Should I Hire Someone?

webdesignnoobie

New Member
Hello all,

Currently, I help run a website/blog that got almost 20k visitors last month. Even though this is the case, our google page rank is still zero and we are doing nothing on the SEO side of things (due to lack of knowledge).

We did not design the site, but we use a template that we purchased online. It looks nice, but I know that it should be able to load faster. I have checked on a few "content optimization websites" and it appears that our website code needs improvement and there are many other structural things wrong with our site. Unfortunately, we do not have any experience with this and wouldn't even know where to start if we looked at the code behind the template.

Is there any software out there that optimizes web code or anything like that? If not, what do you all recommend?

Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
First of all, page rank is nothing. Period. The only metric you need to know if you're doing well is that 20k visitors per month.

Second, if your site is loading slowly and you suspect it's hindering search engines from indexing your site properly, the best way to do this is by hand. Does software exist to do this? Maybe. Should you use it? Probably not. I would say, if you're serious about fixing things, hire out and let someone redesign or at least recode it for you.

Third, once the site is coded in a way that helps search engines index your site, make sure you're creating quality, useful content.
 

webdesignnoobie

New Member
Thanks for the response, ronald. The reason that I am concerned with page rank is because our stats show that very few of our 20k unique visitors come from search engines. If we could improve our presence there then I think we should attract many more visitors.

Our website is here: link

If you guys don't mind taking a look and letting me know how difficult you think it would be to improve the code/behind the scenes design, then that would be greatly appreciated. I feel like there is a lot of simple stuff that is off that someone with experience may notice right away.

Thanks again, I appreciate any help your guys can offer!
 
I think you can easily help your Google visibility on this, and for once, I don’t think there’s going to be any argument (well, we will see on that).

First, Your title, change it. It says nothing at all about who or what you are. Second, some Meta description of your site would be nice, especially since it looks like you’re pulling feeds from other pages on your main page. Third, there is no h1 heading, use one somewhere (probably best to use a css image replacement to put it as the title). Image titles could have better alt tags that describe the products better.

Also I didn’t see a site map. Submitting on to Google will help index your site better as well. Okay, I’m sure there will be an argument here somewhere, but doing any of these won’t hurt and can only help, haters be damned,lol.
 

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
On top of what brian has said. I would move all your scripts to the bottom of the document (there is a substantial lag with this site) and really optimise the images used. A sitemap will help and the other thing I would do is to look at the div structure.
I noticed a lot of this
HTML:
<div id="really-long-id-name">
<div id="really-long-id-name-2">
<div id="really-long-id-name-3">
<div id="really-long-id-name-4">
<div id="really-long-id-name-5">
<ul id="really-long-and unsemantic-and unneeded-id-name">
<li class="another-unneeded-class">
<a href="#" class="again-not-needed"><img src="#" alt="these need  work"> </a>
</li>
</ul>
</div></div></div></div></div>
now obviously thats NOT from your site but the basic concept of it is there.

a lot of developers keep sticking things in divs because they do not know better. Once a robot trawls through the site the best it'll see in that entire markup is the alt tag. Thats not to say its "wrong" but it could be optimised and a lot of unneeded nesting can be removed.

download a copy of the lynx browser and you'll get a good idea of what is seen by search engines. I also downloaded a few screen readers the other day just to give it a shot, and it certainly makes a difference to code using the right tags and markup for the right job.
 

webdesignnoobie

New Member
Thanks for the help so far everyone! I'm going to be working on it this weekend and see what I can do before deciding to hire some help.

Keep the suggestions coming, these are great! (even though I don't understand a lot of them lol)
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I'd like to know that as well chrishirst. social?

Should I suspect you would like to know that for a different reason than I do ie: you would like to use the same or similar sources? :D

Traffic is simply an arbitrary number, and means nothing at all UNLESS a proportion of that traffic follows your "call to action" and actually converts.

If your URLs are commercial, lead generating, product sales, newsletter signup, etc. you really don't need more traffic per se, what you do need is better traffic ie: pre-qualified visitors who are already primed to go where you wish to lead them and do what you ask of them.

