Search engine optimisation - preparing a site

[pinbrook]

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

You are better of excluding this, if this tag is not present SEs assume index, follow.

SEs prefer to assume rather than be told.

[prosite]

[ajfish]

Help - I thought I was good at this

Team,
Please help before I lose faith in the ability of an Actinic site to do well in google rankings.
4 years ago I started watchbattery.co.uk selling just that, watch batteries. Today you can search on google (for watch batteries) and it is number one out of about 2 million pages. I really did think I knew what I was doing.
Okay, the site is dated, but i am reluctant to change it because of its good rankings and have been running the battery-shed.co.uk site in tandem for several years. It was based on version 4 to start with and now it is based on version 7 at the .co.uk address. I still can't get the site listed well (page 6 of google). I have tried the usual H1 tag approach (see below)
Take the page
http://www.battery-shed.co.uk/acatal...e_Battery.html
and if you search for
BT synergy cordless phone battery
the site doesn't appear until about page 6 on google.
Depsite this being a dedicated page to that product, the page name being very relevant and with H1 tags around the search string being used.
Can anyone please fathom what is going on here?

Andrew

A few other things:


3. The second most important area for google and other engines (after the title) is the heading tags. (<h1>, <h2>, etc). I embed the H1 and H2 tags in my templates so they highlight the appropriate bits (the section name for H1 tags and product name for h2 tags). These tags change the font size and boldness so I redefine them in the CSS file to make them look the way I want them.

If you follow the few simple steps we've outlines here you will do better than 98% of the sites out there and usually much better than the so called professional sites. They're usually very badly designed from a search engines point of view (unlike actinic).

Mike

[wduk]

Dear Andrew,

There is one main difference between your two sites and that is the number and quality of backlinks that they each have. One is PR5 and the other is PR1. (google gives a variable called PR (stands for Page Rank) depending on the number and quality of link a site has).

In your position I would try to get more links to your battery-shed.co.uk. May be even from the main sources than the ones going to watchbattery.co.uk - may be even linking watch battery to battery-shed.


Regards

Leo

[jont]

It may be Google is frowning at the number of times you are using the phrase "cordless phone battery" which does appear a lot of times on the page - content is king with search engines but they dont like being spammed with repetitive phrases - does your sister site have the same layout?

Your "keywords" tag is showing with some comma's missing which may be worth looking at and the words are again repeated many times - another Google frown.

Concerned with search engine placement I left my old non-Actinic pages alongside the Actinic ones with a link over to the new page (on the same domaine) - after about 3 months I was only picking up the Actinic pages under Google - the legacy pages have since been removed with no loss in placement for the majority of the site

[AsleepATheWheel]

Hi,

Just in case you hadn't noticed, those earlier posts are nearly a year and a half old, an eternity in the search engine world...

Paul

[Mike Hughes]

Yup. Things have moved on since then. Also my comments were prefaced with:

A few other things:

By which I meant they are in addition to the first three posts by prosite.

Your number one problem right now for google is that you just don't have enough important links to your site.

Mike

[prosite]

Google

Google google google! arghhh

In october / november last year google updated to a new engine that they call florida update, this has caused many problems for new sites getting listed, some people are now saying upto eight months to get a site ranked, some sites that appeared at the top no longer even appear, so you are pretty lucky there. I would not hold too much to 'deep linking' whilst advisable there is no real information as to its nesacity (can't spell!) we submitted a site with one link from us back to them if you search they are number 2 on page 1 (in a week, UK search). So I am confused for this one. Also the relavancy of googles search results are being bought to peoples attention whilst the re-write of the MSN engine and Yahoo engine is providing people with good relevant results. (Yahoo incedently you are #11 on page2 'BT synergy cordless phone battery ') There have been rumours out there for some time that Google is deliberately holding back on new sites and refusing to rank them for quite a while, sometimes up to eight months or more. Perhaps pushing people to excesive Adword accounts.

Perserverance is the order of the day with google you are listed so good result there but for ranking of the pages expect a long wait, all the comments above are right you have over done it a little. Also in the top of your page just below the <body> tag try putting <h6>NETQUOTEVAR:PAGETITLE</h6> you will have to play a little, it is something that we are experimenting with at the moment, not sure if it will work but give it a go. we have one site that is consitently #4 in google UK using this method and has been live for 5 months.

In a nutshell dont blame actinic, they dont own google and can not determine your results but it is still bloody good for getting rankings. Just experiment a little give it time for google to look and rank the site then if after 3 months you have not changed position try again. Remember google indexes a billion sites so it aint going to happen overnight.

Hope that helps hang on in there paitence and experimentation is needed not a new e-com solution (or perhaps concertrate on MSN, Yahoo and tell everyone google is S"$£ and use the competition ;-) ).

Jez

[ajfish]

Jez,
Thanks for the post much appreciated.
Just a couple of things.
For that search string how come you found us on page two #11. Or was that page 11? I have just tried the same search and battery-shed.co.uk doesn't appear until page 16!
Can you explain the relevance of the <H6>tags and their location please.
I know I shouldn't blame Actinic. It's just that we have had the Actinic software for a number of years and the site has never done as well as the very dated looking watchbattery.co.uk. We get 5 times the orders on the latter. Just goes to show it isn't what the site looks like that matters, it's all about getting found. I am just so frustated with this. When I created the watchbattery.co.uk site 5 years ago I got good, consistently good rankings within months and the site is still doing well. Using the same philosophy I used then on other sites just doesn't seem to work any more. Has the age of the site got anything to do with ranking?

