Why doesn't this page getter better google attention?

[Mizugori]

A friend of mine asked me why her newly designed website is doing so poorly with search engines...

The website is: http://www.chiyono.com

It's a Japanese restaurant in downtown manhattan. When you google 'chiyono' or 'japanese restaurant east village' it doesn't even make the first page... how can this be fixed?

thanks!!

 

[mundane]

Get people to link to it?

 

[troytime]

A) its flash. flash sucks as a whole-site solution, and it REALLY sucks for search engine optimization

B) it's a new site, google doesn't treat new sites very nicely. Your friend can expect to be in the new site 'sandbox' for 6 - 18 months, longer if SEO improvements aren't made to her site.

C) lack of backlinks. lack of google PR. Google's algorithm is largely based on popularity. If no other sites are linking to chiyono.com, google won't think the site has any value. Aside from that, it might not even get discovered by the google bots.
I found several reviews of the restaurant, but no links. My advice would be to contact those reviewers and beg for them to link to chiyono.com on that review page.

 

[George P Burdell]

Created: 29-may-2007

That is your problem.

 

[GoatMonkey]

Invest in a Google adwords advertisement. That is the best way to guarantee that you will sometimes be on the front page. You can put in the exact words you want to be in the results for. You can specify a geographic area. You can set exactly how much you want to spend on it. It works, my customers have gotten real leads from it.

 

[yllus]

Make sure you set up an account at Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Those links will allow you to see how Google and Yahoo! view your site - in terms of how many of your pages have been indexed, the keywords they "see" in your pages, the links coming in to your pages, etc. Make sure you create and register a sitemap with both search engines as well, to ensure that all of your pages are spidered.

Edit: I am now considering writing a post on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that we could all contribute too. Hmm.

 

[fs5]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Created: 29-may-2007

That is your problem.

Yes, it takes time for your page to show up on Google. Google index is rather stale... maybe on purpose as to not include fresh sites.

Look at some of the basic factors for PageRank (what google uses to determine where your page shows up in their results)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

 

[clamum]

Originally posted by: troytime
A) its flash. flash sucks as a whole-site solution, and it REALLY sucks for search engine optimization

B) it's a new site, google doesn't treat new sites very nicely. Your friend can expect to be in the new site 'sandbox' for 6 - 18 months, longer if SEO improvements aren't made to her site.

C) lack of backlinks. lack of google PR. Google's algorithm is largely based on popularity. If no other sites are linking to chiyono.com, google won't think the site has any value. Aside from that, it might not even get discovered by the google bots.
I found several reviews of the restaurant, but no links. My advice would be to contact those reviewers and beg for them to link to chiyono.com on that review page.

I second what this guy said.

A client from my last job invested in one of those Google advertising programs (not AdSense I think, the one where it shows up to the right when you do a Google search, like "Featured Search" or something) and that helped him increase traffic a good amount.

Other than that, there's barely anything for a search spider to pick up on since it's all Flash. Dump the Flash, redesign site without it and Google "search engine optimization" for some more hints.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Originally posted by: yllus
Edit: I am now considering writing a post on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that we could all contribute too. Hmm.

That would be great. I bet it would get stickied. I know SEO is admittedly one of my weaker points of web design.

 

[troytime]

Originally posted by: LeetestUnleet

Originally posted by: yllus
Edit: I am now considering writing a post on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that we could all contribute too. Hmm.

That would be great. I bet it would get stickied. I know SEO is admittedly one of my weaker points of web design.

i do SEO for the company i work for, i'd love to share my knowledge AND pick up new stuff

 

[Snapster]

troytime pretty much has it nailed. Search engine spiders can't/don't view flash files when they visit your site but rather the html. One trick you can do is write an html page with some SEO optimised content and detect if the user can play flash and replace the html content if so. There are other considerations, but mostly for html optimisations.

 

[skrilla]

Originally posted by: clamum

Originally posted by: troytime
A) its flash. flash sucks as a whole-site solution, and it REALLY sucks for search engine optimization

B) it's a new site, google doesn't treat new sites very nicely. Your friend can expect to be in the new site 'sandbox' for 6 - 18 months, longer if SEO improvements aren't made to her site.

C) lack of backlinks. lack of google PR. Google's algorithm is largely based on popularity. If no other sites are linking to chiyono.com, google won't think the site has any value. Aside from that, it might not even get discovered by the google bots.
I found several reviews of the restaurant, but no links. My advice would be to contact those reviewers and beg for them to link to chiyono.com on that review page.

I second what this guy said.

A client from my last job invested in one of those Google advertising programs (not AdSense I think, the one where it shows up to the right when you do a Google search, like "Featured Search" or something) and that helped him increase traffic a good amount.

Other than that, there's barely anything for a search spider to pick up on since it's all Flash. Dump the Flash, redesign site without it and Google "search engine optimization" for some more hints.

I am "thirding" what troytime said just to stress it. Flash is absolutely terrible for SEO.

This may be a dumb question, but did she use http://www.google.com/addurl and add the site to Google so it would know to index it?

Google "google ranking factors" - I would take a look at the first link. May not be a pretty site, but it has more info on it than a lot of the "top 10" google pr lists you see out there.

