You gave me so much information in response to my question above, I thought I should stop back and mention to everyone how appreciative I am of the time you took to look at my site and make those great suggestions. There is so much I do not understand and it is quite a learning process but thanks to you, I understand a little bit more I know you took a great deal of time to

While looking around your site, once again, I noted you have a tutorial about Wordpress, which is what we are using to start our blog. Somehow it became corrupted and we had to have our “tech person” redo the site. I am unsure as to whether it will not happen again but hopefully not. In any event, it just so happened I was looking for a tutorial for Wordpress – so what do you know? I am thinking you are my new “one stop shop” for all the website info I need!! Thanks for EVERYTHING Mark. You really went over and above anything I ever expected in a response.

Best Regards,
Gay R.

Looks like your site is well indexed by Google. Maybe you were putting a space between the “site:” and the “furandflora.com”.

Click here to see the same (correct) result:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afurandflora.com

Taking a quick look at your site, the first thing I would suggest is that you beef up textual descriptions of each subset and subsubset of products you sell. Right now you have a lot of products on your pages, but you need to make it even easier for search engines and human visitors to understand what they are looking at. When you divide your products into smaller subsets and include descriptive text with title and h1 tags, you narrow the focus of each page so that you can target more specific keywords.

The title tag is not visible on the page, but if you look at the code of the page using your browser’s View > View Source menu, you’ll find the page title between title and /title near the top of the page.

h1 tags are in use on your site right now. If you View Source code on this page http://www.furandflora.com/furchildren.html , for example, you’ll find that the third DOG PRODUCTS is an h1. (And you can see that the first DOG PRODUCTS is between title tags, so that’s what displays in the top of your browser.)

It’s important to use the keyword you want to target in the title and h1 tag as well as in the description on the page. For example, on this page:
http://www.furandflora.com/carrington-raised-dog-diner–three-quart-for-larger-dogs.html
you have “raised dog diner” in the title and the h1. This may be the keyword you want to target. (Choosing the right keyword for a page is a topic for another – as yet unwritten – post.) If so, you need to include “raised dog diner” – that exact phrase – in the product description on the page. You can make the first appearance bold, as well. This does not have to be artificial. You aren’t trying to “trick” search engines. You just need to make sure that engines know what the page is about, and including your keyword in the body of the page one or two times – along with title and h1 – is the way to do it.

Another good way to boost search ranking is to start a blog, either as part of your site or as another associated site on wordpress.com or blogger.com or some other service – or on your own host. There you can write special feature posts about a particular product – how your customers use their products, include photos of customers’ pets to generate more interest in your site, add tips about care and cleaning of the products, things like this – and be sure to point to specific pages on your site with descriptive text links.

Search engines like fresh site content, and a blog is the best way to do that. By pointing to pages on your eCommerce site using descriptive text links, you ensure that when search engine spiders crawl your blog, they will follow those links to the eCommerce pages and they will have a better idea of what those pages are about based on what they find in the blog.

Here’s another search optimization resource you may find useful:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

I don’t understand this. First I am totally technically challenged. I have had a “working” website for over one year and do not get much traffic at all. I am working on keywords and trying to find links. But when I do as you suggested to find out how many pages in my site are actually indexed by Google, I come up with “page under construction”. What the heck is THAT about?

Any suggestions? Thanks so much for any ideas!

The question is, Why does Google only show you a fraction of the links that Yahoo does? Part of the answer is that Yahoo shows you links that are flagged as rel=’external nofollow’ These are links that Google ignores when it assigns Page Rank.