Want some suggestion for on site optimization.

Hi all,

I want to hear your suggestion on our site.

www<dot>halfpricesoft<dot>com

-Site age: about 4 years
-We hired someone for SEO at the beginning of this year.
-We added our site to yahoo directory and some other free directories. But I do not think they bring us good traffics.
-We release news on PRWeb and other PR sites regularly.

For keywords such as "payroll software" or "download payroll software" we are on page 3 or page 4 now. We just cannot move to page 2.

What should we do next? Please give me some advise on it.

In advance thank you.


Sincerely,

Karen

Hi karen,
Had a look at your site.

Looks pretty good!!

You seem to be doing all the right things. keywords in your title tags and loads of backlinks

You also are tracking your visitors

The only problem i can find is the keyword download software is too competitive and not very targeted

I think you need to think of long tail keywords here

You have obviously put alot of effort into your site and it looks pretty sleek

Maybe try some LSI [latent semantic indexing] in your content

Hi Karen,

The first thing I would say is have a little more patience...
If you hired an seo at the beginning of this year (<3months) and they have begun a linking / seo campaign you will not see the full results of their efforts just yet...

Getting from nowhere to page 3/4 is easy enough but from there the climb gets harder (as the competition stiffens) and directory links commonly take a while to "filter through".

"download payroll software" - 226,000 results
"payroll software" - 1,120,000 results

Sounds easy enough (especially the first one) but the current leaders are strong and well-established sites.
I would expect these subjects to have a small playing field but rich competition.

A couple of things I don't like about the site:
1. Home page links should point to the domain root (take off the "home.asp")... (this is very basic seo imho)
2. The home page title is horribly optimised imho - far too long, too much repetition and adding the site name at the end is just pointless.
The rest of the titles look a little better but I wouldn't have guessed you were targetting those keywords - it looks more like it's optimised for:

"payroll accounting software" - 255,000 results (I see you at #12)
"accounting software" - 14,900,000 results

That's a cursory look (dinner's ready), maybe somebody else will find time to go into more detail

Good job she never mentioned that keyword then

I (humbly) suggest you concentrate on getting the basics right first.

Hi Karen, seems you have generated some interest here

Sorry guys i meant 'download payload software'.

It just seems like with the number of backlinks you have, don't know how many of them do follow, and your use of keywords which looks good, it may be that the keywords you are targeting are competitive.

Yes, your site does show up on page 2 of google when the search term "download payroll software" using quotation marks is typed in. But lets be honest, how many web surfers use quotation marks when searching for something?

OK
Yahoo lists 173 external backlinks to the domain. Where do you get "loads" from?
I looked at quite a large number of pages from karen's site and I wouldn't say that "the use of keywords looks good" (hence my remark that the site itself looks to be optimised for those other 2 sets of KW's).
(Like I said) the terms show 226,000 and 1,120,000 results. Is that competitive?
Look at my post again... I said #12 for payroll accounting software not download payroll software.
I also searched without quotes (a look at the total # of results would tell you that), I just used quotes in my post for the same reason karen did - (punctuation).


In addition, I looked at 25 of the backlinks:
14 of them use the domain name/url as the anchor text.
1 uses "ezpaycheck".
2 use "ezCheckPrinting Lite".
2 use "ezCheckingPrinting 1.0.3".
1 uses "ezPaycheck: Do-It-Yourself Payroll Software".
1 uses "Download ezCheckingPrinting 1.0.3".
1 uses "homepage" (section entitled "EZCHECK PRINTING").
3 use "Do-it-yourself payroll software $89 - 50 State Taxes, payroll & any check printing on blank/preprinted checks" (all from cancer treatment blogs)!
2 - I couldn't find the link.
About 30% of them use "nofollow".

The term "ezCheckPrinting Lite" (no quotes) has 1,070 results; karens site is #4 & #5.
The term "ezPaycheck" (no quotes) has 9,700 results; karens site is #3.
The term "Do-it-yourself payroll software" (no quotes) has 69,900 results; karens site is #3.

So - based on a 15% sample of backlinks - the off-site optimisation is hardly helping at all for the KW's quoted in the O/P and - like I said before - the on-site optimisation for those KW's isn't very strong.

It could be that the directory links are better optimised, so you may see some improvements when they're all indexed, but I recommend you improve your basic optimisation (on and off site).

You may feel I'm am out of order asking you this Karen, but would you be willing to share what the SEO has supposedly done for your site and subsequently charged?

I ask as imo they have done a very average job of it so far (although in reality it is very early on in the project), I just want to see if their fee matches up with the workload.

I would suggest you get some more backlinks with the anchor text of the keywords you want to rank for. Concentrating on topical directories first as they are easy to get into and I know there are alot of financial/accounting/pay roll directories as I have a list of such sites myself. Good free link ideas here aswell:Link Building 101

Also, your actual website does not seem particularly well optimised, need proper h1-6 headings, more internal linking, more keyword optimised web pages relating to your topic. Also make your web pages more welcoming and enticing to the user, as reading them at the minute they dont seem very engaging unfortunately. I'm not sure about that font or the simplistic pictures used, but that's just personal preference.