What Am I Doing Wrong?

[Avalon]

I have two web sites. I have tried to optimize them the best I can considering my little experience. This one has been around for months www.site.com and I just created this one www.site.com The problem is I don't get any clicks except the ones I pay for. I know these are both competitive markets, but I should still have people finding my site naturally. If anyone could tell me what I am doing wrong on these sites it would be a great help.

Note: I did not put these web sites in here for marketing. They are meant for observational purposes to hopefully help me with my problem. Thanks.

[cscgal]

Sorry I had to edit your post ... we don't permit any site specific talk of any kind in these forums. It's nearly impossible to differentiate when someone is posting a question for the sake of self-promotion and when not, so it becomes important to our sanity to have a black and white guideline to follow.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, talking in the general sense helps the posts help everyone - and not just one specific website. (That's what the site reviews forum is for).

Okay, now back on track :) The question you're asking applies to nearly every site out there. It seems to me you want to know how to build word of mouth advertising and natural rankings in search engines. Both of those take time, unfortunately. The best method to get word spreading is to post in a lot of other forums and link to your site in your signature (there is a 10 post minimum to do that here on DaniWeb). Also, be sure to get lots and lots of backlinks - other sites that link to you ... doing that increases site ranking :) Which, in turn, gets you better placement on search results pages.

[JeffHeaton]

It does really take time. I have two sites that get nearly all of their traffic from Google. I learned quite a bit from the posts here. I got links from other sites and such. And all of the sudden I started getting search engine hits from google. Maybe the sandbox effect?

PR is also kind of wierd. For months I had PR0, now all of the sudden PR5. I had expected more of a slow growth. Maybe they only update it a few times a year. Not sure.

I also found adding new pages, and often, helps. I don't get my google hits all to just one page, they are actually spread out over 50-100 main pages on my site. Every page you have that has good content on it is chance to show up on a google search.

It does work, just takes time.

[Avalon]

Well the one page has probably close to 200 pages and is the older of the two. Right around 5-6 months. The biggest problem is I am not able to constantly update. This site has products that don't change typically. This makes it harder to alter and I am under the assumption that simply changing the wording around on each page once a month would not be enough.(changing the ofs/and in the sentences.

As for the other site I am not quite sure if being a link based site is a good idea when talking about content. To remedy the problem I used and created some articles and made a section for them. Was this really a good idea? Does it hurt me to place these articles in other places asside from the main/home page?

[fromthe5]

Avalon,

Without knowing the URLs of your sites and the keyword phrases you are going for it's hard to see what your situation is. PM me with the URLs and I'll take a look. As far as placing articles on other pages, there should be no problem with that at all as long as you just post each article once on the site. More than that and you run the chance of a duplicate content penalty.

I'm not sure that not updating the content on your site will hurt you, although it is said to help you if you do. I have a site that ranks #1 or #2 out of 4 to 5 million returns for a number of phrases and I rarely update it.

Jeff,

Google only updates the visible PR on the toolbar once every 3 or 4 months. The last time was in the recent major "Jagger" update. The actual PR is updated on an ongoing and continuous basis.