Hi everyone,

I have had my old site running for a few years now, and it's looking dated so will be completely re-designing soon.

I get a few hits a day, say 100, which is OK, but potential is obviously there for more.

How should I improve on the old site to get more hits from SE? etc I think the main keywords I should be using are wildlife art, wildlife paintings, wildlife prints. But in Overture there are not really high numbers associated with those terms.

Would be greatful for any help and advice so that I can make the next site much better

here's the current one -

http://www.onlineartdemos.co.uk

Thanks

onlineart first thing to note is that hits aren't a meangful statistic at all. A hit is counted for every request made to the server, which will include things like images. So if you have a page with 50 images on it and I go to that page it records 50 hits. What you want more of is visits and pageviews.

Ok with that out of the way I hope you mind if I don't directly answer your question here. I recently wrote an SEO Basics Tutorial that should help get yo started with what to do.

There's also a lot of information here at the forums which I'm sure you're already aware.

I think think the main concepts when it comes to seo are:

1. Keyword Research
2. Site Building
3. On-Page Factors
4. Link Building

There's obviously more detail to each. Start with researching keypwords more. Some will seem very obvious, but these obvious keywords will often be the most difficult to get your pages ranked. You may be surrpised by all the keywords you can come up with with a little more research. I link to some useful tools in the Keyword part of the tutorial.

Hope it helps and feel free to ask more specific questions as they arise.

Thanks Vangogh,

I meant about 100 unique visits per day not hits - sorry.

Thank you also for all the great tips, I have just read ALL the way through the link pages on SEO you sent - very interesting and I have already learnt a lot - thanks!

My new site will be a complete rebuild, new domain name as well.

The no 1 thing I want are people coming to my site to view my wildlife paintings and prints, so my main keywords must be wildlife art, wildlife paintings and wildlife prints. Would you agree?Checked overture and wildlife art = 3295, wildlife painting = 725 these figures seem quite low.

I'm currently on page 3 for wildlife art - google USA, page 1 Google UK (whole web search).

I thought page 3 and 1 were good, but am I also correct in thinking that 100 unique is poor? So am I thinking of the wrong keywords completely?

Love to hear everyones thoughts - before I start the new build.

Glad you liked the tutorial. I had a feeling you meant unique visits, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.

I agree that being found for 'wildlife art' and wildlife paintings' are good, but there are plenty more keyword phrases you can target. For example I just looked at your site and clicked on the gallery page. The first thing I see is a painting of a leopard. Why not also target leopard paintings. Then I checked Overture and they show 'painting of leopard' getting 65 searches in April. True 65 searches isn't a lot, but you can certainly rank well for that term.

In fact you actually do. I checked Google and you're pages are at #3 and #4. That's what I mean with more and less obvious keywords. You could easily make a page for every painting you have on your site and target a very specific set of keywords to each painting. It seems like your site is showing up for a lot of them anyway. Those specific keywords aren't going to be particularly competitive and I would think with some minimal work like writing a good page title and maybe having a paragraph of text on each page might get your pages in the #1 spot for most of those terms.

Each individual keyword won't bring a lot of traffic, but the sum total probably will and even better since the phrases are very specific your visitors will have landed at a page that's pretty close to exactly what they were looking for.

Maybe when I type 'wildlife art' what I'm really looking for is images of fish which I didn't see right away on your site. Those more specific pages and searches should lead to better conversions. That's doesn't mean you can't also target 'wildlife art' You should still target that phrase, but keep in mind there are many other phrases that can also be very valuable.

As far as the 100 uniques a day I try not to get caught up in the absolute numbers. With my own site I'm more concerned in seeing an upward trend. So if I get 100 unique visitors daily this month it's great if last month I was only getting 75 daily, not soo good if last month I was getting 150 uniques daily.