Smashing Magazine also updated their site with a huge Google pagerank article. http://www.smashingmagazine.com - on the first page (http://www.smashingmagazine.co...-really-know-about-it/ direct link to article)

Also, it would help if she could get her site linked to from other sites. Maybe local restaurant review sites, or local newspaper sites. That is the hard part.

 

[troytime]

Originally posted by: skrilla

Originally posted by: clamum

Originally posted by: troytime
A) its flash. flash sucks as a whole-site solution, and it REALLY sucks for search engine optimization

B) it's a new site, google doesn't treat new sites very nicely. Your friend can expect to be in the new site 'sandbox' for 6 - 18 months, longer if SEO improvements aren't made to her site.

C) lack of backlinks. lack of google PR. Google's algorithm is largely based on popularity. If no other sites are linking to chiyono.com, google won't think the site has any value. Aside from that, it might not even get discovered by the google bots.
I found several reviews of the restaurant, but no links. My advice would be to contact those reviewers and beg for them to link to chiyono.com on that review page.

I second what this guy said.

A client from my last job invested in one of those Google advertising programs (not AdSense I think, the one where it shows up to the right when you do a Google search, like "Featured Search" or something) and that helped him increase traffic a good amount.

Other than that, there's barely anything for a search spider to pick up on since it's all Flash. Dump the Flash, redesign site without it and Google "search engine optimization" for some more hints.

I am "thirding" what troytime said just to stress it. Flash is absolutely terrible for SEO.

This may be a dumb question, but did she use http://www.google.com/addurl and add the site to Google so it would know to index it?

Google "google ranking factors" - I would take a look at the first link. May not be a pretty site, but it has more info on it than a lot of the "top 10" google pr lists you see out there.

Smashing Magazine also updated their site with a huge Google pagerank article. http://www.smashingmagazine.com - on the first page (http://www.smashingmagazine.co...-really-know-about-it/ direct link to article)

Also, it would help if she could get her site linked to from other sites. Maybe local restaurant review sites, or local newspaper sites. That is the hard part.

Hopefully she DIDN't use the google addurl form, thats pretty much the worst way into the google index.

 

[Nocturnal]

The site is new.

The site probably has no incoming links from authoritize sources.

I suggest, trying to get the site indexed first and foremost if it isn't already.

Second, I suggest submitting the site to several relevent directories. Relevent is the key word here. If you start having incoming links from various non-relevent sources it doesn't really count towards your ranking.

Also, the second phrase you have is I would not say extremely competitive but in a way it is.

There are TONS of resources on SEO so do a little reserach and be prepared to read.

Create a sitemap/index. That always helps if your site is almost 100% Flash.

 

[GundamSonicZeroX]

Two things, 1. Make a page that says: Enter ste and load it with keywords and other crap. 2. Make the title something people are more likely to google.

 

[SirPsycho]

Originally posted by: GundamSonicZeroX
Two things, 1. Make a page that says: Enter ste and load it with keywords and other crap. 2. Make the title something people are more likely to google.

That's an excellent idea, if you want Google to view your website as junk and guarantee that it never makes it anywhere near the front page.

What are doorway pages, and should I use doorway pages?

 

[skrilla]

Originally posted by: troytime

Originally posted by: skrilla

This may be a dumb question, but did she use http://www.google.com/addurl and add the site to Google so it would know to index it?

Hopefully she DIDN't use the google addurl form, thats pretty much the worst way into the google index.

I'm curious, why do you say that? Does Google penalize these submissions?

The OP says the site is listed in Google, so it was an oversight on my part asking if Google knew to index the site. But for a site with no backlinks, Google wouldn't be able to crawl it, so you would think that adding a site using the addurl form would let Google know.

 

[troytime]

Originally posted by: skrilla

Originally posted by: troytime

Originally posted by: skrilla

This may be a dumb question, but did she use http://www.google.com/addurl and add the site to Google so it would know to index it?

Hopefully she DIDN't use the google addurl form, thats pretty much the worst way into the google index.

I'm curious, why do you say that? Does Google penalize these submissions?

The OP says the site is listed in Google, so it was an oversight on my part asking if Google knew to index the site. But for a site with no backlinks, Google wouldn't be able to crawl it, so you would think that adding a site using the addurl form would let Google know.

There's no statement saying that sites are "penalized" for using the suggest a site form, however google's page ranking system is largely based on popularity.
If a site has to be suggested, its obviously not popular.
Suggesting a site doesn't even guarantee that the site will get crawled, let alone get put into the SERPs.

A couple years ago, i launched two sites around the same time (within a week of eachother). For one site, i did the suggest form. For the other, i did a few link placements (2 to be exact, bought on ebay for 2 bucks).
The site with the link purchase got crawled the very next day, the site with the suggest got crawled 6 weeks later (and by then, i think there were even a few links on other sites for it)

 

[Mizugori]

i think you guys are underestimating google just a bit... my freaking personal website which has NO links anywhere pointing to it im sure, it doesnt even have any text, gets crawled regularly. i uploaded a few images for a friend and not four hours later my log showed google bots hitting it...

 

[troytime]

Originally posted by: Mizugori
i think you guys are underestimating google just a bit... my freaking personal website which has NO links anywhere pointing to it im sure, it doesnt even have any text, gets crawled regularly. i uploaded a few images for a friend and not four hours later my log showed google bots hitting it...

getting crawled (often or not) doesn't equal good search ranking