Ok...

First impression... your page has a great layout and a decent amount of content. You are using keyword phrases throughout the page, and you DO have categories! Yes! Love to see that.

The great news is that Google has already indexed you... however... I have some observations and a question for you.

First, the question... is there a reason you titled the page "Dunkin Donuts Card" instead of "Dunkin Donuts Gift Card"? This is your gift card page, right?

I ask for a couple of reasons... first you are on the list I saw as the person who would do the Dunkin Donuts Gift Card. Second, when I went to the Dunkin Donuts Coupons page to see who had it and who they were linking to, I found the page manager has already added a link to you, but she is linking to Dunkin Donuts Gift Card instead of "Dunkin Donuts Card". Even if the card is not *called* a gift card in their everyday business, it is their gift card.

You can gain some additional mileage out of adding that. If it were me, I'd use both terms in the page. Currently the gift card phrase is redirecting to the page you have. I'd ask that that be reversed. Call it gift card and redirect card to it. At the very least you need to have that phrase prominent in at least 2 or 3 places on the page. Part of the reason I say that is that Mahalo is currently adding a lot of gift cards... I expect we will become an authority site for them just as we have coupons. Position your page now to become part of that and you will have one of the more aged pages when it becomes a reality.

Next... you don't mention the card at all in the guide note. The Guide Note is also used as the description of the page in Search Engines... so everything there is important. The first sentence can especially be the difference in someone clicking on your page in the SERP's or not. This is something that even I don't utilize like I should, and I know about it! It's a great guide note as far as information on the company, but I'd specifically mention the card, then put a sentence like "Links to the Dunkin Donuts Gift Card can be found throughout this page." at the end as a separate paragraph. I put something to that effect on every single coupon and gift card page I do.

Tell them what you have for them. Tell them they can find it on the page... then they will go looking for it instead of leaving the page because they think it just describes it instead of giving them what they are looking for. And the links they find are often in the ads... not always, because we have great links too, but the ads catch their eye and they will often click those.

Next... and this is easy to do, but you have your related pages misspelled... you need to fix those because it shows the search engines that you link to related pages and want to give the user the best experience. Right now they don't go to the proper pages.

Then... go to some of the related pages and ask for a link back from that page manager. No one currently manages the Dunkin Donuts main page right now... but staff could do it.

****Brief Interlude:
And, not to create a stampede, but I have found when a coupon page does well, like Dunkin Donuts Coupons is doing (not pouring money in, but making more than a lot of them do) the main company page can also do well. So, someone should go click "Claim" then send me a direct question on how to optimize that page to help it pick up traffic the coupon page misses. =) No page can get all the traffic out there.
End Interlude****

And for the page having just been created on 10/29, you are not doing bad. You have already been indexed... you need to concentrate now on improving the page and making consistent changes. Don't change everything at once. A few at a time. =)

So... thoughts?

P.S. In the blog section on your site there is mention of a sweepstakes giving away a $100 Dunkin Donuts Gift Card. I'd click that link and check it out if it was me, and then I'd probably add a text section that said something like:
"Dunkin Donuts Gift Card Sweepstakes" or
"Free $100 Dunkin Donuts Gift Card"
or something to that effect. Then I'd outline what the sweepstakes is then include the link as a reference.

It *ALWAYS* pays to check out what information comes up automatically on the page. =)

Ok great.

The issue with the name I initially created the page with the name Dunkin Donuts Gift Card and then changed it to Dunkin Donuts Card leaving the previous title as a redirect. I think that will be okay?

Claimed the Dunkin Donuts page just now.

And the misspellings ..oops I will take a look and get right on it.

I just took a quick look and fixed some things .. wadda you think?

Sweet I will implement these things today and will check back with this thread later tonight.

I have to go run an errand ad will be back soon.

First sentence nice!

You might want to break up your policies section into more than one paragraph to read easier.

And as far as the page title/redirect, that is up to you and staff, but I do think you would get more mileage out of it the other way.

You could lose out on the whole gift card authority we are trying to build for Mahalo.

