Hi,

I really hope someone can help as my website still seems to be plummeting in google for my keywords and i am at such a loss as to what to do. I have had so many people try to look at my website to see if they can help and no one can find the answer. I was wondering if anyone can have a quick look at my site and let me know their thoughts?

I use to be on page one for the keywords pet portraits, but due to a site overhaul in January (didn't change too much only design) i slipped to page 6 and stayed there for a while, but now i am falling a whole page, on a weekly basis and im in the middle of page 9 now for the keywords 'pet portraits'. Why has google all of a sudden taken a disliking to my site?

I am searching in the uk but for a worldwide search. I have never come up anywhere in the searches for a UK search and im guessing that's a whole other situation.

Can anyone give me advice as to what to do next? I would appreciate any advice anyone can give.

www.pet-portraitartist.com

Hi Melanie your homepage seems cramped compared to the rest of your site and some of your alt tags on your images could do with shortening a little I would also shorten the alt tags on the ideal moments banner at the bottom of the page.

Your meta tags also look like they need attention as your title and description contain too many characters and your keywords need attention run your site url through a meta tag analyzer tool such as http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

Hope that helps

better still forget about pointless things such "analysers" which tell you nothing useful at all.

Also forget about checking rankings as it means nothing other that the datacentre you happen to be looking at is different to the last one you looked at.

What about trafiic?
Is that down?

enquiries, sales are they down? THAT is what should concern you. Not vague things as rankings.

AND
There is no such thing as an alt "tag"

i would shorten your title tags, limit your keywords to about 5 per page, make sure your content reflects the five keywords you chose, shorten your alt tags. If you really want to get crazy you can also move your CSS and Scripts into folders and just call the files so Google does not have to go through all that code before it reaches your actual content.

None of which of course will make one iota of difference.

Just keep on writing quality content and the principle of the cork says that what goes down can come up

Thank you everyone for your support and feedback.

Traffic is down generally as i have dropped pages for a variety of keywords, but i am still getting some traffic as my site didn't move in google in the USA, it only dropped for the UK which i felt was really strange. I wasn't sure why it would change here but not there.

I will keep updating it, and tweaking things.

Your site is a .com hosted on a US IP (ThePlanet based in Houston Texas)

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=6585

Hosting on a UK IP would improve the UK results with damaging the US ones severely.

I have the .co.uk domain as well which automatically goes to the .com although i don't think this is any help so far.

I have heard that even if you have a .co.uk domain on an American server google knows that its based in the UK and ranks it accordingly, in your opinion would you say this is true?

I have heard that even if you have a .co.uk domain on an American server google knows that its based in the UK and ranks it accordingly, in your opinion would you say this is true?

Potentially, yes.

But as you are promoting the .com, just having the .co.uk parked on it (or redirected) will be of no help at all.
You would have to promote the .co.uk, which of course may give other problems with duplicates and filtering.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Also forget about checking rankings as it means nothing other that the datacentre you happen to be looking at is different to the last one you looked at.

What about trafiic?
Is that down?

enquiries, sales are they down? THAT is what should concern you. Not vague things as rankings.

I was made to believe by everyone in this forum that SERP rankings should be the most important goal for SEO. Now I'm reading from chrishirst of all people that rankings means nothing?

The most important thing is sales conversions...

it dosn't really matter where you next sale comes from, as long as it does!

The reason is different people will see different results all the time. It's not an exact science....

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...tml#post710287

and the post below.

The problem is that:

The prevailing beliefs and wisdom of the SEO "experts" and "gurus" is so far behind the times as to be utterly unreliable. Much of the stuff was correct back in the 90s. But this is one situation where the age of the info makes it less reliable.

since i made my first post above i have now slipped from page 9 to page 11 and this is only within a really really short space of time. If i continue to drop multiples of pages, within weeks im going to drop off the planet!

when i look at competitors above me i often cant really see how they got there, especially when the sites have only a handful of pages and no links! How did they do it?

I have many reciprocal links, meta tags, keywords, a good amount of text on each page, i even have a forum and blog attached to my site, the forum has plenty of activity daily.

So if all the old seo stuff is no longer a major factor in getting top for your keywords (ie all that i have done above in my previous para), what do i do next?

stop looking at rankings! They REALLY tell you nothing at all

Analyse your site logs for the last 6 months (if you have them) and your enquiries/conversions over the same period. Then monitor the site logs and enquiries/conversions for the next 6 to 8 weeks. Do NOT look at your "rankings" at all. Analyse your Adwords data, which is just about the best word research possible and use the words phrase from that. Do not look at your rankings.

Gather the real keywords and phrases that real people use to find the pages, and optimise pages around those. Analyse what words and phrases convert better and improve your pages that get found for those.
Get some links that are advertising not ones that you think are optimising.

I have many reciprocal links, meta tags, keywords, a good amount of text on each page, i even have a forum and blog attached to my site, the forum has plenty of activity daily.

As you can tell, the SEO/SEM world has moved on since the above stuff was last effective.
But, you have probably learnt enough now to realise that you actually know very little but thought you knew a lot

Forget about "getting to the top" for your "keywords". leave that to the idiots who want lots and lots of "tyre kickers" with a 0.01% conversion ratio. Playing "the numbers game" by getting page one views and lots of traffic is fine for the people who have nothing else to do but chase traffic every day and was ok when there was less competition on the Internet and user were less savvy about the web generally.
Now, users are smarter and will look for the best page rather than the first one they find.
Coupled with this is your marketplace. Anyone looking for a portrait of their pet are quite naturally going to be "fussy" about where they actually buy from. So being front page/first for "pet portraits" might get you bragging rights but no sales to speak of.

Change your approach from Search Engine Optimising into End User Search Marketing and use the search engines to sell your services.

BTW did I mention to stop checking rankings?