Increase website visits

tickledpinkfair

hey all

Ive been working a Marketing exec (although i really look after everything accounts, sales etc) for a new educational website for the first few months things were fine visits to the site were growing everyday it was catching on, but yesterday and today visits have just dropped from 3 digit numbers to single digits, and no emails eithers.

Ive contacted all the relevant bodies, teachers, teacher trainging schools, advertised etc but i feel ive come up against a brick wall now. i cant think of what to do to get the education community to view this site that we havent already done.

a friend of mine said im too close to the subject now and cant brainstorm because of the whole situation.

has anybody any ideas that could help boost the ratings again or what my next step should be

i really feel like giving up today!!!

Bunnyhopper

That is annoying. I can understand the stress (well, sort of).

Does the site have a forum or mailing list? I find the sites I revisit tend to have those, or perhaps an RSS feed. Also sites that update very regularly with news will get me coming back to see what I'm missing.

Have you got any kind of analysis software running on the site? You can use Google Analytics to track a lot of stuff.

All very vague, I know, but I hope that if it's not exactly helpful then it's at least encouraging

Good luck

tickledpinkfair

the site hasnt got a forum yet because its in its pure infancy stage and the money isnt available to get this programme it.

I can track it and see the stats on how many ar visiting etc. What i really need is some way to get the education community to log on, mainly teachers especially those looking for employment.

its just one of thse days and its so frustrating trying to use my damn marketing skills and think of getting the site out there and known but being hindered because i have a lot of the other running of the business as my sole responsibility.

im in dyer need of divine inspiration to make this site work and secure my job

i really would appreciate any ideas to get our name known byt the education community.

Bunnyhopper

Just occurs to me that if you haven't done so already, you could try the forums on creativeireland.com - someone there might have a bright idea.

xha1r

PHPBB2 I think it's called, should be available in the hosting control panel. With any hosting I've got it's always been available anyway.

In other words, you should have a forum option available to you which wouldn't cost anything.

paulocon

Hi,

How do you think you got the visits initially over the first few months?
Was it from a campaign of some sort (email or post?)

As other people have said, you need to have some content there that changes regularly in order to get return visitors.

Sign up with Goolge Sitemaps and Analytics in order to promote and analyse your website.

Also note that Google has an age delay which will stop it properly indexing your site for several months from the first time it finds it...

tickledpinkfair

yep initially is was both emails and post campaign, still sending brochures and that

im really interested in this google thing, i have noticed that if i google any words like, teaching jobs, education etc, the site does not come up at all i have searched through and it definitly doesnt come up on the first 10 pages and being realistic who looks passed 5 !

so how do i get it recognised by google?

i have it linked to universities and other educational bodies and at the moment i am tryin to get newspapers and teachers mags interested i no its a matter of just getting the name out there and using my initiative to do this but when im swamped with organising so many other aspects of the business its dificult to focus on this part

paulocon

If you website is still relatively new, it can take Google literally months to crawl your website to any great extent.

Get as manu inbound links (links to your website from existing sites) as possible as this will help. After that, it's a bit of a sit and wait game. You can fiddle around with the site all you want for search engine optimisation but until you are indexed, you'll onlu be annoying yourself..

information

tickledpinkfair wrote:

yi am tryin to get newspapers

was that you in the business post?
Do you pay for that?

mneylon

Try to ensure that it is prepared for the search engine spiders and build inbound links

Idbatterim

hi, i was going to start a new post but this post would be similarish. Unlike the OP my hits would be fairly constant but we will have a new website in the near future, and when we do i am going to have to do everything i can to get it to spot on google.ie search. Am i right in saying that the two things that will count are key words (relevance) and hits? What is the best way to go about getting a large amount of hits? i know through linking etc, but are there companies who operate on the premise that they will get you a large amount of through traffic and even if its irrelelvant your ranking will go up to those that it is relevant to? Hope im not hijacking your thread Op, but my question would the same as yours basicly.

fintan

I highly doubt that the number of hits effects your google ranking.

More important is relevant content and the quality of in bound links to your site

A good place to start is:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

paulocon

Have to agree with Fintan there.

Sure, you can go out and pay some company to throw traffic your way but in my opinion, this is money down the drain and it certainly won't help your Google Ranking.

For me, I'd concentrate on the following
- Relevance of the content on your site
- How dynamic your content is (how often it changes)

After that, I'd get setup on Google Sitemaps and maybe Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.

That said, with the way Google now waits for sites to mature before really indexing them, you're going to have a 6-8 month wait for any new website to really start appearing.. If you are thinking of launching a site, get a homeage of some sort up a.s.a.p. to give yourself a head start.

mneylon

paulocon wrote:

That said, with the way Google now waits for sites to mature before really indexing them, you're going to have a 6-8 month wait for any new website to really start appearing..

That's not really true. If the site is spider-friendly etc., it will get into organic results very quickly. Getting an actual page rank can take longer

RedCardinal

paulocon wrote:

That said, with the way Google now waits for sites to mature before really indexing them, you're going to have a 6-8 month wait for any new website to really start appearing.. If you are thinking of launching a site, get a homeage of some sort up a.s.a.p. to give yourself a head start.

While Michele is technically correct, his response isn't quite the full story.

If you want to get crawled and indexed you have to make Google think that your site is important:

Importance is measured by the number of QUALITY backlinks our site has and the duration over which those links were accumulated.

A site can be indexed in as little as 1 or 2 days with the right links.

That, however, does not mean that a site will RANK well for competitive terms quickly. It can take many months (and sometimes years) for a site to gain enough trust from Google to rank well for competitive terms. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the 'sandbox' or 'trustbox'.

The key to ranking well in Google for competitive terms is the backlink profile that your site enjoys. Only the right links will get you to a #1 position for all but the least competitive search phrases.

Excuse the plug but I have documented quite a lot of this in more detail over on my blog www.redcardinal.ie.

Rgds

Oh yeah, forget about PR and focus on rankings. PR will follow if you are concerned about that measure.

miju

buying a couple of relevant domain names helps your google ranking significantly as well

mneylon

miju wrote:

buying a couple of relevant domain names helps your google ranking significantly as well

Huh?

You're more likely to get penalised for duplicate content if you're not very careful

jennyrusks

Hi Tickled

Another way to speed up things with Google and the other search engines is to add a blog to your site. In terms of keeping things cheap, Blogger is actually free. It doesn't have all the features of some of the other blogging software such as Movable type or Typepad but it is really easy to use and it certainly is effective if you can bring yourself to write a couple of posts a week.

I don't blog very often but I find my blog posts coming up in Google when I do a search. In your blog you can write about anything related to your site and its content, link to other sites of interest. It all builds up extra pages of content as each post is archived and consider an individual web page by the search engines.

I've written an article on my own website that talks a bit more about how blogs can help your business if you'd like to read it. http://www.laughingliondesign.com/whatisablog.htm

all the best

Jennifer

wba88

Its not the best idea, but for this forum (and any other u are a member of) edit ur sig and put in a link to the site and a short description of it. every little helps

okellyc

Just curious, have visit trends changed much since you posted the original issue (christmas period aside?) Any thoughts in retrospect on what did happen so we can all learn from it?

PRman

What's The Latest On The Clubhouse?

bidireland

i sounds as thought you got dumped in the goolge sandbox, start getting some links from authority sites and hubs this will help to build up your trust rank which is needed to get your site out of the sandbox.

If you need any more info get back to me