Andrew

[prosite]

Hi,

Yahoo
Ok yahoo.co.uk select a UK search and used 'BT synergy cordless phone battery' actually you are now #10 on page 1, it is your site map page that appears but you are there non the less. It just goes to show that search engines in my view are favouring links pages rather than anthing else.

However if you search for 'BT SYNERGY 900 Cordless Phone Battery' as per your page title you are #4 on page 1. again your site map page. Page 7 on google and the actual product page. Look at the site that appears on #1 and figure out the differances between your sites content.

MSN Engine read this
http://beta.search.msn.co.uk/docs/si...spx?FORM=WMDD2

H6 Tags,
Take a look at www.all4parrots.co.uk you will see on the top the page name being pulled in as the 1st thing on the actual page the engine will read if you search for any of those headings in a google UK search then the site is pretty much #4 However the other site, same customer differnet site is #1 but does not have the tags (surrey pet supplies)

Site Age
The Spets site has been out there for 12 months and the parrots about 5 Age of the site does have something to do with it, but if your site gets hits and is built correctly given time it should start to rank.

'Just goes to show it isn't what the site looks like that matters,'
As a web designer I would have to disagree ;-) but yes you are right there is no point in having a shop that can not be found but you have to ask can I get more business if the site looks better?. Actinic did some research and found that a site that was professionaly designed did 80% better check with them for exact details though that might be biast... But hey if its working why change?

I hate to say it but you are in for the long haul on this one if you are to be dis-heartend about anything google is your 1st point as they are getting slower (not surprosing considering the amount of pages they index) Secondly your own content, S E O is a black art and no one no matter what they tell you knows the answer. Only the developers at google really know what the score is and bottom line they are not going to let on. Read this article on PigeonRank http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html and you will see that they really are not going to let on. This might be a bit more relavent http://www.google.com/technology/

Good luck

Jez


"There are no facts, only interpretations"
Friedrich nietzsche

[ajfish]

Jez,
Thanks again....
Thanks for the links too.
I am still not sure what the <H6> tag thing is about. I checked the source code on your Parrots site and there is no evidence of <H6> tags? So I am now very confused. Should I see them there? Can you please explain again for me s l o w l y.

The watchbattery site, although dated still pulls in many more orders than the flashier looking battery shed site. The conversion rate (visitors to orders) is about 10% which is apparently very good for an e-commerce site. This seems to indicate that perhaps not too many are put off by the dated look and feel. If I could guarantee the same ranking within google I wouldn't hesitate to change it, but my living depends on sales which is directly proportional to the ranking within google (Well actually it's probably an inverse square relationship whereby if your google ranking drops by two your sales become 1/4 of what you had.)

Are you really a web site designer?
On your Parrots site do you see anything wrong with the following?:-
<TITLE>All 4 Parrots the ultiamte in shopping experiance for Parrots and Parakeets</TITLE>

Do you use a spell checker at all?


Andrew

[jont]

Jez,

<TITLE>All 4 Parrots the ultiamte in shopping experiance for Parrots and Parakeets</TITLE>

Do you use a spell checker at all?

I am sure both the Parrots or Parakeets won't be too fussed with the typo

[jont]

Andrew - it is an H5 tag at the top of the product page not a H6 tag - this H5 tag only appears the single time to put a description line as the first line on the page in very small text - this is good for search engines but does force a line above the site header (which is not consistent and is missing from the home page)

[ajfish]

Jont,
Arh I see now and understand... but why use H5? Why not H3 or even H2 and control the size with style sheets? This would be okay, particularly if the other Hx tags aren't used anywhere else on the site. I assume that higher the heading number the greater the possibility of being ranked higher if that word between the tags is used in the search phrase.
I think it's a good idea and I may try it with a few pages just to see what impact on the rankings for a particular search this has. I will report back!
However, I am begininig to wonder that if the site as a whole isn't "liked" by google, then I am not so sure if the keyword one concentrates on promoting will acually improve the rankings for that keyword on that site. Comments?

Andrew

[Faulkds]

I had a similar issue, but I'm currently optimising my site. First thing to do is get traffic to your site; You can buy hits to your site but I decided to use google adwords, and placed google ads on my site. You then need to link from a high PR ranking site to yours. Linking is very good for google but only link off high pr sites. My site was a PR 5 but dropped to a PR 4 when a none ranking site linked off my index page. Then its all about content and keywords, titles and meta tags. Have a look at my index page and you will see what i mean.... Use raw html and not frames or fancy flash.

My stats speak for themselves; I only really started to really work on the site since August. I now no longer use google to get my sales and have a site that’s just growing and growing.

Unique Visitors

Feb 2332

Mar 3084

Apr 2943

May 2664

Jun 2461

Jul 2055

Aug 1504

Sep 5263

Oct 6593

Nov 7265

Dec 6849

Jan 10198

Feb 6702

I have no where near finished yet and only a quarter of the way through the site. Its getting there but I understand your frustrations....

I have only revealed a small part of my optimisation scheme; at the end of the day we can’t all be on page one of google but with various key word combinations you can get some good relevant traffic to your site.

Darren
www.4-motorcycles.co.uk