Review for a candle site

I spent nearly a year making and testing candles that I make, and planned from the beginning to start on the web first, and then branch out. Little did I know that it would be a lot more work than i expected to get placed well in the search engines, mainly google. At the beginning, I had no idea what SEO was, but I think I have learned a lot from just lurking in this chatroom and a few others. But I have made some big jumps in the last 2-3 dances, and I believe I am just a step or 2 away from being in the top 10 for the term 'candles'.

the website address is http://www.illuminous-times.com

I made the mistake in the beginning of the link campaign to target the keyword of 'candles'. I'm now targeting 'soy candles', and hoping that it will still help me greatly for just the term 'candles'.

Some questions I have are...
1) I'm currently ranked #18 for the term 'candles', but on www.fi I have seen my site jump between #12 through #15 on the 'precursor' to the update. So I think I am close to getting into the top 10. Is there anything on my homepage I could tweak at all to help me move up a few rankings, without working on incoming links?

2) I am also redesigning a buddy's art site, and plan on having a link at the bottom of each page stating, 'This site designed by Dan F. from "Illuminous Times Soy Candles" (quotations will be in the a href tag). He has a weekly cartoon strip that is done on a new page, and so far there are around 90 of these pages. Each page is not much different, with just the title of the page a little different, the main title of the cartoon, and the .jpg file of the cartoon itself. Otherwise everything else is exactly the same. How will these links be counted for me by google. I can't see how this would be considered spamming, but it may not benefit me as much as I hope. If not, is there another angle on linking I can try?

Any and all suggestions/criticism is welcome, and i'm looking forward to being a new member in this forum. Great job Darrin!

Wow... you're doing really well there for what is presumably a competitive search term. I notice there's currently just over 3 million matches in Google for 'candles' so... a big well done!



Aaron

Yep you're doing hugely well in the SERPs ... I did notice that you could put more text (spider food) on your wholesale candles page. It gets a decent number of searches according to wordtracker and working on that page's optimization could get some more returns.

Wow, thanks for the compliments everyone. I wasn't looking for that, but it's definitley nice to hear. I put up the wholesale page last month only, and it's looking like that part of the business won't be ready for another few months, so that's why I haven't tweaked that page too much yet.

Well if you want to take your site to the next level, i would do as follows:

(1) Do a mod_rewrite on your URLs do they do not contain ?, =, & etc in them, while you are at it, make it end in a .html.
(2) Optimize each and every page for the search engines. If I am looking for and search for "Carrot Cake Candles" i.e. http://www.illuminous-times.com/index.php?cPath=42_43 , the title should contain that product name.
(3) PM me if you want to look at some dynamic sites that I have built that do what I am talking about.
(4) You are almost there, free, targeted traffic.

Oh, also make a site map

Rusty,
Thanks for the great tips. It took a few days, but I have figured out a way to change the title for those categories. Unfortunately, the code i'm using did not have the ability to have different titles for the main index page, but i have modified it to put a different title depending on the category_id. It's an all or nothing approach, and the titles are all listed in one file, so it will take a week or so to complete. I have too much other stuff going on.

But i'm stumped on the mod_rewrite. I talked to my host, and they said I can put the mod_rewrite info in a .htaccess file. Is this how you're doing it? Can you suggest a good site, etc. explaining how to do this? I haven't found much out there...

Thanks again for the pointers...

title tags are most important so its ur number 1 priority:

mod rewrite info: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

or search in google @ http://www.google.com/search?q=mod+rewrite&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8