Increasing site hits

NetHosted Customer Joined: 08 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

Hi,

I'm looking at ways to increase hits rates to a (toy) site that we have set up and was wondering what methods other people are using to increase their hits.

Search ratings based on specific searches turns up high in the ratings. We also list under their product search, previously froogle.

Does anyone else have other tips that we can use or pointers to where I could get more information.

Or have I asked for secret closely guarded information

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

NetHosted Customer Joined: 08 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

Yep, toy sales exist and it has been promted there. Also, flyers are distributed pointing to the site.

It sees a number of people visit but was looking to see if there are other ways people suggest to increase site profiles and hit rates.

Another aspect is to include some free stuff via downloads that might draw people in so that's a possibility.

Anyone else have any tips?

Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 10:18 pm Post subject:

Fix your HTML - Google prefers pages that are written correctly.
Specifically, use heading tags, as they are especially valued.

Fix your URLs.
These are bad:
http://world4kids.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=29

http://world4kids.co.uk/shop/index.php?cPath=28

These are good:
http://world4kids.co.uk/shop/product_info.php/h7903_HAMA_Beads_Disney_Princess_GIANT_Gift_Box.html

http://world4kids.co.uk/shop/category.php/baby_born.html

Having some Flash games might help.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 278

the URL thing is interesting so if I have a site blah.com and a sub page info.html and wanted to search on 'blah' then renaming the sub page to blah_info.html would be better?

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 11:26 pm Post subject:

Not sure I understand your example, but basically you should be able to identify what a page will be about from it's url - arbitrary id numbers don't tell you that. (although it can be necessary to also include them with the url, when a title may not be unique).

The more information a search engine can get from a page (whether from the page itself, from the link to it, or from the page url), the better.

Ah, think I get you now: If you were to search for "dogs", then simply having "dogs.com/info.html" is probably okay (assuming the page is about dogs); using "dogs.com/dogs_info.html" is likely redundant, but don't think it would hurt either.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 278

yes, that was my drift.

Did some reading and saw that Google doesn't like the PHP ? as you showed.

and then another also saying to use subfolders rather than pages. ie. don't have dogs.com/info.html but have dogs.com/info (where this subfolder would have an index.html)

Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:15 pm Post subject:

The [stuff after] ? is the query_string - it is intended to be used for dynamic search queries, so search engines rightly give it less weight than a fixed url.
Using standard pages with dynamic scripting is what path_info is for, which is when you do: index.php/my_page.html

My personal opinion is that addreses should always end in the filetype they return, so if you are returning a page you should use /info.html not just /info - again, it's extra info in the url, which is good.

I've no idea how search engines deal with this though. I suspect it doesn't matter either way.

If you did want to lose the .html, you wouldn't/shouldn't use subfolders - just use mod_rewrite to convert it.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 08 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

Thanks guys for the tips. I'll look in to this over the weekend and see what I can do.

Appreciate the tips.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 278

changed one of my sites to have subdirectories rather than page links and went from page 3 to page 2 on Google.