Thread: Search Engines and Website Hits

Coldamus

I host my neighbours site on my 'free' bigpond space http://www.greenhorse.com.au/

it's been there for about 9 years!!!! (i am a nerd)

but googling his name 'jeff cheyne' and his business name 'green horse' both pull him up in the first few listings... so I'd say something else is the issue going

I'm sure the eastern european/african/asian servers would have much lower 'trust' rating than an aussie server which runs in an environment of strict(ish) law enforcement.

as you have done spreading the url around other sites increases your ranking, as does having some good quality content.

Google has some pages on other things you can do... but my experience is it takes a while (~ a yearish??) to come up the list

cheers

Erich

Have a search for website promotion. Theres plenty of ideas out there.
Had a quick look at your source code, fill in your meta tags properly. The little things help.

Edit.. Found this http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769

Thanks for the replies. Perhaps I'm just too impatient.

After reading http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-user.html and http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html i thought Bigpond might have stymied us by excluding the 'users.bigpond.net.au' directory from indexing by robots. However, Erich, your experience seems to indicate that is not so.

Thanks for the link, Quikcote. There's some good info. there.

regards
Coldamus

Google knows about it.
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&...scrafts.com%2F

A search for site:http://www.yoursite.com (with the site: in front) will return all listings for that site. Google has followed the redirect ok, but I don't think it can see inside your frames to follow internal links, so only lists one page. Its pretty well regarded that frames are no good for search engines. Lose the frames. Add a Tite tag (up to 65 chars long) This is what Google will use as the header link in its listing. Ad Description (< 156 chars) and Keywords to the empty meta tags in the head. The Description will probably be used in the listing. Make sure the Title and Description includes your keywords. Go to other similar (well ranked) sites, choose 'View/Source' and see what they have as Title and Description to get some ideas. And most importantly, try to get other (well ranked) sites to link to you, with your keywords in the link text. This gives your site a level of 'importance' that should help it list higher.
SEO is a pain. It can take ages even to appear.
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Thanks for the hints, Blocklayer. I guess I've become hooked on frames because they simplify making changes to the site. i.e when adding or substituting a page, the menu only has to be changed in one place rather than changing links throughout.

However, I hear what you are saying and will re-think the layout. I actually do have meta-tags and keywords etc. but they are in index.html (the top-level window) rather than homepage.htm (the home page that loads into the main display area frame).

If I re-do the site without frames, should the key-words and meta-tags only go in the main home page or should they be repeated on other content pages?

thanks and regards,
Coldamus

I'd put the titles and meta in ALL the pages, and make sure they're all different (at least a bit). And use the keywords throughout the body of the pages (but not to much). Keywords in headings near top of pages in <hx> tags are also said to help, as is using keywords in the text of links.

I went through the frames thing a while back also. It seems like almost everyone does (or used to), before you realise they cause more problems than they solve.

The whole deal is a black art, and I always think of it like the wizard of oz. How does it go? smoke mirrors and pay no atention to that man behind the curtain?

Meta tags should go in all pages.

We use templating extensively, which means that this happens by default. The CMS's we use on some client sites simplify this a great deal. CMS's are generally aware of and friendly to search-bots.

Frames and iframes are generally not done nowadays - divs are the way to go - used extensively by CMS's like Joomla/Mambo etc.