Need advice on how to get more traffic.

OK, I have been slowly learning about SEO over the past year and a half. I have developed/maintained an ecommerce site for my friends company during that time. The site uses OSCommerce. It places ok (depending on what your definition of ok is). At one time (for a breif period), we where on the first google search page for alot of the products being sold, but since then have drifted back. I get about 60-70 unique visitors per day, but I would like to get a whole lot more. Can somebody please throw me some advice on what to do? I think I should start back at the basics and make sure there's nothing I am missing.

Thanks,
Josh

Well first of all how are you ranked "ok". What is your top 10 keywords, and what place are you ranked for each one?

Also what is your google page rank. I recommend starting not only a link exchange campaign but look for web sites similiar to yours and exchange 'site wide links' (links on every page of your site), if the web site you are 'site wide linking' with has a considerable amount of pages (3,000-20,000 is a medium-large site) that could easily mean the difference between PR4 and PR5, which could easily mean an extra 500-1,000 uniques/day

On average my PR 4/5 sites get close to 5,000 uniques/day.

Check out googlerankings.com, they offer a tool to check your keyword density, and also a tool to check your google ranking for your top keywords.

If it is an e-commerce web site, and you dont mind spending a pretty penny for some traffic check out searchfeed.com and overture.com. I would personally recommend searchfeed because the CPC on overture is way too high.

Hope I helped.

budbiss,

For assistance you should provide your URL so that some of the folks here can take a look. Also, I am moving this thread to Site Review so that it is in the proper category.

Thanks, the url is http://www.istreamcom.com

The top ten keywords are business/office telephone system related. I just picked them buy figuring out what keywords we want to target and by looking at what the most popular ones where (going by wordtracker, overture, and adwords).

What we rank varies greatly depending on what SE you are looking at (obviously). Google is our main concern by far (agian, obviously). On Google, out of 40 keyword/phrases I am tracking for one particular manufacturer (Mitel), we only place in the top 10 pages (top 100) for about 10 keywords/phrases. On msn we place much much better.

On a side note, while typing the above, a question came to mind: We are targetting about 3-4 different types of customers (for example: hotel owners) and are trying to target about 4 brands of equipment (each with many different possible keywords). What is the best approach to deciding how many keywords to use in my case?

First of all, how many targetted keywords is too many? I mean if you have alot of different items/types of customers you are targetting, then naturally you are going to have alot more keywords then if you only sold a few products and had only one type of customer...correct?



Our page rank is 4 (according to the tool listed on seochat.com).

I just put up a links page the other day (http://www.istreamcom.com/catalog/links.php), I am currently searching diligently to find places to exchange relevant links with.



That would be excelent if we could draw in that kind of volume. I am hoping we can get up to those numbers some point in the future - the faster the better



Will do; thanks for the tip.




We currently use adwords and overture, but yes, you must spend a pretty penny in deed (though we run our campaigns on a limited budget...so we use up the allocated funds quickly, but atleast it is something for now until we can afford to pay more). I have never heard of searhfeed, I will check that out ASAP though.

You have helped out a great deal. I really appreciate the time you spent listing your suggestions.

Thank you.

How similiar is searchfeed.com to overture and adwords? I was on there site and I honestly don't understand exactly what they do. The case studies I read through mention integrating things with their site. Also, I don't see anywhere where they list what portals they are partnered with.

So, does anyone have any suggestions as to what I could be doing wrong? I mean, if the site is a PR4, then why aren't we being ranked better when I do a google search on key phrases that exist on our site? For example, if you do a search on "Mitel Superset 4025", we show up as result 56. How I can improve on this?

Simple text links work well. Do a link exchange with high-traffic, but RELEVANT sites to yours.

You may think that surfers don't click on link exchange links, but they do.