On the woes and ways

Okay, so, by now, you should know I run a few websites. But the one that's my bread and butter is Bearclaw Manufacturing.
http://www.bearclawmfg.com/
I make and sell fire performance equipment (big shocker, no?), and do so primarily through the website.

Well, back in April 2007, I installed the current version of the site. It's got a lot of cool things about it and, quite frankly a few things missing. Fortunately it's ope source, so there's a plethora of contributions to fix the issues I might have with it. Why a few of these are not in the basic install is completely beyond me. More on that later.

So, Over the last few months I've been looking over my earnings sheet and noticed a disturbing downward trend. Naturally, this bothered me a bit. I took a look at a wide variety of indicators and correctly foresaw the crash of the housing market and the current depression we are suffering.

Unfortunately, I've also noticed that my ONLY customers of late have been either returning customers or ones that I contacted directly. Add that with the convenient timing of the downturn compared to the installation of the new website and you get one big, embarrassing oversight. It seems my new website is not optimized for web searches.

Yup, generic title, no meta tags, and the information that I transferred over was pathetic. So, I looked on the contributions page and found a plethora of ways to help. Again, I don't know why a couple of these are installed standardly in the basic package. But, Okay.... we might just want a sales page that can't be found. *sigh*. So for a year and a half, my sales have been declining, mostly because google doesn't know what to do with my site.

It's all fixed now, and maybe a little better for the trouble. So, now we just wait for a few spiders to crawl the site and we should be done. Here's hoping. I hate being on page 36 of a google search for fire poi. *shudder*