Redesign leads to less traffic, leads to redesign

[dewebsign]

I was hired by a slate manufacturer to redesign his site back in October. He had designed a site with Yahoo pagemaker and was unable to position text without over-writing pictures and when I looked at the code it was a mess, with body tags ending the page before the page even started and other coding errors.

One thing I found annoying about his original site was the navigation. You could get to any page from the home page, but once you visited a page there were only 3 choices, home, back and next. The 7 pages were set up in a loop all with the same home, back and next, with only these three links out of each.

Site redesign was done in January. Site looks pretty. Each page looks the same, Navigation is fully meshed for easy use. Still 7 pages. Most of the text stayed the same. http://www.usedslate.com

For nearly 3 months traffic stayed the same or increased from the old site's numbers. The requests for information were at an all time high.

Mid-March Traffic plummeted. Traffic from Google, nearly stopped. Requests for information went down and nearly stopped. After March 19, for almost a week, there were NO requests for information which was down from an average of 35 weekly for the previous month. The customer realized something was up and emailed me in a panic when his site could no longer be found on google. It had been coming up in the top 5 for 18 keywords. Now it was not in the top 3 pages!

I checked, and the site was still indexed in google, just not ranking. I suggested adding content. Which was something I had been suggesting from the start.

I used WordTracker to find keyword phrases to target, The titles of the pages are the keyword phrases and the pages are all written with the keyword phrase creatively used so it reads well, but is keyword rich.

I have increased the amount of written pages and content from 7 to 23(not published yet). Now I am looking for a way to arrange the pages so that the site is easy to navigate for users, but also optimized for search engines.

I came up with this Javascript menu, the customer loves it. Now I'm not sure if the links in it can be followed by spiders. It is set up as a demo, dummy page only here:
http://www.dewebsign.com/usedslate/about.html

If the Javascript menu links cannot be followed by spiders, any suggestions another form of navigation so the site will get indexed properly?

I'm not even sure what other questions to ask. Any suggestions are welcome.

Heather
Dewebsign.com


[/url]

[wbstein]

I have a site that has a simliar structure: www.homerundan.com

What I did was placed a site map on the bottom of each page.
This way the spider can reach each page with ease, and can completely ignore the javascript menu I added.

[dewebsign]

I have a site that has a simliar structure: www.homerundan.com
What I did was placed a site map on the bottom of each page.

With all the links at the bottom of each page, doesn't this fully mesh your site and therefore negate the usefulness of the javascript menu?

Wouldn't it be better to add a link to a page with the site map on it?

I have been contemplating adding Text links to the Main Categories and the home page and a site map at the bottom of each page. Then adding anchor text in the body / content of the pages.

Is this a good solution?

Heather


dewebsign.com

[hatchet]

You're not looking in the right spot to increase traffic, If you want traffic - get links from other sites. Right now you only have 2 backlinks. Either do as lavashark suggested with a set of links at the bottom of the page just for the spiders and keep the javascript menu or get rid of the javascript. On page elements will not get you traffic. Links links links.

[dewebsign]

As of 4/12/04,

I had 11 backlinks from google. I took a screenshot and saved it as a jpg. I had 11 back links. I just checked when you said I had 2. And you're right.

AAgh!

[dewebsign]

I found an article that answers my questions

Search Engine Optimization Case Study
How to have your cake and eat it… Or, how to have both a cool DHTML menu and high rankings with the search engines

http://www.milonic.com/casestudy.php

[dewebsign]

Also, on the homepage of this site:
http://www.milonic.com/

"You may also want to see how Milonic deal with this problem. If you view the HTML source code of this page you will see a tag. This is an invaluable tag for allowing search engines to crawl our website. It's also great as an alternative menu system for the rare user who prefers to have JavaScript switched off. As you can imagine, if a user visits our website without having JavaScript enabled, they will not be able to see the menu. This technique gives you the best of both worlds. See for yourself, temporarily switch JavaScript off in your web browser and refresh the home page at Milonic. You should see a text based menu appear, this is the fall back menu system that search engines see.

» Thursday 1st May 2003"