Somebody check website please?

[juniperburl]

Hello,

I already asked for that favour in the welcome center, but so far nobody answered to that. I reorganized my website (www.ginkgobiloba.biz) for it was a bit messy with the two languages mixed up in one and the same site. I hope it is better now. As no before/after comparison is possible, please just let me know if you find through it easily (or at least to an acceptable grade) and if the navigation order is somewhat logical. I seem to have lost objectivity after having spent many hours on that subject...
Thanks in advance,

Dino

[Landseer]

Hello,

I already asked for that favour in the welcome center, but so far nobody answered to that. I reorganized my website Hi, sorry, I don't do web site "checks" for people and I suspect most people won't either, but I will say just as an FYI that having a .BIZ domain name already has two strikes against it-

1) It's so new you likely will not get in search engines and much traffic, and when people type in an URL the default is .COM so if someone forgets the url and thinks of the name and tries www.blabla they will first try .COM not .BIZ, some browsers also default to .com if you don't type it in.

2) .BIZ as a domain extension to me sounds like spam and scam city, but it's been around I guess a couple of years, I just have never seen ANY websites with that extension at all till now- that is why registrars were/are giving away special deals on .BIZ

Welcome to the forum.

[fused]

You have a very good site/sight, simple to understand & explore, even with the abundance of images it loads quickly and the quality of your work is a nice reward for navagating the links.

I also appreciate the extra effort to make it bi-lingual to speak to an extended audience,
danke Dino.

[juniperburl]

Well, thx a lot Fused. I appreciate that. Especially for you having gone through it twice now!

@Landseer
I just wanted to know if the navigation is all right. Don't know what seems the problem. In the welcome center over 271 people read that thread and that's almost exactly the number my counter has added since that thread was opened. So if only a few went through the whole site and even less left a note I would have been glad...
Re search engines : Try eg. "sculptures" + "juniper" on google, or any other combination of keywords in my HP. I'm almost always in the top ten. Yahoo as well. Nobody types in www.blablabla.COM and then hopes to find some nice wooden sculptures. You sure have to search for me, but if you DO, you find me! I hardly ever typed in an url in 8 years internet experience. Who does? Except maybe short famous ones you know anyway...like google.com!

And yes, it's cheap! I'm a student. Can't afford too much. So it's even more important for me to know if the site works out fine. As I said, I spent days and hours on it and wanted to know if it was worth the effort. Especially with the two languages! But thx for the twelve lines you spent :)

Dino

[Landseer]

I hardly ever typed in an url in 8 years internet experience. Who does? Except maybe short famous ones you know anyway...like google.com!I can think of many who do it, and quite a lot of businesses buy multiple domain names of business name variations to catch people typing in brand names of products like tide.com for tide detergent, clorox.com for clorox bleach etc.

looking for information on Ford cars, one would try ford.com as a first thought, not something like ford_automobiles_trucks_cars.org or ford.biz ford.org ford.net
maybe you want something on wood working, woodworking.com comes to mind first. I don't always use google for stuff like that- radio station and tv statio call letters- ABC or CBS, NBC or WNYC one would naturally try abc.com cbs.com nbc.com or wnyc.com first as those would be the most obvious domain names those stations would use not something like abc_news_and_weather.biz

Looking for sculpture? who wouldn't try something obvious like sculpture.com first? bronze? there's bronze.com, need hardwood lumber? you'd try hardwoods.com

[juniperburl]

I agree with the ford-thingi. But the rest? Buy a sculpture or look for it on sculpture.com? It HAS to be commercial then. And who wants to buy arts there? As I'm not willing to sell at all atm anyway I wouldn't sell to anyone who wants to buy there! I don't know if sculpture.com exists or not but I think you get my point...

Maybe we have completely different internet habits in Europe. Everyody here goes over google or any other big search engine. Even if I wanted to know sth about a Ford, why go to Ford.com? The truth is never where they sell it or even produce it, is it? And looking for a certain preference in sculptures? If ever customers go searching over the www at all, they would know what to look for. They want arts, not tools or materials. I think the key to success is back linking, not domain names!
How is one supposed to find lostnewyorkcity (interesting site btw)? AND I have already been offered 700 EUR to give away my ginkgobiloba.biz. Must be a reason for that :)

Not really agreed,

Dino

[Landseer]

I agree with the ford-thingi. But the rest? Buy a sculpture or look for it on sculpture.com? It HAS to be commercial then. And who wants to buy arts there? As I'm not willing to sell at all atm anyway I wouldn't sell to anyone who wants to buy there! I don't know if sculpture.com exists or not but I think you get my point...