The only time where "more traffic" is "better traffic" is when your URLs display CPM advertising, where you get paid per thousand impressions.
MFA splog owners work on the principle of strength in numbers, get enough visitors views and some of them might just click on the adverts.
 

webdesignnoobie

New Member
Yeah, most of it comes from social media. Some comes through search engines and a small amount comes from giveaway sites. Not sure about conversion rate because we just started using adsense.

Unfortunately, I have not had the chance to use any of the tips that you all have given me yet...I plan to work a lot on it tonight and throughout the week. I'll start with the sitemap and see if I can figure any of the other stuff out.

So now that some of you have seen it, how much work (time & money) do you think it would be for someone to fix the major issues?

Thanks!
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
What has Adsense got to do with conversion rates???

So if very few visitors come from search why do you even care????

The LESS traffic you have from search referrals the more stable the site traffic and revenue will be.

KEEP it like that

So now that some of you have seen it, how much work (time & money) do you think it would be for someone to fix the major issues?
Hitting 20K visitors /month says to me that the only "major issue" is YOU in thinking that SE traffic is essential or a given right. Common sense says you should NOT waste any money on SEO "experts" because you do NOT need one. Whatever marketing you are doing is having exactly the right effect (driving traffic) so just do more of the same.

By the way is the 20k to ALL URLs on your website or just the one? The website is a perfect example of what "social media marketing" is best used for, 75% of women on the entire planet who use "social" sites will be reading what topics your site covers, whereas the traffic from search is likely to be sporadic, fragmented and very poor at converting.

SEO will NOT help you very much, good marketing and promotion WILL.
 

webdesignnoobie

New Member
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me. When you mentioned conversion rates, I thought you meant how many people visit my site and click on ads (that's the way I understood the meaning from googling it)...what did you actually mean by conversion rates?

Also, the 20k visitors is to any of the pages on my website. I understand that we have been doing very well, I just felt like by cleaning up the code and making it load faster (as well as showing up in search engines more), then that would improve the site overall.

Once again, thanks for all of the valuable feedback...I truly do appreciate it!
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
A conversion is whatever you determine it to be and whatever path or action you want the visitor to take as a result of arriving on your URL. It may be a newsletter signup, a product purchase, a service enquiry or for affiliate ads, lead generating or indeed Adsense URLs, a click on an advert that earns revenue for the referring URL.

Also, the 20k visitors is to any of the pages on my website. I understand that we have been doing very well, I just felt like by cleaning up the code and making it load faster (as well as showing up in search engines more), then that would improve the site overall.
Ignore the idea of a "code to content ratio" it doesn't exist as something that search engines use.
Again with so-called "site speed", no search engine has yet defined what "speed" means in this context and what the benchmarks are, or if indeed there are any benchmarks at all.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Oh dear, another list of useless "factors" from an "expert"


Meta data is very important is it tells Google what to display on its search results. It also uses the keywords from your Meta Data to help people find you in searches.
Totally and utterly wrong, Google have not used meta keywords data since 2001.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU

Yahoo! did use the meta keywords content up until around 2008 but evan that has gone since Bing supplying Yahoo! results, which started changing over in 2009.

Meta Title:
Marketing Consultancy, Social Media Start Up, Training and Management in Henley and Reading
There is NO SUCH THING as a meta title that is used by or for search.
There is a TITLE ELEMENT (<title>Text here</title>) that is used but it is NOT a meta element.


1. Build a targeted keywords list – produce a list of relevant keywords and insert them cleverly into your webpages content.
2. Search-friendly site – build your website with original content, indexable pages and use sitemaps so Google can index all your pages quickly.
3. Link Build – Build relevant QUALITY incoming links, using your keywords as the link text.
Great! A lesson in how to get your URLs filtered in the latest Google systems.

If you are getting 20K visitors from your current promotion and marketing, do NOT under any circumstances change it. You are doing EXACTLY the right thing and targeting REAL PEOPLE. Just keep doing that and search referrals WILL start to happen.
If the site makes sufficient revenue now do NOT let the vague hope of "huge results" from search referrals lead you astray, SE referrals are NOT guaranteed, they may send ten of thousands of visitors one month then none at all for the next three. You cannot build a steady revenue stream on something that you cannot control, and SE referral traffic is very much outside of your control.
 

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
If you want to see how building your site for users and NOT search engines brings results have a read at this thread, it may not be quick but it is effective and durable.
 
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