site not optimised for search engines

[jxm28788]

I thought that Actinic was supposed to be very good at optimising sites for search engines, but my site has been around for 4 or 5 months and is hardly listed at all.

According to WebPosition it is not listed in the top 50 results, for any of my search words, in the UK versions of any of these engines - AOL, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Google, Lycos, MSN, or Yahoo.

It only seems to appear in overture and e-spotting (both of which I use with PPC advertising).

Any ideas why it is not being listed after all this time? It has a PR of 2 but is not listed in even the 1st 200 results in google.

Any ideas why it is not being listed? or how to improve it? Too many graphics, not enough text?

www.discount-aromatherapy.co.uk

[rmladden]

It's been very good for me search engine wise, but you do need sites linking back to you for best results.

Assuming you want people to find you when they search for aromatherapy, you should have the word in a header and it should appear more times in text in the body. Actinic makes nice static pages that you can control. Try using a page critic like WebPostion.

When I searched UK google for aromatherapy, the first listing is youraromatherapy.co.uk, which happens to be an Actinic site, and I assume is your competitor. Google has 32 sites linking back to it but none linking back to your site.

[pinbrook]

Take this page for example

http://www.discount-aromatherapy.co....tial-oils.html

what do you consider the keywords for that page, ie what would you want people to type in as a keyword for the page to figure within the top 10 results in Google?

How many times have you mentioned that keyword or keyword phrase in the page title or body text of the page?

Google (as with all engines) needs to see the keyword phrase in a page in order to index it on that phrase

[jxm28788]

Try using a page critic like WebPostion.

This suggests using a keyword frequency of 1 in the ALT tags, but I have 6 on my zestra home page - the logo, and 5 nav buttons (I am trying to optimise both sites, before you ask why I'm talking about another site, and this makes a better example )

5 of these ALT tags are set from the corresponding brochure page title. But if I remove the keyword from the title tags then that makes the other brochure pages worse as the keyword isn't in the title...

So is it better to keep the alt tags down on the homepage to give it a boost, or suffer the ALT tags to keep the other pages optimised...

Or can I make a change somewhere to kill the ALT tags on the brochure nav buttons? (a quick search of the board revealed I can't have a different ALT tag and title as this is fixed in actinic, but it didn't mention if they could be killed off...)

[jxm28788]

Take this page for example

http://www.discount-aromatherapy.co....tial-oils.html

what do you consider the keywords for that page, ie what would you want people to type in as a keyword for the page to figure within the top 10 results in Google?

How many times have you mentioned that keyword or keyword phrase in the page title or body text of the page?

Google (as with all engines) needs to see the keyword phrase in a page in order to index it on that phrase

I would say "essential oils", which I see in the title, and 3 times in the text (4 if google counts "essential oil" as the same thing).

But this page critic has given me some goods ideas...

[rmladden]

Google also ranks by PageRank (it's own term). If you install the Google toolbar, you can see the PageRank for each page you browse. It is also reports back to Google the activity for each page, so it is a form of spyware. The more views a page gets, the higher the PageRank. The higher the PageRank, the higher your ranking will be for searching. Your home page has a PageRank of 2, while www.youraromatherapy.co.uk has a PageRank of 4. My site has a PageRank of 6, so I get into the top 3 for most (but not all) keywords on the page. It's a case where activity spawns more activity. I got a high PageRank because lots of sites on the subject link back to me. I got those links by being one of the first on the web for my subject in 1996. Age helps.

Sorry to see LowCarbGoodies closing down. I guess there is more money is Zestra

[jxm28788]

Sorry to see LowCarbGoodies closing down. I guess there is more money is Zestra

Well, we'll see - it's only been going a few months. But user satisfaction is much higher, as are repeat customers...

Any opinion on the ALT tags vs titles?

[Mike Hughes]

If I were you I'd take Webposition's recommendations with a pinch of salt. All they're doing is looking at other sites that rank highly for your keywords and then telling you what those sites are doing with on the page content.

The truth of the matter though is that ranking on google has far more to do with PageRank, anchor text (link content) and links from authorotative (on subject) sites than whether you have the keyword in 1 or 6 ALT tags. But webposition doesn't know about this stuff and just gives you the inconsequential bits.

Ignore the ALT tags. It's essential to keep your main keywords in the page titles.

Mike

[pinbrook]

i gave up using web position over a year ago.

All I concentrate on now is

<TITLE> tags
body text

internal links (anchor text)
external links - from like minded sites (not any old site that contacts me, and definatley not using any automated linking mechanisms)

[thomas]

Search engines

John you have made life difficulty for yourself in my opinion your home page contains hardly any words let alone keywords, from a design point of few great looking site but from search engine point of view simple not enough text. As for the internal pages as Jo points out there are no clear keyword phrases.

I personally use alt tags because there is increasing moves towards accessibility for people and the alt tags function is to describe to visually impaired what the item is through there reading devices.

As for “the more views a page gets the higher the page rank” I think Bob must be referring to an alexa ranking which is something that records with some browsers which sites are visited and then gives some form of ranking generally perceived to be useless.

You don’t appear to have any form of resource page for links on your site and you should look to try and submit to as many directories as possible in particular related ones health, beauty etc.

Good luck

www.wazoola.co.uk Baby slippers
www.orangefish-directory.co.uk Free to submit directory.

[rmladden]

As for “the more views a page gets the higher the page rank” I think Bob must be referring to an alexa ranking which is something that records with some browsers which sites are visited and then gives some form of ranking generally perceived to be useless.

The Alexa toolbar does the same type of thing, but I don't know if any search engines use it other than Alexa. The Google toobar shows the PageRank and reports page views back to Google. You can disable that but then it does not show the PageRank. Google uses this activity data to rank pages for searches.

[thomas]

Search engines

Google uses this activity data to rank pages for searches.

Bob

I would be interested in where you have seen that information written as I don't belive it to be the case?

[rmladden]

There is a good description at http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Here is a web site that says that PageRank is not as important as it used to be: http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html but goes on to say "It has always been the case that large sites with average or below-average PageRank have a difficult time getting all of their pages indexed in Google. This is one area where PageRank may still play a role. But for the most part, this essay is out of date. It remains posted here for historical reasons."

Google still says it uses PageRank. Each Google "dance" changes things. Google does explain a little at http://www.google.com/technology/ and http://www.google.com/dirhelp.html and http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

I can say that a PageRank of 6 has been good to me.

[pinbrook]

I thought that Actinic was supposed to be very good at optimising sites for search engines

Actinic doesn't optimise - you have to optimise within the actinic environment. Actinic is good is as far as it provides a good environment in which to do this. eg unique page titles, whereas lots of other packages only allow one page title per site.

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Bob,

I think Thomas is picking up on your statement that pagerank is based on page views as reported back by the toolbar. As your link explains, pagerank is based on the number of backlinks (and their importance).

Mike