Eagles Wings Publications
by Stephanie Ehmen
url of your site: Eagles Wings Publications Well, Stephanie, you have a worthy goal but you're not attracting the traffic you'd like. I think you're right to be thinking about keywords. You want to have your site come up for some popular searches! A few words about keywords first. It's not effective to just jam every keyword you can into your "meta" or onto your home page. Proper use of a keyword is to devote an ENTIRE PAGE to the subject it implies, and to weave that into a coherent site with a coherent subject and structure. I'm looking at your home page. The most likely keyword I'm seeing is Katrina, or Hurricane Katrina. (A keyword can be any combination of words typed into a search engine.) The only good news about Hurricane Katrina is it's likely to be a popular keyword for many years to come. Do you know about this tool? It's intended for advertisers who want to place ads with Google, but it's useful to webmasters as well. It provides a rough sense of search frequency for a particular keyword, and it provides many related keywords. I just plugged in Katrina. You should do the same. Then click atop Average Search Volume to order the keywords by frequency. I'm seeing some interesting possibilities... after hurricane katrina katrina damage katrina facts katrina recovery katrina relief katrina victims effects of hurricane katrina hurricane katrina aftermath katrina evacuees katrina fund katrina help Oh and here's a very interesting one: katrina stories The problem as I see it is that your site isn't about anything that anyone is searching for information on. It's a wonderful site to send people TO, but it's not so great for getting FOUND. That's why keywords are a great thing to start thinking about. Thinking about common searches forces you to consider what a searcher would WANT to find as a result of that search. Someone searching Katrina evacuees probably isn't looking to learn all about the Thorntons; they're probably looking for help! And here's the unfortunate truth: Google wants to help people find what they're looking for, not what YOU want them to find! What does all that mean? It means that if you really want more traffic, you need to start providing information on more than the Thorntons! What kind of information? Well, the kind suggested by those keywords we found. So the question becomes, Are you prepared to create a site that offers real and substantial information resources relating to Katrina? And if so, is eagleswingspublications.com the right vehicle? Probably not. First, even the domain name puts you at a disadvantage. The search engines take your url into consideration in deciding what your site is about. Your domain name gives you a better chance at becoming a high-ranking information resource on Native American headdresses than on Katrina! It makes sense to me that your blog gets more traffic than your website. You spend more time on it, it's constantly updated, and it contains more text. But that's not to say it has more potential than a website. It doesn't. One sad fact of the internet is that Big wins. The search engines view it as their job to direct searchers to sites that offer a wide range of information on a not-too-big, not-too-small subject. (The Thorntons, I'm afraid, is way too small.) Now imagine, if you will, a site that collected Katrina stories - not just the Thorntons' - in abundance. (It would be rather like what this website does with self publishing stories. Here's the feature I use to create user-generated content.) Pretty soon, you could be getting a lot more traffic. But it would require a lot more work! Of course, that isn't the only way to build a bigger, more trafficked website. And if eagleswingspublications.com remains where you want to focus your effort, well, you can never go wrong by creating more pages and content. If I were to do so, I would make the bulk of those additions Katrina focused. I would also look at every page on the site and address its "meta." I'm not sure, but I don't think you have meta Description or Keywords listed in your code. They certainly can't hurt. Rather than create identical meta for all your pages, I would address each individually. Reread your page text and come up with a Description and some apt Keywords. Also, compare your blog's homepage to your site's. I think you'll be surprised at how much more often the word Katrina comes up on the former. That and the lack of meta could be combining to confuse the engines about your site's focus. You can also work-work-work at getting links to your site, but I'm afraid you're going to get a relatively low return for your efforts. No amount of inbound links is going to convince the search engines that your site offers extensive information on a popularly searched subject. (The wonderful thing about creating a site that IS a sought-after information resource is that the links tend to simply come to you!) Sigh. I wish I could be more help, Stephanie. (But I did receive my book today. Yay!)
|
