I have a website a month old and 90% of my visitors are coming from my own state in Australia. I would like to attract visitors from all over the world. Can anyone tell me why my visitors are so local?
Thanks,
Rose
http://www.fabulousrecipes.net
Where my visitors are coming from (20 posts)
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marshall2000
Posted 1 year ago # -
Maybe it´s because the main audience you´ve attracted are your friends, family and you yourself? You know, the website feels when you enter it. Your visits also count.
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Posted 1 year ago #Thanks Loke. I was concerned it was something to do with search code or some other reason.
Regards,
Rose -
roostertail
Posted 1 year ago #I like the concept and colors.
However, I think your pages are way too long. I scrolled my mouse 100 times on the first page and I was only about a 30% of the way down to the bottom. Also, the text is a little too small. It's hard on the eyes.
On the sidebar you have recipes broken into categories, so what's the point of the first page? Seems to be an endless list of odd recipes with no organization. And if they are organized, it isn't obvious (to me anyway) because there are so many recipes.
As far as your traffic goes, not sure why it's only local. My site seems to get more international traffic than local (USA)...so go figure. As Loke mentioned, new sites do tend to get mostly family and friends initially. Are you using an SEO plugin? The site will get more traffic when search engines can find it.
Good Luck,
Nick
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Posted 1 year ago #Nick,
Thanks for the suggestion. I've cut the number of recent posts back, it's much better now. I don't know how to change the size of the text. I've had a look but I can't see anything obvious. I will keep looking, I agree it could be a bit bigger.
RM -
Pothi Kalimuthu
Posted 1 year ago #Hey Rose,
You may probably want to go social. I mean you may use Twitter, FB, etc to get connected with the rest of the world.
You are probably using a Cufon font. You may want to use some standard fonts to make the site look normal.
HTH.
Pothi
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Posted 1 year ago #Pothi,
Thanks for the comments. I am on facebook. I Have listed a lot of recipes on my wall. http://www.facebook.com/pages/fabulousrecipesnet/196734667009345It seems that the posts are getting some impressions but I don't know what else to expect.
The font looks ok to me because I have a big screen. You are right, it is a Cufon font. I haven't seen what it looks like on a smaller screen, like a laptop. I couldn't find anywhere in the theme preferences that would allow me to change it.
Regards,
Rose M -
Posted 1 year ago #You are right. I browsed your website on my Dell mini netbook. It looks okay on my primary PC.
Thanks,
Pothi -
Gabe Young
Posted 1 year ago #One thing you might want to do is just include excerpts on your home page. Folks typically only want to see headlines (or a few lines) so the intense scrolling doesn't have to happen to see all the recipes.
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daisy8
Posted 1 year ago #Some thoughts:
Try putting a date on your recipes and adding a bit of human chat - e.g. the dinner party recipe (12th March) doesn't say how many guests it will serve. And maybe suggest a wine which would go well with it. It contains quite a lot of fish in it, so you might like to say 'for those who are allergic to shellfish, then an alternative here can be....'
If you have this type of an introductory paragraph as a heading to each recipe, this provides keywords which help you to get traffic. Talking a bit about each recipe is also a way to help people see the recipe in terms of them finding it easy to use.
Take your pashka recipe as an example. There are 1900 global searches monthly for this type of recipe and google turns up 249000 results. If your introduction to the recipe includes the word pashka a few times (3?) you have a chance of coming up in their search. The first on google's first page had a chef's note attached to the recipe, giving a bit of background on pashka.
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BKKTravellers
Posted 1 year ago #Marshall, I am using the Twenty Ten theme and want to have a frame around some of the photo's I have posted, like you have done with some of your photos. Can you please tell me how you did that/
I am new to WordPress and can't figure out how to do it!
Thank you muchly
Nadia
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Posted 1 year ago #Daisy,
Thanks for the message. I appreciate your suggestions. You explain things very well. I understand what you are saying about the human chat. I will probably go back and do some editing soon. I am beginning to see how search engines work too.Regards,
Rose -
Posted 1 year ago #Nadia,
I am new to WordPress too. The photos on the front page have a frame but I didn't add the frames, they were on the photos when I found them. You could probably do that sort of thing with a drawing program.
