Info wanted on Internet Traffic

[Mrs Langtrees]

I have a meeting on tomorrow with the web builders I have chosen for the new look www.langtrees.com.
One of the issues up for discussion is how and who is going to optimize the site for traffic. I never bothered with doing this for Langtrees before as we always had good traffic, but now taking it around Australia I need to get better ranking with google searches.
Any advise is appreciated as not sure whether maybe better to sub this out to another firm?
My budget is $5,000 what can I expect?

 

[hurst]

Maryanne,
i think if you mention "meta tag" with the developer, they will know about it. Meta tag is the wordings used for the search engines to check " or the term search" your site. the more accurate, the more chance your site wil appear on the top of the serach result.
if you click on your browser menu, Internet Explorer for example, go to View > View page source, then you will see some comding there, and the first few lines will have your meta tag.

of cos, the more the user visiting your site, your site will eb on the top of the serach result.

not sure if it helps,
thanks anyway

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Thanks Hurst all info helps.

 

[Ian IT]

Meta tags is a very small part of SEO (Search Engine optimization). Meta-title tags are very important and must contain the keyword or phrase you have chosen from your keyword research. Dont repeat over and over the keywords as this is spamming and will hurt your ranking. Meta-keywords are not important as Google do ignore this tag now. However, if the Meta-keyword tag was of importance... the Langtrees site would be penalized. If you go to Langtrees.com and hover your curser under the purple table. You will notice very small font by left click and highlight. The font is very tiny and the same colour as the black background to hide the keywords. This is called keyword spamming search engines using sneaky blackhat techniques and it will hurt your rankings. However, because Google ignore this tag now.. you are safe, may as well remove it.
H1 tags are very important, also using bold font and must contain your keyword.
Domain name is important to google search engines.. Serena sites domain name is a perfect example to rank higher in Google because it contains good keywords for private escorts.

Above is a small overview of onpage optimization, however what is most important is offpage optimization. Onpage is basically to beat your competition and not leaving any stone unturned. Offpage optimization is using one way incoming links from high ranking sites or authority sites. One way means they link to you, but you do not link to them. Google finds this the most important as if a very high traffic authority site is linking to your site and you do not link back.. they will give you higher ranking. Its not about the quantity of links... its about quality of links.. eg. 5 high rank one way links will do much more for increasing traffic than having 1000 low ranked links.

A another problem with Langtrees site... it does not search engine friendly code. Best to convert to CSS.

Anyway, what I have explained above is just a small summary of SEO, so I did not go too indepth as there is much more...

 

[aussielids]

Hi Mary-Anne,
Your message confuses me a bit. : When they asked to optimise traffic, for me that means something different in my IT speak to Google searches. Google will allow your pages to be ranked higher (and therefore displayed sooner in searches) based on the key words you choose (hurst is on the money). The higher the ranking, the more it costs. Traffic optimisation is to do with what path 'thru' the internet your information will travel along (routing). Now I have been out of touch with this sort of thing for a little while as I have chosen to work with small office, home office installations, not corporates, so maybe when you speak to them they could clarify what they meant and let us know the answer? :ky:
Cheers

 

[Ian IT]

Aussielids, I believe you may have not read the question correctly. They actually asked 'optimize the site for traffic' not 'optimize traffic'. This meaning what I have explained above in my last post. Hope this clarifies your confusion..

Just another quick note... when optimizing, its important to optimize for targeted traffic. Makes no sense to have lots of traffic that dont convert. This can cost you more in bandwidth.

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

True.

Plus, whoever does the coding needs to make sure that the code is as WC3 compliant as possible. There are all sorts of little things that one can do to improve the pages' readability which will boost rankings.

Simple things - such as if your site is in English, putting lang=en in the < body > tag is usually recommended (more info) as well as declaring a doctype (more info).

Also, including a robot.txt file is now almost mandatory (more info) (short answer: robot.txt tells search engines where to look on your site and how to behave).

I'd also like to echo what jackhammer said in the first post but with a small difference - make sure that you do have your metatags on the page. Google ignores them, but there are many other search engines as well that do use them. Just because Google is the biggest does not mean you should cater exclusively to them.

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

I am starting to get a undetanding. Because Langtrees.com is not domain name specific would it pay me to have a domain for each major town as well with the name in the title i.e cairns-escorts.com.au. and point these to my site or is this a waste of time and money.
The reason I want to stick with langtrees.com as our new site is also going to offer a free dating service profile like Red Hot Pie.

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

There are a couple of options and basically it comes down to functionality.

If you are going to have all the data going to the central site (langtrees.com) then there's no point in having all the extra sites (plus the extra overheads).

On the other hand, if you are going to regionalize, but each region will only have an average level of bandwidth then it'd be easier to have subdomains on the main site (cairns.langtrees.com sydney.langtrees.com perth.langtrees.com and so on). The advantage of this system is that it'd make it a lot easier for people to log in to the "regional" subdomain and still be able to jump into the "main" site and still be logged in.

Finally, if each region is anticipated to have a high volume of traffic then it might be better to have each region on it's own domain and on it's own hosting. There are a variety of ways to minimize costs for such hosting, depending on what you are comfortable with.

A dedicated server might be cheaper than X number of hosting packages but you might need to provide your own tech support. You could buy a hosting reseller package but you only sell to yourself (sort of like buying hosting in bulk rather than retail). American plans tend to have more bandwidth available, but you may have difficulty if you want to use .com.au domains instead of .com and support may be a bit hit and miss.

Langtrees works well because it has brand recognition. However, it wouldn't work as well if "langtrees" was your name and you had several businesses with the same name (for example, if you had a massage business, a video business and a painting business you'd want them all to have distinctly different names to avoid confusion between the services being offered).