I just make suggestions, though. =)

One thought on your title...I'm not sure why you changed it, but here are my thoughts...
#Those of us who did the initial gift card pages put a fair amount of thought into how best to title the page and determined that XXX Gift card would give us the most SEO bang for our buck, so all the pages were built as XXX Gift card for consistency.
#Using Dunkin Donuts Gift Card rather than Dunkin Donuts card will make it easier to rank for both terms. Dunkin Donuts Card, on the other hand, will probably not rank as easily for Dunkin Donuts Gift Card
#Redirects do nothing for SEO-- they just keep someone else on Mahalo from building an unnecessary page that duplicates content, so having "Dunkin Donuts Gift card" as a redirect doesn't mean that Google will send those searches to your page.
#We have several hundred pages that all have XXX Gift card in the title, with similarly formatted guide notes. This helps us establish a portfolio of pages on a topic, which may help increase their authority-- and as a result increase their rank. Retitling the Dunkin Donuts page means that it is not as likely to be associated with those pages, and be seen as a Gift Card page--if we get to the point where Google sees us as an authoritative site for Gift Cards.

These are great insights but several of suggestions involve getting related pages. What about us lesser belts who can't just claim a page on a whim? We need to ration them for a hot page that might come along as from previous answers in past few months the page claimed counter doesn't credit us for the pages abandoned? Will just the keyword term changes be sufficient? Also these are high traffic pages which are difficult to claim (even if I had a spare page to manage). Do these strategies work on low volume (topics of specialized interest) pages as well?

Who on Mahalo staff should be contacted to add one of our related pages to unclaimed pages? It would seem that there should be some kind of automated request mechanism (problem ticket system) for these kind of requests staff can batch the requests as staff seem to be very busy. A form that says something like link this page to these pages.

@ssmacd how can I change it back? Each time I have tried it says "A page like this already exists" and won't let me change it back.

I changed it initially because the term "Dunkin Donuts Card" is how the company itself describes the card.

@k2k,

All new pages are assigned. You just request it by typing in the Page title you want in the search bar on the main page of Mahalo. One of three things is going to result from you doing that.

1. You will see that someone already has the page
2. You will see that the page exists but has no manager
3. You will see that the page does not yet exist.

Now those three are not unusual, and you might be wondering why I'm even telling you that... but the system has recently changed.

If you get situation #2, you click the link to claim it like you did before, but now it goes to staff and they look at how you are doing on your existing pages and assign it to you if they think you will be a great manager for it.

If you get situation #3, you will now see a blue button on the right side of the page that allows you to request to build the page. Clicking that brings up a further box for you to tell them how much you think the page is worth in M$. Most topic pages are probably worth M$2 - M$5 to them... depends on the page. How To's are M$4 - M$10, again depending on the page. They can also change the amount if they decide to assign the task to you. Either way you will get an email assigning it as a task or telling you it was not approved.

The page limits no longer really apply under the current system. =)

@buddawiggi You'll need to have the redirect removed in order to change the title back. Email contact@mahalo.com and ask them to remove the redirect and change the title back for you, if you can't remove it yourself.

If you look at the Tim Hortons Gift Card page, you'll see how I handled the fact that the card is called a "Tim Card" officially.

I hope this helps!

Thank you @ssmacd ! I will email them today. I sent you a DM about this. I didn't know if you would see this today.

Big help.. thank you.

I'm back @smartweb and would like to to have a look again.

I have corrected the page name and the proper redirects have been included.

I have corrected the spelling errors in the related pages section

I have split the policies and procedures section into 2. much better I think.

I am torn on whether to add the text section about the 100 dollar sweepstakes. The contest ends in 14 days. Should I write the section anyway?

~edit Just added it anyway

@buddawiggi

hey buddi, to get you some more visitors I suggest submitting your site to 2 places.. Stumbleupon.com and Digg.com after you submit there check your rank in google for Dunkin Donuts Card. Chances are the page is not ranked very well given your visitors.. After a week check it after doing the submissions you should receive a little increase.. if not i would consider dropping the page as it might not be to viral of a topic.

