Hi ScubaJerm.........I am going to introduce you to your new best friend.......
http://inventory.overture.com
Learn to love him, learn to call on him for plenty of help, and ALWAYS listen to what he tells you.
Scuba Jerm:
Most of our visitors enter and exit on 2 of our pages...
www.onestopscuba.com and
www.onestopscuba.com/divebags. I've learned on average they only stay for about 1.5 minutes.....
I think you have the answer to your questions right in the information you provide in your post. Others have told you already about the 'appearance' of your pages, so I will leave that alone. I will talk to you about WHY people come into your site on these two pages, and ONLY these two pages (maybe with a very few exceptions)
Header of Your Bag Page:
<title>Mesh backpacks, waterproof duffel bags, rolling duffel bags, and more!</title>
People come to pages on your (or any) website basically from only three places......(1) direct URL entries of your URL in their browser window, (2) direct links from other websites or HTML documents, and (3) from search queries from a search engine. So, the people that enter your website at
www.onestopscuba.com come there because they directly enter you URL in their browser window. People that come to you website at
www.onestopscuba.com/divebags come there from searches in search engines. Do you know why? The only page on your website that provides the search engines with the information they need to index your site is the bag page! The answer is in the quote I provided above from the header of your bag page. All of the rest of the pages supply the search engines with information that tends to imply that your subject matter is about "add to cart". Of course, Google has identified you as a spam site under the mysterious duplicate content rules because you have so many pages that search to "add to cart" queries.
Clearly, organization on any website can be improved. My site is pretty amateur compared to many, but that is my cross to bear and mine to improve. You are in the same situation. It is important to remember that the BEST ORGAINZED page is useless if no one visits. To get visitors, the game is Google, Yahoo!, Ask!, MSN, and all of the rest. Please don't let anyone fool you into thinking that they can "get you top 10 placement" on the major search engines. You can't buy that....that takes hard work.
Spend some time searching for optimization topics on the internet and you will learn a lot about the power of cross-linking your frequently visited pages to other pages, writing relevant content statements, properly structuring page titles, and the rest. Don't worry to much about the "keywords" META tag......it no longer has much impact on placement and indexing. Worry more about making your indivdual product pages relevant and so enticing to the search engines that they are FORCED to give you high placement. With a few changes, you will rapidly see you number of unique visitors soar! And always remember you new best friend.............
http://inventory.overture.com
If you want to chat sometime, give me a call. If my store is open, I am here. Thanks and good luck.
Another VERY Important Thing to Remember: Search engines hate spam, they hate cute tricks, they DEPLORE attempts to improve search performance through duplicate content, and they punish HEAVILY those that do the things they hate. Expecially SPAM! When writing, stick to the rule of 7....don't repeat the same thing more than 7 times on a single page. (actually more then 3 times will make your viewers sick to their stomach, but 7 times and your page will be thrown into the "lost web page file" by the search engines.
Phil Ellis