3 Tips To Better Google Rankings

pcplumber

Where do you see the number for the ranking?

Thank you.

carlsore

Are you talking about link popularity? Or the Google ranking itself?

Carl

A W Smith

Carl in your opening post you emphasize the importance of a page title, I have had a page title since 2002, So why when i put a portion of my page title in quotes in google are no results returned?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...22&btnG=Search

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

SLSTech

Easy - your robots.txt reads
User-agent: *
Disallow: /files/

While mine reads
User-Agent: *
Allow: /

See & understand the difference?

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Alabama Full Service Remodeling, Renovation, and Preservation by SLS Construction
Certified Energy Efficiency Audits, Ratings, Modeling, Verifications, & Consulting
Residential, Commercial, & Industrial Infrared Thermography Scans

carlsore

Al,

By the looks of things I don't bear good news... From what I can see your website has either never even been indexed or it's been banned (unlikely as you have a few pages indexed)

Your navigation with the drop down cannot be spidered as well as static navigation on your site. I see that a few of your pages themselves are in fact in Googles index but your homepage is not.

If you go to google and search for awsmith.com it should be the first search result if the page was indexed.

SLS brings up a good point about the robots file. Considering Google does in fact have some of your pages indexed... It's possible you've linked to these pages from a forum post or something before and were spidered that way... but they definitely don't get past your home page.

Carl Sorensen

A W Smith

Damn, no wonder, Just fixed that. IIRC I might have edited that mistakenly in an attempt to dissalow directory browsing and searching long time ago.

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

A W Smith

I have been meaning to make graphics for a button bar navigation. in 5 years Ive not got around to it and still used the drop down. Its amazing i am getting any leads at all from the page being that its no longer turning up in searches. It did turn up on top 2 or so years ago. I think maybe i broke it trying to optimize it.

Oh I fixed the robots text file as soon as SLS posted that error, Thanks a ton SLS and Carl

I also have a slide show that i cant even get google analytics to find. Its in a directory where i dumped a script a template htm file and a 140 or so images called /More should I take that cap out of the directory folder name?

I just now edited a simple text navigation line under the title box graphic, But I left The drop down navigation there as well.

__________________
Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

Ivinni

Have you put your slide show onto youtube?

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its not going to get better with straps, or new footings or even aroma therapy.

A W Smith

no its a free php slide show i got from here

http://www.zinkwazi.com/wp/scripts/

you just fill a directory with images. drop the php and template file in the same directory and it runs itself. i have tried to change the text size and color on the template and the way it wraps around the image on the template, and failed. so i put back the default slide show template

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

A W Smith

according to this page i had the robots text file correct to begin with, To disallow spidering of a specific private file directory.


http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02...ech/robots.htm

It should not have prevented robots from spidering the rest of the site, I am going to have to do some more research.

Also Google webmaster tools has a robots.txt file checker. Which passed the test in both incarnations above,

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

carlsore

To be honest I think your issue is steming from the lack of valuable content on your page and the navigation you've setup....

As you mentioned this site was created in 2002? Web design has advanced by leaps and bounds in that time.

1. You need to add 3 or 4 paragraphs of text to your homepage... Describe who you are, your company, and what you do. This will put some content on there for a search engine to see.

2. Get rid of the banners you have on your homepage... I won't even get into the reasoning but just know they aren't helping you.

3. For your before/after pages you should write a few sentence caption for each... describing the job/project. (more content)

4. I will link TO you from my website and a few others (which are spidered every day) and let's just see what happens over the next few days. If your site gets indexed and starts showing up then great... If not then we've got more work to do.

As your site stands right now I wouldn't even try to SEO it... You also don't want to make any improvements to the site IF the site has been de-indexed or banned... In that case you need to start over with a new domain.

*edited to add - I am doubtful it's been banned as they have indexed some of your pages but you'll definitely need to work on the content improvements if we are going to get them coming back. Get that done and the links I'll point to you will really give it a jump start.

Carl

A W Smith

i just submitted a reconsideration to google after removing completely my meta tag for key words, as not a single word in that meta tag which also appeared in my service descriptions was found when i viewed the content keywords found by googlebot. Funny you should mention the submit banners as you are reading my mind and those are dating back to when i first created the site. I have been considering creating a form for visitors to submit home improvement technical questions and using those questions to start content that looks like sort of a blog. or just seed it with a few answers to commonly asked questions clients have asked me.

edt

and granted I will be the first to admit my site lacks content. but you would think at the very least the title of the site in quotes would turn up in a google search. When asked to describe myself i don't want to come across as boastful. I think over the years I have taken myself for granted, and for a decade didn't even bother to take pictures of my work. Guess I have to decide how i want to package myself without sounding corny or boastful. But adding descriptions to the images shouldn't be a problem. in fact i really should rename the images to reflect their content rather than use the random letters and numbers my cell phone cam gives them

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

Ivinni

Very good point.

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its not going to get better with straps, or new footings or even aroma therapy.

CF Construction

What exactly do people mean when they say a "properly formatted text" within your site's written content?


A website that's a flash site has no chance in being high on the Google rankings? If so, is it because the spider doesn't recognize the content inside of a flash site?

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CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

MrHands

I missed this thread from the beginning and just had to read it all quickly, so apologies if I'm repeating anything.

Carl and Ivinni,

I was told that one must make his site "handicapped" friendly and that all images should have a tag that describes them. Is this good (important) advice ?


Also, with Yahoo now trying to get a better share of the search engine market, do we need to change any approach to rank higher with them?

Ivinni

I'll have to defer to Carl for that one.

However, I think if your photos are labeled with keywords that are relevant to the photo and the content you will be better off than without.

I know very little about yahoo.

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its not going to get better with straps, or new footings or even aroma therapy.

MrHands

That's basically what I did - not so much as describe them, but used the opportunity to add more relevant text. But if I remember correctly, there may be a limit to characters before being penalized.

It was a few years ago and I jyust went on the advice of a friend who understood SEO then. The rules are constantly changing so it may be different now.

carlsore

Yes... It's good practice to label your images correctly. Don't keyword stuff though...

eg.. (plumbing pictures,plumber,plumbing services,kitchen plumbing) would be keyword stuffing.

eg.. (remodeled bathroom with new jacuzzi) would be a good description

In short... No. Optimize for Google and you'll fall into place within all the other major search engines as well.

Carl

CF Construction

Anyone?

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CF Construction and Remodeling, Inc.
"Your Vision Is Our Commitment"
General Contractor In Miami

Ivinni

I Googled that phrase and what I found was basically:

text that is formatted in proper grammar style, rather than no breaks or punctuation where all the sentences and ideas (paragraphs) are ran together.

Don't take this as fact, it's just what I found.

__________________
its not going to get better with straps, or new footings or even aroma therapy.