Thanks, Mike !

Good call @romeo0830 I have done that already with Stumble and Digg on the 30th of October the day after I made the page, once I though it was okay to go out. <~~now crossing fingers

these gift card pages will probably not be viral. however, the gift giving season is starting and i expect they will do well. i don't advise dropping them.

@buddawiggi

No Problem buddi it is my pleasure, Im glad I could help..

Ps: One other option, open a ping.fm account and link all your social networking accounts there and you can post to all your social networking accounts through AIM or MSN it saves about 3 quaters of the time instead of doing them all 1 by 1.

Thanks, Mike !

Hi @cjd,

"how to get your Pages registered" by that you might mean indexed and you might mean coming up in the search results for a particular term.

They are actually two different things. Getting indexed is easy. Just get a link form a page that is already in their index... the more active the page the better because Google considers active pages "spider food" and sends their bots back often to get the latest changes... and they will follow your link and index you, too.

Getting ranked for a particular term is more complex. You first have to know what keyword or combination of keywords (keyword phrase) is getting traffic and that you can possibly catch some of the traffic for.

Knowing which ones currently get traffic is a little involved for this comment... I want to explain the other part of it...

One easy way to determine if you might be able to easily rank for a phrase is to do a Google search for the term you want to target with quotes around it.

For instance, if you sell model airplanes on your website and have a page on model airplane kits you would search for "model airplane kits". That will tell you that there are approximately 24,800 competing pages for that term, whereas "model airplanes" has around 579,000. It would be easier to rank for the term with "kits" added to it... taking it further, "model airplane control line kits" only has 3 competing pages.

Tell me, do you think you could rank for that term? It is all about finding out where the competition is and going where there is less. while it is true that "model airplane kits" gets 245 searches a day and "model airplane control line kits" gets 23, it is possible to get more daily visitors for the less searched term because there are less people competing for those visitors. And those visitors are very targeted and are looking for exactly what you have on your page.

(This is one reason the coupon pages do so well here.)

SEO is all about choices. It is basically doing some research and making a conscious decision to focus traffic through a funnel into your page. Trying to rank for everything on one page will never work, and the more competition there is the harder it is to get a piece of the pie.

If you want to ask something more specific, I'd be glad to answer that as well. =)

as smartweb has mention it is very easy to get your pages indexed and start getting crawled by the search engines provided your site is not slow. All you do is submit the site to a place like digg or some other social networking site where the back link has great SEO juice and will get you indexed within a 4 hour time period. (Personal Experience)

If you want to directly submit your site to google or bing or yahoo... simple search submit your site in each of the following search engines and they will give you step by step instructions to do so..

For google and msn you will want to create a sitemap at sitemaps.org for yahoo you will want to create a urllist and submit it in siteexplorer for yahoo.

I hope this help you improve your SEO some.

Thanks, Mike !

Hey @smartweb and mike - thanks for your comments! Greatly appreciated and I'm gonna try digg as well. Hope my pages will get more views!

to clear your cache simply go to the tools then go to clear history(cache)

To get more visitors to your ashley madison page i would advice checking in google where ashley madison first ranks in google.. after you do some checking and you find it has a reasonable spot then start doing some marketing.. I did however check google and it looks like ashley madison mahalo page is not ranked within the first 20 pages of google which is not to good. I was not sure if you were refering to as if this ashleymadison.com is the site you want to get ranked for because you put it in mahalo tags but as far as getting more visitors to your mahalo pages or the website itself I would consider using adwords if it is worth it to you... Organically someone at your level of SEO is going to have a tough time getting ranked and getting traffic without paying someone for SEO. Im not saying it isnt doable but it is definitely tough (this is just based on the fact of the questions you asked, i could be wrong so excuse me if i am)

First thing to start getting traffic is find out what keyword is looked up most for your websites niche. Then try to rank for it considering that it is not to competitive... If it is something like dating online then your in deep water if you know what i mean.. Other then this I would definitely start a blog for the site to start and create a sitemap at sitemaps.org and submit it to google webmaster tools, yahoo(this would be a urllist which is very similar) and bing(new msn).