Cheers,
Rose -
christophermp
Posted 1 year ago #G'day Marshall,
Just a random thought mate,
Do you have Google Webmaster Tools set up on ya site? I know there's a section in there where you can set a geographical target (eg. target users in Australia).
Site configuration > settings > Geographic target.
Hope it helps at all.
Cheers,
Chris.
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Posted 1 year ago #Thanks Chris. I haven't got around to Webmaster Tools yet but I will get there.
RM
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DomainStick
Posted 1 year ago #Hello,
Your image slider doesn't seem to be working. I used a long carousel slider on my site: DomainStick.com. You may consider using something like this. Maybe it's my browser, but the image on your site appears on the right-hand side.
I think you need colorful graphics running across the top of your site. I read a recent article, which I'm forgetting the title of, about the way many people now search by hovering over the little magnifying lens. If you are using a FireFox browser, you'll see how this option appears. When one hovers over the magnifying glass, you get a quick preview of the site. In the article, the author used the example of food related websites - he showed how someone searching in this area would see the food sites and be attracted to the thumbnail images with food pics. This made me rethink my site!
Ok, I just remembered the guy - he's following me on Twitter. His name is Alex Wayo and this is his site. The article where he mentions the food websites is really good. He mentions the actual name of the google search feature with the magnifying lens.
Keep up the good work!
Robert
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Posted 1 year ago #The image slider works fine for me (Firefox 4.0)
I think it's supposed to be on the right side...looks good offset IMHO.
I like how you incorporated the shorter pages. Simplifies the whole layout and makes navigation better.
Cheers!
Nick
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Posted 1 year ago #Robert,
Thanks for the comments. The slider seems ok to me. It is supposed to be on the right side, it balances the title and tabs etc that are on the left.Nick,
I think it is much improved. The site used to have a long list of recent recipes on the front if you remember, and I shortened that; since then I replaced the recent recipes with a static page that gives a little bit of information and some text for the search engines to look at.Something else that you or others might be able to help me with:
I've been having visitors who leave about 50 silly messages a day that are not serious messages; they are just bits of chat that look like they have been copied from somewhere and pasted on the site. None of it is offensive. I think the email addresses and the url's that come with the messages are not the real senders details. I think they have just hijacked those. The messages have to be approved before they appear on the site so I just delete them. Do other people have these visitors?Rose
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healthvotes
Posted 1 year ago #@marshall2000,
about the message/comments - I would suggest you to have the akismet plugin, it is by default present however it will require an API key which is free to get. also, another plugin bad-behaviour helps in keeping those messages away. If it still does not helps, then perhaps having that re-captcha plugin might be your final option.Now here are some suggestion for your blog.
1) Why don't you select a more friendly permalinks structure. Your current links are based on default permalinks structure. Having friendly links improves your search engine traffic.
2) I see that you have a facebook fan page with 0 fans. Perhaps you should have the fan widget in your sidebar, that is a great way to get some facebook fans for your fan page. Also on that note, perhaps you should get a twitter id too and look for some followers.
3) In your original post you asked, why you are not getting global audience. I guess a bit of SEO can help you with that. Get an seo plugin to start with. Also, are you writing recipe's that target your local place, if so, try writing recipes which attracts others as well.
4) I suggest you to have your recent posts appear on the homepage, it will help your posts to rank better on the search engines and that way you will get more traffic.
Overall, it is a nice theme, good logo as well. I see that you got the facebook like button on the posts as well, perhaps you can consider putting a few more buttons there, like twitter/delicious etc. Best of luck with your blog,
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Posted 1 year ago #healthvotes,
Many thanks for your message and the interest that you show.I am very new with wordpress but I changed a discussion setting so now visitors have to be logged in to post. That stopped the bad messages. I'm not sure if I need discussions anyway. I suppose it might create some interest when the site gets busier.
There are 3 other permalink settings I could use. Day and name; month and name; numeric. These others are better for search engine traffic?
Since my first post I am getting more traffic now from USA than from Australia. Loke pointed out it was probably because of family and friends and I think that was correct. Now they have all lost interest. :-)
I originally had recent recipes listed on the home page. Someone told me it was better to have a static page with text using words that were relevant to the site; like recipe, bread, cakes, pudding etc. so I wrote the text that is there now. How will it help with ranking to have recent recipes there.
I am still working on social networking. As simple as it probably is I find it is tricky.
Thank again for your help and your comments.
RM
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