diogenese19348 posted at 1:47PM Sun, 19 August 2018 - #4335023

I'm in my 60's, by younger I didn't mean 20 year olds I should have been a bit more specific. Anyway the site I am working with is www.daggerbay.com. If you have the time, I would love to hear suggestions about how we can improve it. You will need to make an account to get to see everything, but the site is free. We aren't there to make money, we are there to learn and socialize. We have bling you can buy to award pictures or comments you like, the proceeds for that are enough to pay server costs and it is purely voluntary. As I was saying though, contest sites in general are dying, which is why we are trying to branch out.

I thought you meant young people, fair enough, I guess you just meant new people? :D

I took a look at you site and I think it looks good as a first impression, I didn't register because I don't think that is necessary as your first impression with the site is as an unregistered person. Once people have decided to register its usually easier to keep them as they have already gone through the trouble of signing up in the first place so something have caught there interest. Where it would be relevant to look "deeper" into the content in such regard is if you can see you are loosing registered members or if the number of visits to the site is declining. So for instant if you can see from the statistic (Google analytics or something similar) that on average a member visit the site 2-3 times a week over a given period of lets say 3 month and comparing that to a 3 month period later on and you can see that the average number of visit times have fallen to maybe 1-2 times every two week or something. Then it would be interesting to take a look at the deeper content of site.

First of all, what you are facing have nothing to do with you being a contest site and whether they are popular or not, I think, But obviously you are never going to get as many visits or members as Youtube etc. As artists sites are for a very specific group of people, like people into gardening stuff won't really draw the attention from the majority of people, but there is still quite a few people interested in all the topics that you have on the site, at least more than enough to make good competitions. And at least from what I can see there ain't really a huge amount of sites doing things like this, so that is good news for you.

The issue you are facing is pretty much the same as any other site, which is visibility and is a never ending battle for any website and is how to marketing yourself, When you speak of online marketing you are primarily talking about what is known as SEM (Search engine marketing) The most important one at least in my opinion, is what is known as SEO (Search engine optimization) and is basically how to get your site found and placed good in a search engine search result. Being the first search result to pop up in a Google search is going to get maybe 100% more visits (Just using a fictive number) than the last result on that page for instant, as you flip through each search page, it rapidly goes down as result starts to be less relevant and knowing from how people use search results, if you are on page 3-4 you are practical invisible to that search term.

The second most common way is to pay for it, which is through Google Adwords, which is how Google makes all their money, people pay to be found :D

Obviously the tricky part is SEO and is also the most difficult, because it doesn't only involve your own site and how it is designed, but also how other sites refer to you. So imagine that a lot of artistic sites had links to your site, then that would boost your importance for a lot of terms relevant to artists, such as paintings, drawings, art etc.

Secondly search engines scan all websites content trying to figure out what they are about so they can categorize them, if you have analytics, you can probably see somewhere that you were visited by a "bot" or "spider" as they are called. So they go through all the code of your website (where they are allowed) and find keywords, both from written stuff, image descriptions and so forth and then it tries to figure out what its about and how relevant it is to those words. This is a lot more complicated than I make it sound here as Google is not really interested in telling how exactly they are doing this and how they weight each thing. Which is done so people can't exploit it. Some might remember back in the days where you had those websites known as link farms, which were basically just websites which contained a lot of links and people could pay to get their link there and it would improve their relevance. You don't really see these sites anymore, as its would not really give people the stuff they were after, so Google as far as I know, changed how it worked and quickly these link farms (Which were a pain in the ass :D) died off.

But in your case, you can test this both manually and there are some tools that can help you track down keywords for your site, its a good way to get a "virtual" view of how your site is actually viewed by the search engines.

Doing it manually you can make a list of keywords or terms that you think is the most relevant or important ones for your site, lets say "Artistic competition site" were what you would consider being the absolute best description for your site, so you type that into Google and press search, if everything goes well, you would be on the first page, most likely not on the top, but even being on the first page would be a very good start. Now I tried doing that search and your site is not there, which is not surprising. So to make a quick comparison you could type "Daggerbay or Dagger bay" in Google and you would pop up as the first result (Because your url is "Daggerbay.com", which makes sense. However its becomes very clear why that is not very useful, because unless people search a lot for that, they wont find you. Being the first result on a term like "Art" is worth a whole lot more than a very specific name. And that is pretty much why SEO is really difficult and not something to ignore, you want to be visible you have to really spend time and energy on optimizing for this.

The online tools available that you can use, can give you a list of keywords and how relevant they are on your site, its a good way to get a quick overview.

So after all this introduction :D

If we look at the front page of your site:

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Dagger Bay is a collection of online areas where the worlds best artists compete daily in creative competitions. We run creative competitions of all types, including Effects (otherwise known as photoshop or photochop), Photography, Illustration, Writing and 3-D. Our purpose first and foremost is to have fun but new members are encouraged to become familiar with our site's FAQs before wading in. If you have questions beyond this, feel free to send a PM to one of the Quartermasters (moderators), or post your question to an appropriate thread in the forums.

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This is roughly all the visible text and in general there is not a lot of text on the site, which might be good for us as humans as we might not care to read so much, but its not really good for the "Bots" because they will have a hard time finding important terms. So they might not really know what the site is about, even if you use words like Photography a few times, to the bot this site could just as well be about moderators and how to moderate a website for instance as that word is also there. That is why getting other art sites to link to you is important, because Google will take that into account, so another site with a high placement on the word "Art" will affect your rating as well on that word, especially if your site is about art as well.

So what you could do, would be to add some text maybe explaining the background or history of photography where its relevant, im not talking about simply spamming the site with random non sense. But you know that people that might be interested in your site, might also have an interest in some history behind it, tutorials etc. Also your images could probably also be optimized, making sure that keywords are added to the link description,

To show you what I mean, I took an image from your site and compared it to Shutterstock:

So the top one is yours and the last one is Stutterstock obviously. If you look at line starting with Data-pic in your link, this is the name of the image, so its called so random stuff like A7aea.... etc. Which tells nothing about the image, meaning the "Bots" and humans will just see this as non sense, where as Stutterstock have added there words to the image and you can basically from the description guess what the image is about.

Since your site have a lot of images, it would make sense to do something similar, so they help promo it.

To end this already very long post :D

SEO is a long and constant process and simply changing and adding stuff like tutorials, some history or whatever, will not instantly give you better results, it takes time but eventually it will pay off, you just have to keep it in the back of your head whenever you do something with the website and how you can optimize whatever content you add to it. If you want faster results, you have to do it manually, like making collaborations with other sites, making sure that for instant when you are on Renderosity that you have a link in you profile linking to your site (Look at ambientshade, like that), which would be no problem as you are not competing with them. But not because it gives you "SEO" points, because that is most likely blocked on Renderosity, but because there might be people here that think it could be fun to check you out. And you do that on other forums where you are active. Its not going to bring a 1000 new people, but everything helps.

Also I haven't worked with SEO for a long time, so keep in mind that some of the stuff I might have written is not relevant today, Search engines constantly changes to how important varies things are, etc. But in general I think what I wrote here is a good basic way of looking at it.