Meditation Website and Book

by Tom Von Deck
(Prescott, AZ, USA)

Site: www.monkeywisdom.net/oceanicmind

How much traffic do you get? Not much. The contents are published throughout the internet. The contents all direct people to monkeywisdom.net. Googlebots visit. People from India for some reason visit. Some people type www.monkeywisdom.net into their browser to find my site and, for some reason do not make it to monkeywisdom.net/oceanicmind, which is puzzling considering that they probably just looked at the contents of my book.

How much comes from the search engines? Half. My Scribd site gets the most from search engines. It gets a lot more than my main site.

How much money and time have you put into the site? Most of the time is spent optimizing the keywords in the domain site and the subdomain (my book) site. It costs $5.00 per months to avoid popup ads and a few bucks for Google Adwords.

Has the site met your expectations? There are too many pages that link to my site that outrank the site itself. It gets drowned out by Smashwords, Getfreeebooks.com, Scribd, various author sites, etc.

By the way, whether it's physical problems, website problems, tooth problems, I ALWAYS go into the expert's (or doctor's) journal as a special and unusual case. Maybe this'll be the same. I'm sure this may be a good learning experience for myself and others.

Tom's book page on this site: Fun with Print on Demand

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Tom, I'm going to take the liberty of examining your site as a whole, because that's how I suspect the search engines perceive it. And, actually, I think it's advisable that you keep it as a single presence, as the subjects are overlapping. (Tom has a meditation/yoga business, and the rest of his site is devoted to that.)

I'm also going to sum up the advice I offered previously when commenting on your book page...

1) Make sure all your pages link back to your home page. It helps the search engines crawl your site and can work to your advantage.

2) Give your pages real file names, ones that are congruent with each page's content and sound like real search terms that someone might type into a search engine.

Bad: http://www.monkeywisdom.net/id11.html
Good: http://www.monkeywisdom.net/subconscious-beliefs.html

(Use Google's Keyword Tool to find real search terms!)

4) Try to use that actual search term a few times on your page.

So now let's go a little more in-depth

For starters, Tom, I want you to begin thinking of your site as a collection of fishing nets. The more nets you have, the more traffic you're going to catch.

Think about it: the search engines don't refer searchers to websites, they refer them to webpages. For any search query, those engines are looking for the most apt pages on the Web. Your website then should be composed of pages that aim to rank for search queries related to your subject matter.

And, looking at the non-book part of your site, I'm seeing pages that run long. In many cases you have one fishing net, where you could have two or three! (As a rough estimate, let's say that pages don't really benefit from additional length after about 600 words.)

If you have that much to say, say it on multiple pages, giving each one a slightly different focus and aiming each at a distinct search phrase.

Okay, enough with the fishing net analogy. Let's move on to the funnel!

You have to get all those fish back to the boat, right? Your website should be a funnel, leading search engine visitors from the information they were searching for (and found on your site) to the information YOU want to give.

Namely your book, and/or your professional services. (Actually, I think you do a decent job of that with your site, so I'm mainly putting that in there for other people reading this!)

Now, let's talk about your domain name.

If you have a business with a name and all you want is for people to be able to find it, great, name your website after your business. (Or your book. Or your self.) However...

If you want to be found by people who weren't searching for you but were searching for the things you have to offer, then monkeywisdom.net is NOT a great name for a website. Your domain name is part of what the engines use to determine your site's focus and rank.

You're telling those engines that you're an expert in Monkey Wisdom, and frankly there's not a lot of demand for that! When you speak of being outranked by your presence on getfreeebooks.com, well...

Can you see why? On getfreeebooks.com you can get free e-books. On monkeywisdom.net you get yoga training and a meditation book. Hmmm.

(By the way, monkeywisdom.com features some Indian-themed goods, which probably explains your Indian traffic.)

So, can you see why meditationtraining.com gets the visitors you want and why you don't? In fact, check out meditationtraining.org. Like you, they have a bricks and mortar business. But unlike you they get found when people nationwide search meditation training. Check out what they do that I've recommended:

• The domain name is apt
• The page file names are descriptive
• Each page's content is focused
• Each page links back to the home page

Here's what I think we've learned

Tom, you're more than capable of writing the content necessary to have a successful website. Your problems relate to structural/organizational matters and a lack of keyword research. And your domain name is holding you back big-time.

Let me give you 5 options I see that are available to you.

1) Hire the web designer who did the meditationtraining.org site. There's a link to her at the bottom of their site. If she's responsible for the content, then she appears to be the RARE web designer who knows not just about design but about attracting traffic. (Maybe she won't have any ethical objections to helping you with a competing site!)

2) Use the interface I use to build my sites. You'll be given what is essentially an instruction manual and a suite of software tools to structure your site's content in such a way that the search engines give you the respect you deserve.

3) Pay a bit more to get the same instruction manual, software AND an intensive 12 week course with an instructor to make sure you design your new site right!

4) Have this same company I use design your site for you. The cost will be significantly more than their other options, but likely less than using a web designer.

5) Go it alone building a new site. Get an apt domain name and follow my advice. But please know that I'm only able to share here a tiny fraction of what I know and that you don't have access to the software tools I use to optimize my site. I can almost guarantee though that you'll get better results in the long run than you are from monkeywisdom.net.

Whew! I didn't expect to go on this long. I hope it's of some help!