Maybe we have completely different internet habits in Europe. Everyody here goes over google or any other big search engine. Even if I wanted to know sth about a Ford, why go to Ford.com? The truth is never where they sell it or even produce it, is it? And looking for a certain preference in sculptures? If ever customers go searching over the www at all, they would know what to look for. They want arts, not tools or materials. I think the key to success is back linking, not domain names!
How is one supposed to find lostnewyorkcity (interesting site btw)? AND I have already been offered 700 EUR to give away my ginkgobiloba.biz. Must be a reason for that :)
Not really agreed,
DinoGoogle didn't exist a few years ago as it does now, things have changed since, but there have been lawsuits in court about how Google ranks web sites apparantly favoring some over others, it's also been said in many places that the average user of search engines rarely goes past about page 3 in the search results. That makes sense when you search for something generic like "Wood sculpture" or "Wood carving" and you are looking at

"Displaying items 1-200 of 1,389,369 items"

A lot of porn sites also come up up mixed in there, and that's a lot to scroll through past 3 pages worth.

I only know what I read articles about search engines or Google, or information about getting your web site meta tags and content so it WILL be indexed by search engines- as I remember it described research and trends (probably by google) showing that when people are looking for BRANDS they will normally try the brand name and .COM because .com is the oldest and most common domain extension, net and .org were always secondary. In recent years it's become real common to hear urls given out over the radio, tv, in print ads and on products, this was less common a decade ago when you HAD to type out the full http://www. and trying to get all that out on the air, over the telephone or remember it was a chore.

So on the radio you hear an ad for Ford cars, they will tell you to go to "ford dot com" for National Public radio they may say to visit them on the web at "NPR.ORG" but if you accidentally type .COM they own that too and it redirects to .org I've done the same with my site, I own .org .net .info and .com
Another issue is look-alikes, you will find many sneaky sites now that show snapshot content in google that you are looking for, but when you click on the url you go to a page or redirected to a totalyl different url that is nothing more than another search page and it's run by spammers getting money on ads for every click-though, or the same scenario above when you are looking for products and you THINK you are going to a commercial sales page according to the snapshot in Google- when in fact it's going to a search page for EBAY that does nothing more than list those items being sold on Ebay though I think NOW maybe due to complaints google adds "EBAY" in front of the titles, they didn't before and it was very misleading when searching for information to be directed instead to an Ebay sales page.

[Landseer]

http://www.100best.com/articles43.html


Which Domain Extension?

The first thing to consider when choosing a domain name is what domain extension (or top level domain, TLD) you would like to use.

The extension is important because it lets viewers know generally what type of site you have. For example .com= commerce, .org= non proft organization, .biz= business, etc.

.com
Although there are increasingly more options for extensions, .com still remains the best first choice for most domain names. When a customer looks up a company web site they will generally try the name of the company followed by a .com first. If your site doesn't come up you may be passing along traffic to your competitors. True many .com names have been used up already so you may have to try another extension, but with a little creativity you may find the perfect .com that is still free.

If you are unable to secure a .com your next best alternatives are to stick with .biz, .net, and .info. These are what viewers will generally try next as a default. Other domain naming options for einclude using country code top level domains, such as: .us, .ws, or .tv.

[anatomist1]

I have to agree partially with Landseer, in that '.biz' sounds a little flaky. I doubt that it would make much difference in the way that he says though, in that most people use search engines, and ranking/keyword issues there will be more important.

The name itself gives me more pause. When I hear 'ginko biloba', I think about dietary supplement scams. I had to look it up to see that it had anything to do with juniper trees, and it seems to me like you would really have an uphill battle to get people to associate that techical name with sculptures, as opposed to diet or geriatric pills... at least in the states. A lot of supplement scammers have spent a lot of advertising dollars already, getting people to associate it with bodybuilding and 'alternative health care'. Although the name wouldn't prevent me from finding the site, seeing that while I was looking at it and thinking about buying something would definitely cause me to think twice about buying something. It sounds like a site where I would expect to be buying giant bottles of pills with pictures of steroid-pumped freaks glued on.