I hope some of these tips help and you start receiving some more traffic...

Thanks, Mike !

I am asking about the Mahalo page about Ashleymadison.com. The real website is for people who like to cheat while married.

Hi @pellrider,

I'm sorry I didn't get to this yesterday. And I've seen your direct question as well and will give some additional advice there, but let's take a quick look, shall we? =)

First... don't change the page name... it is accurate. The page is about the website.

Next. You need to add categories.

Then. Add a title to your video and a description.

Now... this one is tough... if MSN has actually banned acccess through their search results it cuts out a lot of possible keywords. You don't give a reference for that fact, so I can't see what you are talking about.

However, in a case like this I would look up what the actual website is targeting for keywords. You can do that in a couple of ways. First, view the source of their main page. That is usually an option from the view menu in your browser or by right clicking on the page. Second, use a service or software program that can tell you what keywords they bid on in AdWords... if they do use it for advertising. This site does... and it looks like they target things like "married but looking" and ''www philanderers com" and "married classifieds".

You can bet if they are paying for a keyword it is pulling traffic.

This can be a very controversial page... both for and against. Some will like the whole idea and some will be outraged. That can work for you in the social networks. Post a question that will use that controversy. People will come to weigh in if you let them know they can...

For this you can use the Discussion Board feature of your page... every page has one. Look under the Page Info box and you should see a link... here is the one for your page: Ashleymadison.com Discussion Board.

Start a conversation, get a few others here to weigh in, then go post a question or comment on the social networks inviting people to... weigh in, give their opinion, rant, praise, etc. etc. etc. and link to the discussion page.

Those pages also show in the google results, and they link to your page. In the discussion itself, I'd tell them to go watch the video or read the text you have or whatever it is that is sparking the discussion... just send them to view your page and then come back to comment.

And to answer your other question, it depends on which cache you are talking about. The cache is basically a snapshot of the page when it was visited before. On your own computer, it helps it load faster when you go back, because things like images are already stored in your computer and it doesn't have to download them again.

That is the kind romeo was talking about clearing.

Then there is the cache Google has of your page. There is a link to it next to your listing. It tells you when Google last visited your page and lets you see what it looked like. That will change when Google's spider comes back and sees changes. You can't clear it.

If you mean another kind, tell me and I'll see if I can answer that. =)

Hi @cherise,

I've seen you comment about this before. I know some have had trouble with the categories. From what I understand, it is only a problem for old pages... however, whether yours is older or newer, staff can look at it.

In your case, @lon knows about it. You can always ask if they have any news about it, but with 3.0 coming out soon it will probably be a moot point. Try to put them on any new pages you get, and see if the new rollout fixes the other problem.

I really am not trying to frustrate those like you who have trouble with categories on certain pages. REALLY. =) So, know that when I mention categories from now on, I mean "except those of you who have very frustrating category problems" (should that be those who are categorically challenged??) =D

I feel for you. And for you... my advice is to get those incoming related pages links. Since you can't get a link from a category page, find out what pages are in the same category that DO have it listed, then get a link from a couple of them. It should have a similar effect. =)

And I don't think less of anyone who doesn't have categories on their pages... just so you all know. =) But those who can add them can see a boost... especially in the time it takes to get indexed.

It is probably because the ajax loads a little slow here and while in the process of loading your pc/browser crashes, it means your memory is gone pretty much and it might be time for a memory upgrade.. I think you need at least 1gb of Ram to be able to use some of these features with ease (Personal Experience)

Thanks, Mike !

Thanks Mike!
I was able to edit categories on a few of my pages today by restarting just before it did it! (I do have a gig of RAM, but that is all I have.)

Thats great @cherise, im glad you got it to work... Another tip. as you might have trouble watching video, change your screen resolution to 800 x 600 while watching films online... it might also have a effect on updating these categories and should speed things up for you some..

Thanks Again, Mike !