# Keyword Demystification Please



## DickTees.net (Apr 5, 2005)

How is it the I have one page on my site with a shirt that says I think I just sharted and I get more search engine hits from people searching for the term sharted. Meanwhile I have the keywords "offensive shirts" one nearly every page on my store and I don't get a single hit from those keywords. When I type in "sharted" in google I come up in the top 5. When I type in "offensive shirts" I am no where to be found. 

While I am fairly new to ecommerce and whole search engine rank game, it blows my mind that a niche like "sharted" is supplying the majority of my search engine referrals and a fairly common search like "offensive shirts" turns up nothing on Dicktees.net. 

Someone please enlighten me. 

ps: I have read most of the google optimization lit online.


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## BWS (Mar 30, 2005)

I'd say that far, far more sites are competing for the words "offensive shirts". They're just blowing you out of the water - a lot of smart people are trying to figure out how to increase their search engine placement for that phrase. You have a lot less smart people competing with you for "Sharted" .

I just glanced at the source for your page and I was happy to see you're using alt text on the graphics, or at least on some of them. Having the word "Sharted" there helps a lot on a page with so little actual text, which is true of most of our store pages. Slipping a little "offensive shirt" alt text here and there might help you with the other phrase, too. In fact, since your header graphics don't seem to have alt text - and since they're at the top of the page, which is considered significant - you might think about adding "offensive shirts", or whatever, as the alt text for one of those images.

Mind you, I am encouraging you to help the search engines to properly understand your site. I've looked at your very funny designs and I am positive that they would be offensive enough to someone that they've earned the keyword .


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> I'd say that far, far more sites are competing for the words "offensive shirts".


Bradley nailed it on the head right there. Competition.

If you look at the search results for a google search for sharted, you'll see this at the top right hand side of the page:



> Results 1 - 10 of about 823 for sharted


That means out of the *billions* of webpages published on the web, only 823 are "competing" for the keyword sharted.

If you do a google search for offensive shirts, you'll see this at the top right hand side of the page:



> Results 1 - 10 of about 791,000 for offensive shirts.


That means your store about offensive t-shirts is competing with over 791,000 other pages looking to be in the top 10 for that phrase.

It'll take time, a search engine friendly site layout, promotion, and more relevant links to your store to get your site higher and higher for that phrase with that level of competition.


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## DickTees.net (Apr 5, 2005)

Thanks for the feedback BWS and Rodney. Good points from both! Am I correct in thinking that the more traffic I drive through dicktees.net the higher my positioning may become when people search for relevant keywords related to my merchandise. Forgive the newby type questions here. I am a designer not a web optimizer. Although I am learning a ton through trial and error.


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## Adam (Mar 21, 2005)

No, your positioning is based on how much relevant content you have, plus how well it is optimised, plus how many similar sites link to you. Plus another x amount of other things. 

Greater traffic can be a result of a few things:

* You have more pages i.e. more pages indexed by a search engine. More ways for people to enter.
* You are indexed for popular keyword search terms, i.e. offensive t-shirts. 

Useful tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Tips:
====
Get some more text on the site, its very image heavy, not much for a search engine to read. 

Some good link text would be useful as well.. i.e. add an Offensive T-Shirts category to your category list.


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## Elleth Faewen (Mar 31, 2005)

One thing that is frequently overlooked is the length of time your domain name is registered for. Having it registered for only one year is a negative tick in the page rank calculation. I recommend registering it for five years or more.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

Elleth Faewen said:
 

> One thing that is frequently overlooked is the length of time your domain name is registered for. Having it registered for only one year is a negative tick in the page rank calculation. I recommend registering it for five years or more.



Can you verify that is correct? I've only heard that as speculation and haven't had it effect my pagerank any.


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## Bougie (Jul 12, 2005)

I read somewhere that general domain names like cars.com aren't as good as you'd think because people are looking for something specific like Chevrolet or Toyota.


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## jdr8271 (Jun 16, 2005)

> No, your positioning is based on how much relevant content you have, plus how well it is optimised, plus how many similar sites link to you. Plus another x amount of other things.


not totally true. For instance, if you have 25 links to your site that all have the text "happy t-shirts", and all of those links are indexed by google, chances are you will come up high on google for "happy t-shirts". 

You could have happy t-shirts written 20 times on your page, but if you have no links to your site, you will not be listed high on google for that search term.


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