[Landseer]

I have to agree partially with Landseer, in that '.biz' sounds a little flaky.

The name itself gives me more pause. When I hear 'ginko biloba', I think about dietary supplement scams. I had to look it up to see that it had anything to do with juniper trees,

It sounds like a site where I would expect to be buying giant bottles of pills with pictures of steroid-pumped freaks glued on.That was my first thought and what I was saying in my first post, to me ginko biloba sounded like some diet supplement and then with the .biz frankly I thought the post "check my web site please" was just another spammer who registered here to spam us with a commercial web site selling pills, potions or hooking people's computers up with scripts, spyware, web beacons etc. so I didn't even look.

As was said:

"Try eg. "sculptures" + "juniper" on google, Im always in the top ten..."

How many people type "juniper" specifically as a search term when looking for SCULPTURE? that may be exactly why you come up so high- because of an obscure search term that your site would match well. This would be my last choice, I would search for something like; "sculpture +wood" or "Wood carving +sculpture"

What you need to do to get a good overall picture is check the LINKS to your site, all these search engines spider from site to site by links, the more other sites that link to yours the better, try this search term in google for any web site;

link:www.ginkgobiloba.biz (http://www.ginkgobiloba.biz)

Zero results come up

Now try changing that to sculpture.net you get this:

Results 1 - 100 of about 2,680 linking to www.sculpture.net (http://www.sculpture.net).

Same results come up for .org and .com as they are owned by and redirect to the same people, but .biz and .info come up zero

My own site:
Results 1 - 32 of about 137 linking to www.lostnewyorkcity.com (http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com).

I tried
link:www.ginkgobiloba.COM (http://www.ginkgobiloba.COM) NET and ORG and they all come up empty

If you try:

ginkgobiloba
You get:

Results 1 - 100 of about 30,700 for ginkgobiloba.
With many results like:

Information about the herb ginkgo biloba. ... An article covering the natural remedies for erectile dysfunction, including ginkgo biloba. ...
altmedicine.about.com/od/ginkgobiloba/ - 23k - Cached (http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:zQAQvvoMEZUJ:altmedicine.about.com/od/ginkgobiloba/+ginkgobiloba&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=13) - Similar pages (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=related:altmedicine.about.com/od/ginkgobiloba/)

Finally, if you try what most people might for a search term- sculpture +wood you get:

Results 1 - 100 of about 6,020,000 for sculptures (http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=dict&q=http://www.answers.com/sculptures%26r%3D67) +wood (http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=dict&q=http://www.answers.com/wood%26r%3D67).

The thing about search engines too is, the constantly change, site rankings today will change tomorrow as new sites come in, old ones go out or content changes, every I believe it's 3 months they say- they update their entire database and that can shuffle things up which means any site in the top ten now can wind up who knows where and vice-versa and that has been the subject of a number of lawsuits in fact.

I also have a Mcaffee script in my browser that red flags web sites- it tells you when a site links to bad sites, has scripts that can damage your computer, spyware, adware or has suspect downloads etc, your site comes up with a question mark and I looked at that and it says your site has not been checked yet, but every other site in the search cueue that came up had been, here's a screen cap below.

I don't know what else to add, I'm not slamming or insulting you or your site I'm trying to show you a few things. I've gone a few rounds with a chap once who insisted his site had some huge number of people linking to it, I forget the details but he claimed it was say 50,000 sites linking to his fairly new site and I said no way, mine has been up for 8 years and his is new, when I did the check in google I believe the actual number was 37 or something like that- the rest all turned out were NOT linking to his site at all.
137 come up for mine, but this includes many internal subpage to main page links, if you weed those out it's much less. Links that are good are those that people put up by hand on their web sites in the "resources" or "other sites I like" pages- the rest, including posts in message boards like this eventually fade out when posts expire, are moved, archived in a different folder etc

If you search google for:

demolished buildings +new york city
or
demolished buildings +1970
My site comes up #3

People are highly unlikely to ever search for demolished buildings +1970

They would more likely try the + new york city or just;
demolished buildings

It's #10 and #11

Another issue I see a lot of is people new to the net put up a web site usually on Geocities or some other free server, and then they announce a few days later that their site got 900 hits in just 2 days!!! they are confusing page views with "hits," typically when you check it out you find they have 50 thumbnail images up there, all kinds of .gif images, trailing stars curser script, sound, guestbook and a bunch of other stuff- and everytime all that stuff loads each object, file, image, sound file etc is a "hit", so every time someone looke dat the main page they were causing 50 "hits" but ONE page view, so then the 900 hits in 2 days was really only 19 visitors and some of those were the site author checking their own site and reloading the page...

