megamomm

My SE placement is pretty dismal right now and my PR is non existant. I'm working on the whole backlinking thing. I'm writing articles, submitting to directories, but I still have to wait awhile to see the results of my work.

Anyhow, I have noticed that only a small percentage of my visitors are coming from links and search engines the rest are direct requests. For example today I only got 71 different visitors but only 19 of those were from links and search engines.

Does that mean that I'm heading in the right direction content wise if I am getting all these direct requests/return visitors on a daily basis or is that pretty normal and par for the course?

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megamomm

Wow, no one has an opinion at all? I'm actually kind of surprised. I know a lot of you have multiple websites. I figured someone would be able to speculate for me.

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rick

One major problem is you're not using SE friendly URLs. There are a couple of good and easy to use plugins for Joomla that will make your URLs search engine and user friendly.

mdurkee

I am having similar problems building popularity. I have been able to increase my PR to 4 but have been at this for about a year now. I have a dynamic web site that calls the .asp code with javascript. I then have these static type pages in a catalog directory with lots of good content. I am struggling with whether to re-design the whole site or just keep trying to plug away at the SEO. I have blogs with links to my site, traded links with multiple related sites and more. Still working at it. It seems like Google doesn't pick up all the links that I have traded though. Not sure where to go from here.

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megamomm

Yup, I've tried three of them but none of them work right. They all break the site. I've even gone for help in the forums provided but still can't figure out the issue.

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megamomm

I'm not too worried about popularity at the moment. I can build it with time. This site is, after all, just a hobby for me (thank goodness) so I can be a bit more laxed about building it up. I was curious about was if the average visitor return that I am seeing is a good sign in terms of my content or if it's just normal.

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jumpenjuhosaphat

I think that it's normal for a decent site to get more direct address visits than visits from a SE or links.....But, what you need to do is work on gaining more an more traffic. It sounds like your traffic is relatively low at the moment. I wouldn't worry so much the ratio of where my traffic comes from until you start getting more traffic. Also, don't worry about PR...It means nothing to your visitors. However, search engine placement is quite important, and has a lot to do with how much traffic you are getting. You should do some keyword research to find out what people are typing into the search queries to find sites like yours. Once you do that, and have a small handful of search terms, you should begin on working on your backlinks.....Keep in mind that it is likely that your competition has thousands, or hundreds of thousands of links, so link building will be a big job for you, but the payoff will create a higher trafficked website.

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rick

I look at how long visitors stay and how many pages they click on to determine the quality of content or level of interest. BTW, have you tried OpenSEF? I've used it on two Joomla sites without any problem.

megamomm

That seems rather silly to me. I would think figuring out if people are enjoying your site and planning what direction to go in with your site's content (and how it effects your visitors behaviors and spending/clicking habits) should be your first priority because if it's bad no one is going to stay on your website for more than five seconds and you won't make much anyhow. So, a larger amount of traffic will only get you a small handful of visitors who actually stay and surf which is rather pointless.

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megamomm

Yup, I do that too (checking the visitor logs). I have not tried OpenSEF. To be honest I've been scared to. I've heard so many horror stories about it because it's still so full of bugs that I went with a few others that had less complaints and seemed to be more stable but using them I couldn't access anything on my website. I'm thinking about just paying someone else to deal with it. It's such a headache and I have a two year old and a one year old so I know about headaches!

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