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Beginner Help-My site dropped off the map

by gijoe985
16 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So, this is my first post here. Hi everyone! A member of the T-Shirt Forums told me that this was the place to be. I sell Christian t shirts.

That said, I have a website, I've been up and running for a little over a year, but I have had the website for over 2. Last fall I got up to position 29 on Google for the obvious keywords "Christian Shirts", but soon after that I dropped off the map. I now am not found on the first 30 pages of Google for those keywords. Though I am 82nd for "christian t shirt".

Anyway, I'm a broke startup company and I need to spend my money wisely. I thought about hiring someone for SEO work, but I feel like I've already done a lot of it. I use keywords, put them in titles, etc. I'm starting to read a lot here on the forums. I wish there was a simple step by step guide that I could just work through.

My site is a Magento site and hosted by Hostmonster. Hostmonster had a SEO ebook that I just downloaded to review. I obviously need some good links, but don't really know how to get random people to link to me.


Anyone have any good resources to point me toward? I have a time knowing what are reliable and up-to-date sources of information. A step-by-step guide would be nice. Otherwise, and free tools to help me would be great. I'm still searching the Warrior forums, but any direct help would be appreciated.
#beginner #dropped #help my #helpmy #map #site
  • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
    If you share the name of your site it would help anybody that cared to advise you. Hard to tell you anything about anything without seeing it.
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    • Profile picture of the author gijoe985
      Originally Posted by kid carson View Post

      If you share the name of your site it would help anybody that cared to advise you. Hard to tell you anything about anything without seeing it.
      Touche...

      Christian T Shirts, Clothing, Apparel, and more: Sport Your Faith

      I sell Christian shirts. Someone just brought it to my attention (I am seriously kicking myself for this) that I don't have the term "Christian shirts" on my homepage anymore. I think I was trying to diversify my keywords and in doing so, got rid of my main one. I basically put "t shirts' everywhere.

      I think I am going to revamp my whole website with a new theme. Start fixing things from the ground up.

      Any help is greatly appreciated. I'd consider paying for help, but what I really need is results. I was already approached by one guy on Elance who said he'd go trhrough and do some work for free as long as I gave him a good review. What I envision currently is just some help getting them ball rolling and a little coaching and I should be able to get it from there.
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      • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
        Originally Posted by gijoe985 View Post

        Touche...

        Christian T Shirts, Clothing, Apparel, and more: Sport Your Faith

        I sell Christian shirts. Someone just brought it to my attention (I am seriously kicking myself for this) that I don't have the term "Christian shirts" on my homepage anymore. I think I was trying to diversify my keywords and in doing so, got rid of my main one. I basically put "t shirts' everywhere.

        I think I am going to revamp my whole website with a new theme. Start fixing things from the ground up.

        Any help is greatly appreciated. I'd consider paying for help, but what I really need is results. I was already approached by one guy on Elance who said he'd go trhrough and do some work for free as long as I gave him a good review. What I envision currently is just some help getting them ball rolling and a little coaching and I should be able to get it from there.
        You need some quality backlinks too. All I see is 3 forum sig links from 3 different car sites and 1 forum sig from one teen christian site pointing to your site. 95% of them are from the car sites.

        There's no need to rebuild your site. Now that you've put your keyword back on your home page you should get yourself a few quality back links beyond those forum sig links (of which 95% aren't even relevant to your site) and you should see a pretty huge difference.

        Where to get the good RELEVANT back links is another story though.
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        • Profile picture of the author gijoe985
          Originally Posted by kid carson View Post

          You need some quality backlinks too. All I see is 3 forum sig links from 3 different car sites and 1 forum sig from one teen christian site pointing to your site. 95% of them are from the car sites.
          Those just happen to be from other forums that I frequent and I put my webpage in my sig. I wasn't "targeting" car sites for my Christian shirts...

          So far most of my advertising efforts have been Facebook and Twitter. I have a Google+ account, but it is a ghost town. I also have Pinterest and think it could be very helpful, but haven't had time to grow it.

          Right now my biggest problem is time. My shirt site is my side job. School teacher by day. So I don't have much time to be posting on forums (for advertising, I try to find time for research and help like this).

          As far as the site rebuild goes, that is more about just wanting to look better and try to increase my conversion rate. I have a new look that I think will really look better. I figure I can kill two birds and optimize all of my SEO as I am transferring content over to the new site.
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          • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
            Originally Posted by gijoe985 View Post

            Those just happen to be from other forums that I frequent and I put my webpage in my sig. I wasn't "targeting" car sites for my Christian shirts...

            So far most of my advertising efforts have been Facebook and Twitter. I have a Google+ account, but it is a ghost town. I also have Pinterest and think it could be very helpful, but haven't had time to grow it.

            Right now my biggest problem is time. My shirt site is my side job. School teacher by day. So I don't have much time to be posting on forums (for advertising, I try to find time for research and help like this).

            As far as the site rebuild goes, that is more about just wanting to look better and try to increase my conversion rate. I have a new look that I think will really look better. I figure I can kill two birds and optimize all of my SEO as I am transferring content over to the new site.
            Sounds like a good plan!
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  • Profile picture of the author strategic seo services
    Originally Posted by gijoe985 View Post

    So, this is my first post here. Hi everyone! A member of the T-Shirt Forums told me that this was the place to be. I sell Christian t shirts.

    That said, I have a website, I've been up and running for a little over a year, but I have had the website for over 2. Last fall I got up to position 29 on Google for the obvious keywords "Christian Shirts", but soon after that I dropped off the map. I now am not found on the first 30 pages of Google for those keywords. Though I am 82nd for "christian t shirt".