[Landseer]

While we're on the topic of web sites, no doubt you will run into this too- people hotlinking your images. I was looking over my access logs and noticed one of my somewhat obscure antique prints seemed to have an unusual amount of interest, I noticed the referrer was a myspace.com blog, so I went to look and it was some dolt's blog with pictures of himself sporting purple hair on a skateboard, lot's of the "F" word, wierd photos and rock music titled something or other "death" blaring out. Amongst all that crap was my image scan of a mid-19th century sheep print the guy had simply linked to in order to display it in HIS blog.

Thing is, he never asked despite the notice on the page, secondly, every time one of his ghastly friends loads his profile page it calls up MY image from MY server and uses 100K of MY bandwidth traffic which isn't doing anything for me at all, the image had been called up a dozen times in a few hours alone in my log for the day.

So... I renamed the image and then put THIS one up in it's place and it now proudly displays on the chap's blog for all to see;

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b375/Randall2/1ce58c6c.jpg

[juniperburl]

Hello Landseer,
Wanted to answer earlier but was quite busy here...
Thanks for your information, you really brought up some interesting aspects. It's not all really new to me, but I actually did not go into them all that deeply.
For the search terms. Sure, you have to look for me with special search keys. But that's what I said. At least it appears. And as I'm still German I'm glad to see it works even better if you type in the German key words (organische Skulpturen). Adding juniper (or 'Wacholder') you can't miss me, somewhat like your demolished buildings newyork/1970. Let's say somebody has seen my work, doesn't know where to find me but knows a few details. He will find me, if he wants to...
And still, if somebody is looking for a special type of eg sculptures, he will use those special keywords and do an image search or websearch and see what comes up. I found some nice stuff on domain names nobody would ever type in in his wildest dreams! Especially people naming their site with their own names. And if you type in my name, I'm No1 even it is not in the domain name.
My site is up for about three months now and I haven't got many back links yet. This has to be improved, I know that. But not at any cost, I will take my time with that and chose well.
But all that wasn't my point in the first place. I use my side as a kind of a hobby or rather to display my hobby over the internet. It's more used as a visiting card. Especially when I have had an exhibition to give people the chance to look at the stuff again from at home.
For that reason I wanted to know if the site is good to navigate through and all that. I'm not in a hurry to make my site the most popular sculpture site in the www!
And so far I don't know of any people using my images. I agree with you that people have to ask for that favour but the difference is that somebody using a picture of one of my creations would be of no use for him, the sculpture is here in my flat and more pictures of it would just make it more popular. As long as the one mentions where the pic is from, of course!
I have a 40Gig transfer included in my 10EUR i pay every month and I'm not using 3% of it yet.
About the name ginkgobiloba. Well, that wasn't too lucky a choice that time. It is my favourite tree and I already acquired the domain name about a year ago, long before I was thinking I will make that website about my carvings. I just liked the name, It was available because .biz was quite new and it was cheap, so I took it. Wouldn't do that again but here I am now. At least it is a name of some wood and I think it's one that people can remember. Maybe I change that If I will relly keep up a website for much longer. Or maybe I just find me a nice log of ginkgo and make a sculpture so it makes at least a bit sense :)

What I didn't understand was that McAffee subject. Checking for dangerous scripts? I think I don't have any on my site and I'm also not linking to any. But if there is sth, let me know...
Btw, I already checked al the backlinking and search enginge entries with these tools: http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/online-tools.htm#lp

Is that what you meant? Checking my url there it says there's not much to find of my site which doesn't make wonder. As i said, my site is online for three months.

Anyway, thanks again for your efforts and information! And it wasn't my intention to spam the community with my link! But if it is no fun at all going through my site what's the use of it then? That's all I wanted to know and I thought the Community Help Center was the right place to ask for.

Greetings,
Dino