Google and the search engines change their search algorthims almost monthly. They modify them to stay ahead of the people who cheat the algorithms to get unjust high rankings. It is an endless cycle similar to the one that spam filter writers and spamers are in. The more significant recent change is paid searching such as Adwords. Those are the sponsored links on the top and right. If you click on one, the company who owns the link pays Google 5 cents.
I took a look at your site. One change I would suggest is getting rid of the flash introduction. In my default browser your website page is blank because I don?t like wasting my time on that stuff and so it is disabled. Your intro is about 500Kbytes which is way way too much. I have a high speed DSL connection and it still took 3 or 4 seconds to load. For someone with 56K dialup, it might take close to a minute. Look at one of the most successful websites in the history of the internet ?
www.google.com. It is about 16Kbytes. It is very small to be quick loading. If it was 500Kbytes, no one, absolutely no one, would have ever heard of Google.
After waiting that minute, what do they get? They get your phone number, address, and a few words about your shop and the artists in your Gallery. Not much more than they could get from the phone book. I was going to get on to you about not having an email address but double checked and found it. To get it I have to click the button which launches outlook express which is not my mail tool. One thing you could put on your website is a map to your place.
There are two critical factors which determine the amount of traffic to your site. One is the content of your site. Right now there is not much content on your site. For people who do not live in NC there is no useful content at all. The other is links from other quality and related sites to your site. You currently have a few such links showing up on altavista (in altavista search on ?link:
www.weframe.com? without the quotes). One of them shows up on goggle. You can see your website popularity across the search engines at
http://tools.marketleap.com. Just increasing traffic to your website will just cost you more money since you web host will charge you more money. For instance you could pay google a bunch of money for the search term ?picture frame? and you will get thousands of hits. Unfortunately 99.99% of them will not be anyone that would want to use your services since they do not live in NC. Before trying to get more traffic to your site you must ask yourself what kind of traffic do you want? Who do you want? Why do you want them to go there? What will you give them for going there?
It would be useful for your website to come up if they search on something like ?custom framing charlotte? however your current website will never come up in such a search because the word ?Charlotte? does not exist as text anywhere on your website which means the search engines will not see it. Although your website has the keyword {custom framing} the keyword {Charlotte} was not added to the list. And since none of the keywords show up as text in your website the search engines will practically ignore them. Now I say practically, which means your site will probably be towards the bottom of the list. How long is the list? 57,400. Now the list for {?custom framing charlotte?} is empty in Google so you would have a chance at showing up on that one if you do some work on your site. The artists you represent are not currently listed as keywords on your site.
You should try to get Charlotteartists.com to have a link to your site on the Judith Cutler page. Judith has the name or you gallery on her page but not a link. I did not check the others. You are helping them with your links to their sites. They should give links to your site which will send useful traffic to your site, and will increase your rankings in the search engines.
Hope this helps get you started.
Mark
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Mark Rogers
Frame Destination
www.framedestination.com
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