wordpress and a good theme at this point.

4. Patience. It takes time. Yes, there are people out there who can have your website receiving 100s of hits per hour in just 2 weeks. What they don't tell you is how your site will eventually be blacklisted, or how 100s of hits per hour means spit if no one's buying.
 

Nullified

New Member
I think you have way too many scripts loading in the header. When I first came to the site a blank white background displayed for 2 seconds before the entire page's content loaded in a flash. I am on a 20mbps downlink.

If the scripts are not pertinent to pageload (meaning they are used for site interaction after load) then move them to the footer after all other page content.

Plus, try utilizing some php code to display only scripts relevant to the current page.

Lastly, implement the use of pragma, expires and cache-control eta tags to ensure content is cached and not reloaded at each page load.

Take at look at my code here: www.option9.com - You'll see I have implemented all of that and my page loads quickly.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
HI, I haven't redirected urls. I will google how to do that. I think the difference is, I was able to hide, or bury, lots of keywords in the yahoo site. I made the words the same color as the background. I understand what people are searching for to find a product like mine, so that helps. I even buried my competitors name in there. Not sure if that's a big no-no or not. Just being creative with words.

The problem with the new site is when I ran it thru google's keyword system, it hardly picked up key words. I just wondered if one site builder over another was better suited for SEO optimization. It's time consuming enough to learn how to build the site in wordpress. I just can't spend even more time learning the ins and outs of SEO.

Would weebly be a option? My hosting service is bluehost. They are so much more professional than yahoo. Just can't believe how the results tanked.

So no redirects AND "keyword stuffing"!!! Boy you really don't want to let Google send you referrals.


Forget about "keywords" and pointless "rank checking" create a site for USERS not search engines AND get links for TRAFFIC NOT "rankings"
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Pretty much but set the delay to 0 rather than 2secs search engines will then treat it as a permanent redirect rather than a temporary one.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
A permanent redirect, (HTTP/1.1 301 response) will transfer any value that the old URL may have, over to the new URL while the redirect is in place, and the old url will be replaced in the index with the new. It takes a while for this to happen

A temporary redirect, (HTTP/1.1 307 or 302 response) will not pass value and both URLs will remain indexed.

In both cases user agents such as browsers will be redirect over to rhe new URLs

By the way, value for Google, does NOT mean SGB PR, it means REAL PR and anchor text.
 

Nullified

New Member
I did and can see that your site is messed up in Safari. You have omitted to close the footer div.
I haven't done any testing in safari, but I don't see where I did not close the footer div in firefox or ie and the code should be the same in all browsers. It may not display the same, but i'm sure if the footer div is closed in ff and ie then it is closed in safari. I'll look into the issue though, but i was offering my code to address the issues with load times and to give examples of the suggestions I gave.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I would have thought a more pertinent question would be:

Why do you have a XHTML DTD but code the document to the HTML3.2 specification?
 

Roddy

New Member
i'm sure if the footer div is closed in ff and ie then it is closed in safari

The div is not closed in any browser because of the screwed up layout in Safari!

I'm only suggesting that its the footer div. It could be any other one. Don't you have a document syntax checker?
 

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
it is very div happy, and perhaps there is or isnt a div unclosed.

nonetheless its advisable to NOT use <center> as chris correctly pointed out html3.2 was the last time it had its time in the sun, and I think the align attribute is also deprecated in html4.01 and above but i'm not 100%.

and if you want to talk about optimising pages. a good start is to use css over images. looks like you would benefit from say learning box-shadow, gradients and rounded-corners.

Oh and it doesnt load that fast, perhaps on your computer it does as its in your cache...
 
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