[DickTees.net]

How is it the I have one page on my site with a shirt that says I think I just sharted and I get more search engine hits from people searching for the term sharted. Meanwhile I have the keywords "offensive shirts" one nearly every page on my store and I don't get a single hit from those keywords. When I type in "sharted" in google I come up in the top 5. When I type in "offensive shirts" I am no where to be found.

While I am fairly new to ecommerce and whole search engine rank game, it blows my mind that a niche like "sharted" is supplying the majority of my search engine referrals and a fairly common search like "offensive shirts" turns up nothing on Dicktees.net.

Someone please enlighten me.

ps: I have read most of the google optimization lit online.

 

[BWS]

I'd say that far, far more sites are competing for the words "offensive shirts". They're just blowing you out of the water - a lot of smart people are trying to figure out how to increase their search engine placement for that phrase. You have a lot less smart people competing with you for "Sharted" .

I just glanced at the source for your page and I was happy to see you're using alt text on the graphics, or at least on some of them. Having the word "Sharted" there helps a lot on a page with so little actual text, which is true of most of our store pages. Slipping a little "offensive shirt" alt text here and there might help you with the other phrase, too. In fact, since your header graphics don't seem to have alt text - and since they're at the top of the page, which is considered significant - you might think about adding "offensive shirts", or whatever, as the alt text for one of those images.

Mind you, I am encouraging you to help the search engines to properly understand your site. I've looked at your very funny designs and I am positive that they would be offensive enough to someone that they've earned the keyword .

 

[Rodney]

I'd say that far, far more sites are competing for the words "offensive shirts".

Bradley nailed it on the head right there. Competition.

If you look at the search results for a google search for sharted, you'll see this at the top right hand side of the page:

Results 1 - 10 of about 823 for sharted

That means out of the billions of webpages published on the web, only 823 are "competing" for the keyword sharted.

If you do a google search for offensive shirts, you'll see this at the top right hand side of the page:

Results 1 - 10 of about 791,000 for offensive shirts.

That means your store about offensive t-shirts is competing with over 791,000 other pages looking to be in the top 10 for that phrase.

It'll take time, a search engine friendly site layout, promotion, and more relevant links to your store to get your site higher and higher for that phrase with that level of competition.

 

[DickTees.net]

Thanks for the feedback BWS and Rodney. Good points from both! Am I correct in thinking that the more traffic I drive through dicktees.net the higher my positioning may become when people search for relevant keywords related to my merchandise. Forgive the newby type questions here. I am a designer not a web optimizer. Although I am learning a ton through trial and error.

 

[Adam]

No, your positioning is based on how much relevant content you have, plus how well it is optimised, plus how many similar sites link to you. Plus another x amount of other things.

Greater traffic can be a result of a few things:

* You have more pages i.e. more pages indexed by a search engine. More ways for people to enter.
* You are indexed for popular keyword search terms, i.e. offensive t-shirts.

Useful tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Tips:
====
Get some more text on the site, its very image heavy, not much for a search engine to read.

Some good link text would be useful as well.. i.e. add an Offensive T-Shirts category to your category list.

 

[Elleth Faewen]

One thing that is frequently overlooked is the length of time your domain name is registered for. Having it registered for only one year is a negative tick in the page rank calculation. I recommend registering it for five years or more.

 

[Rodney]

One thing that is frequently overlooked is the length of time your domain name is registered for. Having it registered for only one year is a negative tick in the page rank calculation. I recommend registering it for five years or more.

Can you verify that is correct? I've only heard that as speculation and haven't had it effect my pagerank any.

 

[Bougie]

I read somewhere that general domain names like cars.com aren't as good as you'd think because people are looking for something specific like Chevrolet or Toyota.

 

[jdr8271]

No, your positioning is based on how much relevant content you have, plus how well it is optimised, plus how many similar sites link to you. Plus another x amount of other things.

not totally true. For instance, if you have 25 links to your site that all have the text "happy t-shirts", and all of those links are indexed by google, chances are you will come up high on google for "happy t-shirts".

You could have happy t-shirts written 20 times on your page, but if you have no links to your site, you will not be listed high on google for that search term.