Six months old and only three hundred users, what's wrong?

[hoffmabc]

I opened up shop a little over six months ago and as of today we sit around 300 users. I'm a single founder of a web site called TheMovieTracker.com and although we've had steady increase in usage (very gradual but not downward) it hasn't really taken hold. I'm also aware that it's in a very competitive segment, but that doesn't keep a lot of site from doing much better that I've been doing. Any thoughts, words of encouragement, criticisms, trolling or otherwise for me to keep my spirits up?

[sirwitti]

the site itself looks good. but after clicking through the site i still got no real idea what the site is actually about. the only vague hint i get is "the best way to find new movies"

make it very clear what users can do on your site and what benefit they have using it. there´s that screenshot on the landing page but i don´t know what all that means.

working on that will help a lot i guess.

another thing is: when clicking on a movie there´s this read more button which simply links to wikipedia. as there´s no new window opened, everytime a user clicks on that link he propably won´t find/come back. so the first thing you can do is, to make those links open in a new window, or even better show that information inside your page.

if there´s something in the workflow most users will do, which requires them to leave your site (even for a short amount of time) you will lose many - even of your existing users.

hope that helps, martin

[noahc]

A better way to ask this questions would be:

"I've tried x,y,z and y worked the best. Here's why I think so.... I want to try a,b, and c. Which one do you think would work better"

What can you do for me that Netflix can't? All I want is to know what movie I should watch next based on my previous movies, I've watched.

[noodle]

improve your SEO. http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5940 is computationally fine, but you get less link juice than you would if it were something like http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5940/major-league-2

whats up with the discount movie tickets feature? it seems kind of neat but it also seems like a conflicting feature when you're offering analysis of movies that aren't or aren't primarily still in the box offices.

visiting your page, have the general idea of what the site's about, but i'd like to know more before i sign up for an account. your sale involves me doing a good bit of work in order to get any kind of result.

[dmel]

Doesn't netflix do this for you?

[_b8r0]

I'm certainly not an expert at SEO, I'm just someone with a passing interest. I'm not sure what you're trying to rank for, but I imagine that ranking for movie title and actor searches would probably be easier than ranking for specific search terms alone, but here's what I can see.

Your main page is quite big uncompressed, it took a while to load first time. You should consider caching your pages.

You have about 30 backlinks. I haven't looked at the pagerank for all of these but i imagine that you're probably going to have to get more.

Your title tag tells us what the site is, but put some keywords into it. Use Google's keyword checker to determine what you want to rank for (you want the right trade off of high search volumes and low competition).

Your keywords tag misspells blu ray. I don't know whether or not this is intentional. Having keywords like 'recommendations' isn't a good move, there's no way you're going to rank highly for recommendations in general, especially given your site content. I'd reconsider using that for things that you want to rank for.

Once you have your keywords you need to optimise the density across pages on your site. You're looking for between 2-5% keyword density per page. That doesn't mean you need every keyword 2-5% times on every page, just that you need to have a 2-5% keyword density across your site for one or more keywords per page.

You're not using the H1 or H2 tags effectively. Search Engines read the H1 tag to find out what your site is about.

Put alt tags containing your keywords into your image html. Each alt tag is like a free keyword advert.

Your blog is great for communicating news, but what about talking about movies? If you're looking to engage movie goers, perhaps you should do some features on popular films on your blog, then link to the pages on your site. You can then post (in a non-spam manner) to reddit's /r/movies, /r/classicmovies and to places like IMDB.

Speaking of yuor individual film pages, put 'the movie tracker' after the film title in your title tag. When you don't have movies, consider using other content sources such as rotten tomatoes, imdb or even wikipedia. If you can embed some more info on the more sparse pages it'll look less empty.

You should also consider restructuring your URLs. For example, your film URLs should have the name of the film in them. If you do this make sure to issue HTTP 301 permanent redirects to the new locations.

Consider adding Actor, Director and Producer pages so people can see what other work key people have done. One of the biggest bugbears I have with IMDB is pairings - finding out which actors have played in which films together is impossible.

I think you definitely need to get out there more. I'm big on films and hadn't heard of your site. Try engaging other film communities - there's over 53,000 subscribers to the movies subreddit - don't just post your site, give them a reason to go and keep going back.

Have you considered advertising on facebook or reddit? What about stumbleupon? Try with a small amount of cash, see what the results are like and test, test and test.

I hope this is helpful. If you've found this useful, have a read of http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op... and if my comment has been really helpful, I'd be extremely appreciative of a link to my side project with the anchor text "Share links online" pointing to http://www.minklinks.com/ in your bar at the bottom of your page template.

[hoffmabc]

Wow. Lot of feedback, really helpful! I will definitely try what I can and see how it goes. Thanks much.

[_b8r0]

Actually, do you have an email address? If you email me (address in profile) I have some ideas on how my side-project might be able to get you some extra visitors.