RewiredMind.com

[KMxRetro]

Hi all,
I'm a regular over at SitePoint (well, when I can...:) ) and I'm loving this site so far. Excellent work! You'll see me popping up in these forums whenever I can as well.

I'm just wondering if anyone could review my site please?

I'm having problems building any major traffic since we had a huge boost about a year ago, and our server died because of it. We got the site back up and running, but following SEO articles and grabbing links wherever I can doesn't seem to be working. The main page has a PR of 6, but the others fall quite short.

Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

The url is in my signature. Thank you very much in advance! :)

[GCT13]

Welcome KMxRetro :)

About your site, looks like most of your major sub-pages have okay PR and your forum is search engine friendly, which is good. Is your sitemap new? Because it has no PR.

Two things.

I couldn't find a single review linked from this page (http://www.rewiredmind.com/reviews.php) that had PR. Perhaps adjust those pages to have SE-friendly urls?

Looks like you have a lot direct links to Amazon. Perhaps switch all those link to something that will not transfer PR, like a redirect script. (Search these forums for the redirect script, I know it's come up from time to time.)

Good luck!

[Best.Flash]

Hi KMxRetro,

I see your using a branded domain - this can be an uphill struggle to market for search engines because directories like Yahoo, Dmoz will usually always use your sites name as the anchor text which is a major factor in ranking sites for specific search terms.

Using your Dmoz listing as an example im certain you'll see what im getting at:

RewiredMind.com (http://www.rewiredmind.com/)
[description]Contains message boards, reviews for all platforms, and an online comic.

From what i can tell by the content of your site the words that can help you specifically with Google (taken from your Dmoz description) are reviews and if your site offers content for online games online

These words are a good place to start as they give you a boost in Google. By adding say as an example computer game reviews to the home page <title> tag and a couple of times in that pages visible text - also the more anchor text (internal and external) you can have pointing to your home page (or each page you select for specific terms) with your target key phrase(s) the better.

You probably know about keyword popularity tools like Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool and Wordtracker. Do some research on these perhaps starting with the two terms highlighted from your Dmoz description to check which terms are realistic to target for your sites page based on the top ten results in Google ie. do the sites listed in the SERPs for those terms have 100's of back links - if so you'll either need to buy some text links on other sites (using your target terms) or pick a slightly less popular term.

Example of a back link search:
google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Erewiredmind%2Ecom%2F

Are you looking to attract mainly UK traffic or show up in UK specific searches?

b.t.w classic site slogan: Games. Because Real Life Sucks :D

[KMxRetro]

Hi guys, thank you for replying! :)

To take your points in order....

GCT13: The sitemap is relatively new (around 2 weeks old), so I don't think Google has PR'd it yet.

You make a good point about the reviews not getting any PR. When you say "search-engine friendly URL's", do you mean dropping the "id=" part of the URL and replacing it with Apache redirects or something like that? I hear that "id" in a URL string can cause problems as Google thinks it is a session ID. If I changed it to just "r=", would that help?

Also, Amazon redirects....again, using Apache? Say http://www.rewiredmind.com/amazon/productcode ?

Best.Flash: I wasn't happy with our DMOZ listing to be honest, but I can't really complain...it is a link after all! They edited my suggested text completely.

I'll look into the keyword suggestions that you mentioned...thank you for your help!

Again, any more comments appreciated. Great tips so far guys!
:)

[GCT13]

Originally posted by KMxRetro
When you say "search-engine friendly URL's", do you mean dropping the "id=" part of the URL and replacing it with Apache redirects or something like that? I hear that "id" in a URL string can cause problems as Google thinks it is a session ID. If I changed it to just "r=", would that help?Ah, that's most likely the problem, using "id" as the querystring variable. Change it immediately to anything else, "r=" would be fine. Later you can look into SE-friendly links, switching from this "/review.php?r=183" to this "/review/183".

Originally posted by KMxRetro
Also, Amazon redirects....again, using Apache?For the outside links, use JavaScript links or a form link or a script (this might point you in the right direction (http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=3851)).

[KMxRetro]

OK, I've now changed all links to that page to "r=" instead of "id=". I've also added as many anchor titles as I possibly can.

I've written a script that redirects Amazon links and logs referrers into a database. If I can get the final part (robots.txt) running, I'll post the complete code as a gift to WebsitePublisher, although I'm sure it's easy enough for you to all work out anyways.

Someone said I need to block the script using a robots.txt file, so that Google doesn't forward my PageRank to Amazon anyway. Can anyone provide an example of the code that needs to go into robots.txt? I don't have a robots file at the moment, so I'm starting from scratch! :)

Thank you all again for your excellent help!

[incka]

Do you make money from that advert for the hobbit game?

[KMxRetro]

Yes, we were approached by the advertising company to run their ads. We get paid in Amazon.com gift certificates (suits me!) and we've run several ads for them in the past year.

[chromate]

Originally posted by KMxRetro
OK, I've now changed all links to that page to "r=" instead of "id=". I've also added as many anchor titles as I possibly can.

I've written a script that redirects Amazon links and logs referrers into a database. If I can get the final part (robots.txt) running, I'll post the complete code as a gift to WebsitePublisher, although I'm sure it's easy enough for you to all work out anyways.

Someone said I need to block the script using a robots.txt file, so that Google doesn't forward my PageRank to Amazon anyway. Can anyone provide an example of the code that needs to go into robots.txt? I don't have a robots file at the moment, so I'm starting from scratch! :)

Thank you all again for your excellent help!

I'm not sure changing it to "r=" would actually make much difference. I think google has a problem with anything below about 3 characters or something. Just change it to something meaningful like "reviews=" to be safe. But even that could have problems. Best to use search engine friendly URLs. There's an article about that on this site.

What sort of forwarding are you using in your script? Depending on how you're doing it, you may not need to bother with the robots.txt file anyway.

[incka]

Originally posted by KMxRetro
Yes, we were approached by the advertising company to run their ads. We get paid in Amazon.com gift certificates (suits me!) and we've run several ads for them in the past year.


And the advertising company is?

[KMxRetro]

They're called Liquid Advertising. They will find you if they want you (or so they said when I recommended a friend's site to them!) :)

As for forwarding chromate, I was just going to use a standard PHP header redirect...will that suffice?