Hi glamourshades!
First of all welcome to the forums!
Well ... being Sunday here and considering I don't work in such a day, just reading the boards a little bit heavely than the other days of the week, I'll spend some time trying to help you a little.
I will start with the keywords research stuff.
First of all, I would recommend you reading seo guy's
Seo Tutorial . Well, you should have better read it before starting your site but never is too late to get things done the right way.
Well ... since I'm not a native English speaker, I did a quick research on what's the correct speeling of the keywords you target. Well, probably the correct one is
sunglasses since that's the version of the term with the higest competition and with the most searches performed according to WordTracker. You can use
DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool for a more detalied keyword research. Anyway, once you got in this biz and probably spent a few bucks you're not a skinflint to avoid spending around $7 to get full access to WordTracker features for one day.
Anyway, the keywords you target should be in correlation with your knowledge and abillity to get your site in the top of the SERPs. If this site would be my full time job I would aim for the most competitive ones ... like
sunglasses.
Mostly, after your on-page optimization rocks you will have to focuse all your efforts on a well thinked, strong and long term link building campaign.
Start by submitting your site to
Dmoz , if you're lucky you may get it quickly. Also, search over the boards and the web for established directories and submit your site. Also, start emailing other webmasters in your field and ask for link exchanges.
Now, let's strictly reffer to your home page.
Title: too long. You should know that a well optimized title should not be longer than 55 characters. Yours is probably double. Also, some SEOs tend to believe that having your main keyword being the first keyword of the title helps a little ( I tend to believe this too ) but I don't have any real evidences of this fact.
If you decide to target the most competitive keyword in your industry ( sunglasess ) I would suggest focusing only on that one on your home page. Trying to optimize that page for more keywords you'll be diluting your efforts.
Also, putting your site name in the title of every page sounds like you want to brand it. Don't know if this is quite necessary at this moment.
Let me give you just my absolute personal behaviour if I would be the one managing that site. My title would look something like:
Sunglasses - Cheap discount sunglasses
This way I have
singlasses the first keyword in my title and I would target another 2 smaller keywords like
discount sunglasses and
cheap sunglasses, which by fair would bring you enought traffic in the next few months and probably would return some bucks in your wallet while you're in a big progress to your final target:
sunglasses.
Also, regarding the title, you can achieve top rankings, but if your title looks spammy and surfers wont click it then it will be valueless.
Meta Tags: Yours seem to be optimized for the home page only. Still so, just as the title they look like they're working against you because repeating sunglasses to many times they look spammy. As well, you're diluting your efforts. Keep your Meta Description clickable from a surfer point of view and think like a SEO when writing it. Even if Google seems not to weight it when calculating rankings, Yahoo! and MSN seem to count it enought to make a difference.
Your internal pages Metas are totally un-optimized. Optimize them for the specific words they target and apply the above advice regarding the titles.
Clean up your source CODE and try to validate it using the
www.w3.org HTML and CSS validators.
Also, regarding the CSS statements on your home page, cut them out of there and put them all into an external stylesheet. This way your clean up your code a lot. Also, do the same thing with heavy JS code if any on your pages.
Using Flash for a part of your navigation doesn't help alot. Well, in the past few months seems that Google is able to index and follow content inside .swf files but I wouldn't take the risk.
Try to move the content ( text ) that involve your targetted keywords upper in the source. You may be unlucky and spideres can leave your pages before they read the important parts of your site. Feed them!!!
Basic things: used your targetted keywords in bold and italicized text a few times on the page, just take care to avoid making them looking rude or spammy.
Also, your urls seem to use Sessions ... these things kill the crawlers, you should do or get someone done some mod_rewrite stuff for them.
Well ... seems that I wrote pretty much about on-page stuff. Probably most of the things are well known by you ... anyway ... they came to my mind and I wrote them here hoping to help you a little.
Now ... let's face the hardest part of the SEO stuff. The off-page part.
This means that 60%-70% ( +/- some % ) of your rankings nowadays will be based on links pointing to your site.
Well ... this thing isn't as easy as it looks at first. Some guys think that once they get bunches of unrelated links pointing to their sites they're done for the top SERPs. Its just not that simple.
Start by submitting your site to as many directories as you can find. Use variations of the keyword you're targetting ... this way you could avoid the sandboxing effect of the fast acquired links. Use text that exactly describe your site around the
anchor text used for linking back to your site.
I just said the magic words:
anchor text. This is probably the most important things involved in the off-page SEO stuff along with relevancy and probably PR.
Talking about PR ... your probably know what it is. You should try getting its value around 5, this way you make sure your site is frequently spidered and new changes to your site are quickly reflected in the SERPs.
There are a lot more things you should be aware of when thinking and managing the optimization of a website, especially when trying to achieve high rankings for a competitive keyword.
Probably, if I would try to write here lots of details about all this stuff I would take to much of seo guy's HDD Space
So, the key is reading, observing, trying, tweaking and so on.
Just keep up to date with new trends in the SEO world. Visit and post regulary on a few qualified
SEO Forums like this one and step by step you'll learn a lot.
Ups ... almost forgot. Here are a few tools that can help you in your SEO adventure:
Of course,
SEO Guy's site, which is an impressive resource of SEO infos, tools, articles and this nice forum. ( Thank God he's paying the bills for hosting etc. )
Keyword selection - This will give your an overview to your competitors backlinks. Don't base to much on its results since it queries Google for backlinks ... being known that latelly Google is not showing all backlinks. Just thos almost insignifiant, but it stil can help.
Digital Point's SEO Tools - nice collection of seo tools ... I like a lot the Keyword Tracker ( tracking your URLs positions in SERPs for specified Keywords ) and the Keyword suggestion tool I mentioned upper in this post.
Also, visit
Seo Chat - The place where I firstly read about SEO. Great forum community, lots of Pros out there, forums, blog, great tools, great articles.
This is all for now ... lol ... just figured this is the longest post ever written by me on a forum. Anyway, hope this will help you a little. If you already know some things I've been talking in this post, please be aware that I don't consider you a noob or a newbie, so I'm not offending you at all
Something else ... my english sucks many times ... if it happened again during this post ... please don't swear me
Huh ... I'm tired of so much writting. Best wishes and good luck man.
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