    Anyway, I'm a broke startup company and I need to spend my money wisely. I thought about hiring someone for SEO work, but I feel like I've already done a lot of it. I use keywords, put them in titles, etc. I'm starting to read a lot here on the forums. I wish there was a simple step by step guide that I could just work through.

    My site is a Magento site and hosted by Hostmonster. Hostmonster had a SEO ebook that I just downloaded to review. I obviously need some good links, but don't really know how to get random people to link to me.


    Anyone have any good resources to point me toward? I have a time knowing what are reliable and up-to-date sources of information. A step-by-step guide would be nice. Otherwise, and free tools to help me would be great. I'm still searching the Warrior forums, but any direct help would be appreciated.
    Hi there and welcome to the Warrior Forum! Here is an excellent resource that will point you in the right direction for SEO:
    SEO Book.com ~ SEO Training Made Easy There are lots of free resources and tools in that guide.
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    Click Here ► $15 NEW! Backlink Packages Added! Special Discounts. High DA, PA Relevant, Contextual, DoFollow Backlinks. Rank Your Site on Page 1 of Google! ◄Click Here to find out how
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  • Profile picture of the author RyanLB
    Have you done any nefarious linkbuilding? Maybe you have incurred a penalty?
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    I'm a Freelance Copywriter that helps Agencies, Startups and Businesses Educate Their Audience and Grow Sales
    Skype Me: r.boze
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Here's a couple of on-page things that need work for SEO.

    You have a boatload of ugly URL 302 redirects, that don't even redirect to a useful page as far as SEO goes. The URL below 302 redirects to a page about cookies.

    Example of your 302s (replace hxxp with http):
    Code:
    hxxp://www.sportyourfaith.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/18/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcG9ydHlvdXJmYWl0aC5jb20vY2hyaXN0aWFuLXQtc2hpcnRzLWFuZC1hcHBhcmVsLmh0bWw_bW9kZT1saXN0JnNleD0zNQ,,/
    Download Screamingfrog & you'll see what I'm talking about with the 302s.

    You have multiple <h1> tags on the Home page with repetitive text, narrow it down to 1 <h1> tag per page. Also look at the rest of your internal pages as plain text (Google cache text version) so you have a better visual idea of what's happening on the page with things like alt-text & <h> tags.

    Think of the single <h1> tag per page as an alternative page <title>. Google will sometimes use <h1> tags as SERP listing titles.

    When it comes to things like <h> tags, less is more when your tags are focused on your target keywords, <h> tags for text like My Cart, Popular Products, etc... can be re-sized with CSS font sizes instead of <h> tags.

    You can get a web developer plugin for firefox (free) that will simulate a Google Cache (text version).

    Download the browser plugin.
    • Disable all javascript
    • Disable all images
    • Disable all styles
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      It seems that you already know about backlinks. You should get good ones if you can. Unless you know what you're doing stay away from the link packages that you often see on Fiverr and WF.

      Didn't do that much analysis on the site, but the content seems to be very thin. Just a sentence or two. I know it's pretty hard to write about such a simple product, but it would probably work better in search engines. Funny or interesting copy may also get you shares and visitors just because of the content.

      About conversion: you've got social media buttons where your add to cart button should be. Social media buttons are one of the least useful elements for actual customer so at least move them further away from the main title.
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      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

        About conversion: you've got social media buttons where your add to cart button should be. Social media buttons are one of the least useful elements for actual customer so at least move them further away from the main title.
        Agreed, IMO a better option would be for the buyer to share purchased items after checkout with social traffic. Basically a redirect after the checkout page back to a social media page hosted on the money site. This way a potential buyer isn't distracted away from a shopping cart trying to share things on social.
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      • Profile picture of the author gijoe985
        Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

        About conversion: you've got social media buttons where your add to cart button should be. Social media buttons are one of the least useful elements for actual customer so at least move them further away from the main title.
        I like that. It's a valid point.


        I saw a youtube video where the guy uses Pingfarm.com. I'm pretty new to the idea, but is that a good way to let Google and other engines know that I have updated my site and to have it get indexed? Is there a better source?

        Edit- Another Q- is there a general goal/rule for how fast a page should load? I.e. if I had someone help me speed up my website, what should I tell them the desired load time should be?
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by gijoe985 View Post

          I saw a youtube video where the guy uses Pingfarm.com. I'm pretty new to the idea, but is that a good way to let Google and other engines know that I have updated my site and to have it get indexed? Is there a better source?
          If you're dealing with a "money site", I'd just submit the XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. That way you're going directly to the source. Of course you're also telling Google who's the owner of the site, but that should not matter in this case.

          Originally Posted by gijoe985 View Post

          Edit- Another Q- is there a general goal/rule for how fast a page should load? I.e. if I had someone help me speed up my website, what should I tell them the desired load time should be?
          No. Faster is better of course, and that's what Google is telling you too, but it always depends on other factors such as visitor's distance to the server, their network speed, and caches involved. There's also a bit of a disagreement on how much and how directly speed affects your search results.

          Your site doesn't seem to be that slow, but there's always some room for improvement. For example there are half a dozen CSS files and as many JS files. Minimizing and combining them might help a bit, and longer cache times for external files are a good idea too.

          However, I would not put speed on the top of your todo list. Take the low hanging fruit if you can, but there's more important stuff to do for SEO.

          Couple of good tools to help you:
          Website speed test
          https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
          Signature
          Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
          Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

          What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author VivekThakur
    Yes you are right when you said i do seo work myself and i read a lot from forums, internet etc. But still you are failure in getting ranking to your keyword.
    No doubts anybody can learn basic seo but webmaster is the person who know exactly how to do seo. Frankly speaking you really doesn't know how to create high pr natural back links. You need to learn and implement it and it will take much time other option is hire a seo person if you want to do business from internet.
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    Enjoy Life.

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