6 replies to this topic

[donaldcroswell]

Hi All

I have a site that sells flowers Australia wide and I have three questions.

1. If I have a page which is optimized for 'sydney flower delivery' and a similar page which is optimized for 'melbourne flower delivery', is this spamming? I asked Google if it was ok because I am using it in an AdWord campaigne. My individual ads go to thier respective pages. For example the target phrase 'sydney flowers' links to my Sydney page and my target phrase 'melbourne flowers' goes to the Melbourne page. He told me that this was ok but I don't see the difference in this and a doorway page. (doorway pages are bad.....right?)

2. I have submitted my site to Lycos for the Inktomi and Fast inclusions but find that only the URL's that I have paid to have indexed, are getting searched on. How do I get them to index my entire site. Surely I don't have to pay for each page. I don't need each page updated regularly but thought that once they included my 'paid page', the spiders would find the rest. Is this true? How long does it take?

3. From what I have been reading so far, there is no need to submit your site to the engines as they will find them on their own. Also, my mentor and queen Jill has suggested in her posts that it isn't worth the $$ to pay yahoo for their directory listing. This leads me to believe that after optimising your site, the best thing to do is list with dmoz and start linking to others. (Am I following or missing something)

Thanks to all
esp Jill

[Jill]

Hi Don, and welcome. Nice to see you here!

If I have a page which is optimized for 'sydney flower delivery' and a similar page which is optimized for 'melbourne flower delivery', is this spamming? I asked Google if it was ok because I am using it in an AdWord campaign

Your ad campaign is different than the regular pages of your site. With PPC ads, it's important to have specific landing pages that go along with the keywords you're bidding on. However, if the landing pages are very similar in nature, i.e., the content is the same except for the keyword phrases, you should probably exclude them with your robots.txt file. It's not a good idea to have the engines indexing a whole bunch of similar, yet different pages.

I have submitted my site to Lycos for the Inktomi and Fast inclusions but find that only the URL's that I have paid to have indexed, are getting searched on. How do I get them to index my entire site.

Well, unfortunately, you may be stuck. I've heard others complain that when you submit a few pages, the rest of your site doesn't get spidered. Many wonder if it's better not to submit any because you'll have a better chance of getting your entire site spidered. Can't say that I've studied it enough to really know if this is true. Bottom line is that if there are specific pages you really want included, you might want to pay. Otherwise, just wait and see what happens. It may take many months, but they may eventually index the pages.

This leads me to believe that after optimising your site, the best thing to do is list with dmoz and start linking to others. (Am I following or missing something)

Yep, that's pretty much correct. Except, since DMOZ can take forever, I would suggest submitting to many more directories also. There are tons of industry specific directories, along with some more general ones like JoeAnt, Gimpsy and GoGuides. I had a good guest article last week which discussed Finding Free Niche Directories which you may have missed.

Good luck!

Jill

[donaldcroswell]

Thanks Jill

So if I know that 'Sydney Flowers Online' and 'Melbourne Flowers Online' and 'Perth Flowers Online' are all key phrases that will bring me paying traffic, then how do I cover all of my key phrases?

Do I make an effort to ensure that the Sydney page is vastly different from the Melbourne page? Should the content be different even though I am offering the same product to people who live in each place?

Do I try and squeeze all of my keyword phrases into one page?

Because I offer a service to people Australia wide, I have difficulty in the fact that people will usually search on the location and the product together. Searching on Australia will work for my overseas customers, but a Sydney resident who wants to send flowers to Perth will usually search on 'Perth flowers' rather than 'Australia flowers'

As with the AdWord campaigns, it seems to be better to target the audience specifically rather than a general phrase. Unfortunately this usually means the 'specific location' of the service being provided.

How would you approach getting a high-ranking for each geographical key phrase without spamming the engines with pages that are exactly the same, except the product destination.

Thanks again
Don

[Mel]

Hi Don:
I just happen to be optimizing a regional flower site (not Australian) at the moment and my keyword research leads me to believe that the most searched on online florist term may be roses, with its many variants, such as long stemmed roses, a dozen roses etc.

I also am lead to believe that most people searching for flower delivery are not using the location as a part of the search term, nor are they using regional search engines as much as international search engines.

Perhaps you could give us the benefit of your experience in this area.

[donaldcroswell]

Hi Mel

From my Google AdWords, lots of people search on phrases with the word rose in it. Not many of these searchers are buying flowers in Australia.

This is what I think Jill means about word tracker leading you in the right direction, but AdWords lets you know who is actually clicking on your ad. (and if you track them, you will see what words the 'buyers' use)

I have limited my campaign to Australia so maybe they are different from Americans or elsewhere. 'Gifts' is another highly searched on word that yields hardly any click throughs. My ads are concise and state that my site is an Australian flower delivery site. So why would I optimise my site to get lots of people searching on 'gifts' when an online florist isn't what most of them are looking for. Who cares if my site is number one in Google for 'gifts' if people click on number two....the online gift shop.

As for the geographical key phrases. If your grandmother lived in Seattle, and you wanted to send her some roses.........what would you enter in Google's search box?

A. "one dozen red roses"
B. "box of fresh roses"
C. "red roses online"
D. "fresh roses delivered"
E. "Seattle roses online"

The answer will probably be different for each person but my experience is that rather than entering 'red roses online' and getting a million companies that deliver flowers in their area but not the one you want is going to lead to you being more specific in your search. When I look for someone to deliver my flowers to Seattle, I don't want a flower specialist in Florida who marks up the price and then orders through a Seattle florist (people aren't dumb.....for the most part). I say that even though shows like Jerry Springer are still on the air.

That's why the net is cool. I can go right to the Seattle florist myself. It's pretty safe to say that anyone entering the phrase, 'Seattle flower delivery' wants to know about having flowers delivered there. Quality traffic! Buyers! Get my meaning?

Hope this helps. And I hope I haven't misrepresented Jill's ideas in any way.

Don

[dragonlady7]

I'm starting to wonder why regional directories aren't more popular-- but then, if I were looking to send flowers to my cousin in Arizona, I wouldn't think about going to a regional directory, I'd go to Google and shop around florists.
But I'd probably try to narrow the search to Arizona, so... it does seem like a good idea to optimize for the location.
I think there's a good future in geographical location features on the web-- there's some interesting stuff going on in meta tags for location specifications, for one. But that stuff's a way down the line.

In the meantime, I'll contribute that doorway pages and landing pages are different things. If you have an ad, you want people to land on a certain page, instead of coming to your general home page and having to poke around to find what they're looking for. So there's nothing wrong with optimizing different pages for different things, and in fact I've heard it generally encouraged to ensure that every single page of your site is suitable to be a landing page. Each page can be optimized for something subtly different, and should be prepared as if that were going to be the first page a user saw upon visiting your site.
So, no harm in it as long as it's usable to humans.

[note: that was my first edit. Took me a couple seconds to figure out where the edit button was! Edited to fix an incorrect and misleading pronoun... ]