SEO_greenhorn
04-17-2004, 07:31 PM
Hi All,
OK, here is the info. Any help or advice on the site is appreciated. My apologies if it is overkill.....
The URL is LAPSAKY Organic Cotton Baby Clothes (http://www.lapsaky.com). The site is the online outlet for our line of organic cotton baby clothes, which we also sell conventionally to retailers of various sorts.
The site has been up for about 3 months. It is our first site. My bro and I did the work. I am an old fart computer geek by profession but have no experience before in this kind of thing (I do C/C++/FORTRAN etc for a living). The business is my wife's.
We started by downloading the OsCommerce (PHP) source, and have then heavily modified it. The goal was to make it our own, as well as deal with all the little problems we found with the original code. In terms of optimization here is what we have done.
1) made sure there were reasonable header tags for all pages. the keywords, title and description are dynamically built from the mySQL database, but we then have the option of tweaking it all for each page. We havent tweaked them all, but have done some of the products.
2) Added H1 tags for some of the relevant parts of each page
3) made a sitemap with plain HTML rather than PHP that points to every page and product on the site. The sitemap is accessible from every page. We have focussed most attention on the splash page (www.lapsaky.com) and main page (www.lapsaky.com/catalog).
4) used mod_rewrite to get rid of all the ? components of the URL and made them appear as straight HTML
5) run the pages through the w3c validator and tweaked them till most of them pass as HTML 4.01 transitional. The places that dont validate involve some javascript, and there is still some browser dependent stuff in there which we are gradually removing.
6) modified the osCommerce code to recognize when robots/spiders are hitting the site and surpress the OsCSid string in the URL (eg
http://www.lapsaky.com/catalog/index.php?osCsid=7384a52ce74429bb1ace555c6a202f3c
)
7) submitted the site to a number of directories like DMOZ
8) subscribed to a couple of adwords campaigns
9) contacted just a few places so far for link exchanges.
The good news is that the search engines are spidering the site. if you enter lapsaky into google you will find that it has found all the pages, and I see a couple of hundred additional entries from outside listings. A number of other engines are also spidering us. We are getting 50-100 unique visitors daily.
We are getting inquiries from retailers asking about buying our goods to put on their web sites, or sell in their stores. I can
see the bots crawling our page from the apache logs and webalizer, etc.
The bad news is that our page rank is currently 3. We arent getting many online buyers. Another thing that really bugs me is that if I type
link:www.lapsaky.com
into a google search window I get nothing. None of the tools I have tried report any backlinks. But I know I have some. Admitedly a pitiful few (20-100) by the standards of this group. But why arent those pitiful few being reported?
I am now going to go through all the good information provide at SEO guy and try to fix things, but I would sure appreciate
critical eyes looking at the site as well.
Oh Yeah... The most critical keywords that we would like
to rank well on are
"organic cotton baby clothes"
Thanks so much for any advice you have.
SEO_greenhorn
OK, here is the info. Any help or advice on the site is appreciated. My apologies if it is overkill.....
The URL is LAPSAKY Organic Cotton Baby Clothes (http://www.lapsaky.com). The site is the online outlet for our line of organic cotton baby clothes, which we also sell conventionally to retailers of various sorts.
The site has been up for about 3 months. It is our first site. My bro and I did the work. I am an old fart computer geek by profession but have no experience before in this kind of thing (I do C/C++/FORTRAN etc for a living). The business is my wife's.
We started by downloading the OsCommerce (PHP) source, and have then heavily modified it. The goal was to make it our own, as well as deal with all the little problems we found with the original code. In terms of optimization here is what we have done.
1) made sure there were reasonable header tags for all pages. the keywords, title and description are dynamically built from the mySQL database, but we then have the option of tweaking it all for each page. We havent tweaked them all, but have done some of the products.
2) Added H1 tags for some of the relevant parts of each page
3) made a sitemap with plain HTML rather than PHP that points to every page and product on the site. The sitemap is accessible from every page. We have focussed most attention on the splash page (www.lapsaky.com) and main page (www.lapsaky.com/catalog).
4) used mod_rewrite to get rid of all the ? components of the URL and made them appear as straight HTML
5) run the pages through the w3c validator and tweaked them till most of them pass as HTML 4.01 transitional. The places that dont validate involve some javascript, and there is still some browser dependent stuff in there which we are gradually removing.
6) modified the osCommerce code to recognize when robots/spiders are hitting the site and surpress the OsCSid string in the URL (eg
http://www.lapsaky.com/catalog/index.php?osCsid=7384a52ce74429bb1ace555c6a202f3c
)
7) submitted the site to a number of directories like DMOZ
8) subscribed to a couple of adwords campaigns
9) contacted just a few places so far for link exchanges.
The good news is that the search engines are spidering the site. if you enter lapsaky into google you will find that it has found all the pages, and I see a couple of hundred additional entries from outside listings. A number of other engines are also spidering us. We are getting 50-100 unique visitors daily.
We are getting inquiries from retailers asking about buying our goods to put on their web sites, or sell in their stores. I can
see the bots crawling our page from the apache logs and webalizer, etc.
The bad news is that our page rank is currently 3. We arent getting many online buyers. Another thing that really bugs me is that if I type
link:www.lapsaky.com
into a google search window I get nothing. None of the tools I have tried report any backlinks. But I know I have some. Admitedly a pitiful few (20-100) by the standards of this group. But why arent those pitiful few being reported?
I am now going to go through all the good information provide at SEO guy and try to fix things, but I would sure appreciate
critical eyes looking at the site as well.
Oh Yeah... The most critical keywords that we would like
to rank well on are
"organic cotton baby clothes"
Thanks so much for any advice you have.
SEO_greenhorn