Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

[Red C220]

Does anyone truly understand this?

I've had a few websites over the years which have done reasonably well on natural listings in Google and the other usual suspects but I'm really struggling with a new site I've set up. I fundemantally understand how to arrange the structure of the site and it's content to maximise it's position.

There are som many SEO snake oil firms that I just don't trust any of they and they charge a lot of money for not a lot of work or results.

Does anyone on our lovely local forum actually have a grasp of this "black art"?

 

[Alex Crow]

Are you making the most of your metatags and page titles?
How long has the site been up?
How many hits do you get?

 

[Red C220]

Site only went live 8 weeks ago, we then updated meta tags and page titles for the more important keywords.

I've been monitoring for a few weeks using 11 keywords/phrases.

They were mostly listing in mediocre positions - but listing all the same.

We updated the meta tags and page titles with the relevant important keywords (without overloading them) and the prvious medicore listing are dropping like stones.

I'm inclined to leave it another couple of weeks or so to settle, but I've never had a site "drop like a stone" with a few minor tag and title tweeks, it's little worrying.

Hits are now in the single figures per day.

It's not viable to use adwords, the outlay required to provide reasonable traffic would absorb more than the income the traffic would provide - zero sum game - so it has to be natural listings.

 

[MercFanUk]

Hey there

First of all, don't worry about meta tags (The Keywords one anyway), as they are pretty much obsolete these days. Stick them in by all means, but they are not the primary tool for search engines to categorise/list you etc.

I used to be 1st in Google for "Freelance PHP Developer" back when I did that, and the way to get there is pretty simple - make your content relevant.

If you want people to find your site when searching for something like "Black cheese", make sure your content is about that.

The second good SEO factor is inbound links - I don't mean by swapping links with sites, but by sites about "black cheese" or content on that subject, linking to you.

The other main things to remember are:

- Make sure your code is of a high quality (More errors makes it harder for Google etc to index the website)
- Have descriptive links. I.e. instead of "Click Here", have "Read more about black cheese"
- Put good descriptions on images (The ALT tag). You can do a similar thing to text links with the TITLE tag.
- Don't cheat (Things like white text on a white background spammed with keywords), search engines these days can pick it up, and you'll likely get removed completely. Not good!

There isn't much more to it than that.

If you sell a product, get your products into Google Product Search too. It's a huge traffic provider - some of my clients have had massive boosts in sales through using that.

If you don't sell a product, consider adding a small blog/news section. It's a good traffic generator so long as it's well written, easily read, and has good content.

If you need any more help, feel free to PM me

 

[neilz]

I agree about inbound links - Google for some reason relies on those much more than it should (and not much at all on meta tags). Yahoo is rather the opposite. I wouldn't waste money on SEO.

And can I recommend (and they're free) Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics if you haven't signed up already