8 replies to this topic

[kelly001]

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice or suggestions on Killwhat. I just finished remodeling the site while paying special attention to SEO guidelines. I'd like to know what else I could do or change to help the site's ranking. I'm also open to any comments on the design, navigation, etc.

Thanks!

PS: If anyone can tell me our page rank, I'd appreciate it. I'm on a Mac so no Google Toolbar for us.



Is this site completed or under construction? completed
If completed:
How long has the site been up? 3 years under this domain name

SEO
Do you have incoming links? yes
What keywords are you targeting? not too sure but probably "punk", "fanzine", "chronique"
Do you want your code reviewed for errors or improvements? yes

Marketing
Who is your target audience? Think about: music fans
Gender m/f
Nationality french speaking
Age Range 15-30 year old
Likes/Dislikes likes independant music

How important is usability? very

What is the purpose of the site? promote bands, musical media outlet

Design
Do you want design suggestions? yes

[mcanerin]

My Google bar says that today (Oct 28, 2003) the PR for the home page is 3, and you have one backlink in google (popnews) and 54 in alltheweb.

Hopefully that's helpful. The streaming music clip made my hair stand up on end, but I expect that was the point

Ian

[kelly001]

thanks for the PR. Is that good or bad ? Why do we hardly have any backlinks in Google. The site is linked from many other sites. I guess that doesn't qualify them as backlinks though ???

PS: Sorry the first band in the jukebox at the moment is a little harsh I agree but not everything we cover is like that!

[mcanerin]

I usually consider anything less than a 4 to be in need of improvement. This may be merely and only due to the fact that the site hasn't been fully indexed yet, so don't panic. Wait a bit

Many people (unfairly) will not even consider exchanging links with anyone less than a 4, which is why I recommend trying to get that, at least.

A 5 or 6 is fairly normal for the site of a professional SEO or well regarded website.

For reference, most of the moderators on the forum, and the top 50 or so posters, fall between the 4-6 range for their own sites. Only one of us (not me) has a page with a rank of 7 - and it's not who you might think. The local "pro-cloaking/spamming" crowd hover between 0 and 4 mostly.

Having said that, you can have a rank 0 site come up #1 in the rankings for your keywords - hence the lack of a huge amount of concern about PR from most of us.

The SE's usually do a relevance check first, then use PR as the tie breaker. If your site is the most relevant, then there is no need to break the tie and your PR doesn't really factor into it, as best as I know.

Basically, the better your competition and the more hotly disputed the top positions, the more likely the SE will require a tiebreaker, and therefore resort to a system like PR. Every SE uses a different way, of course - only Google actually uses "PageRank".

The fact that G only shows 1 and alltheweb shows 54 is likely related to the fact that G only shows backlinks from sites with around 4 (some say 3.5) or higher. It's still counting the links, it's just not showing them.

You are getting your name out - keep doing it and you will get the page rank you are after naturally. Don't obsess over it, because it's not really under your control (which is the whole idea).

Get as many relevant (remember relevance? -that's the first criteria) links as possible to your site. Don't worry about their page rank - just get ones that are useful and relevant to your site. For example, you are better off getting one good music link then a dozen FFA links. Then your page rank and relevance will tend to go up together. Assuming you have the content worth linking to and looking for.

To be fair, I haven't fully looked at your site yet so I won't give feedback on the content yet (looks nice though).

Ian

[kelly001]

This may be merely and only due to the fact that the site hasn't been fully indexed yet, so don't panic. Wait a bit 

Well, the weird thing is that the site was fully indexed last year. All the individual review pages were in Google and based on the band name and the name of their label (a common search combination for my users) it would come up 1st or 2nd in Google for many pages. Then, somehow most pages started dissapearing and the Google results altogether vanished. Even though some of the pages are still indexed, they do not come up in searches with the same keywords as before.

I know my site was down for about a week in April when my old hosting company crahsed their server and lost all my content. I had to switch to a more reliable company. Perhaps that affected it's ranking.

Also, up to this week, I didn't have a robots.txt file in the root directory maybe Google decided to stay away from it because of that.

Any idea ?

[awall19]

while most people recomend having at least a blank one, you do not need to have a robots.txt file

you are indexed in google with your home page having a pagerank of 3

your site only showed one backlink though. you need to get more backlinks. if you have no links into your site you do not make it easy for google (or other engines) to find your site

its not a good idea to just randomly exchange with anyone (since this will lead to exchanging with viagra sites which will eventually get banned) pick some sites in your niche and exchange links with them

[kelly001]

I'm a little confused as yo who I should have links with. there are plenty of record labels, other music zines (large & small) and bands that have links for Killwhat on their site. however since this is not a very competitive category, I have a feeling no one really has a high PR rank so all those backlinks are not taken into account by google as explained by mcanerin. Though a lot of the sites that have links towards us are very relevant to the subject but in the grand scheme of things they might be seen as useless. If google, thinks "music" = MTV. Then yeah, none of the sites that are going to link us are going to give us valid google backlinks since that's not what we cover.

[mcanerin]

Hi Kelly

I just took a closer look at your site and found a couple of things. First, the cache google has right now is still your old site, so it's still in a bit of a waiting mode.

Second, I couldn't find a mention of the words punk, fanzine, or chronique on the home page itself. I know it's in the title (and that's good) but see if maybe you could put up a blurb at the top of your page about what your site is about - and make sure you use those terms somewhere in it. That should help a bit.

Basically, figure out what words the searchers for your site would type in to find it and then make sure you've used those words as frequently as reasonable in the content. I know your site has a certain look that doesn't lend itself well to large amounts of text, but I'd add as much as I could.

Ian

[Cyrus]

You might want to consider increasing the width a little more. It’s very stylish, but the forum section especially is too difficult to read and move through. Overall I think it’s a great site.