S.B. Website novice needing advice please

sunsetgirl

Hi,

I have a small business making sock monkeys and I have made a website using 'instant site' from 123reg to try and get some web exposure.
I do not know hmtl and intant site makes the website a bit like typing a blog.
I have added my url to google and other search engines, got some links on other sites but I can't get high up on a 'uk search'.

I have read the previous threads about sitmaps and metatags etc but I don't really understand it all.

If someone is wanting a sock monkey, I guess they would type in sock monkey to google so what other key words do I use?

The site is listed in my profile and I would really apreciate any simple advice that could be effective in helping me become more visible on the web.

many thanks

Astaroth

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a massive field with many companies charging very large fees to get up the rankings.

Not really sure what a sock monkey is but I imagine you would also want to capture key words such as teddy bear, puppet etc (as appropriate). It is also important that the key words appear in the text on your site, in particular in the page titles, headings (<h1>) etc.

Number of links to your site and what their ranking is - ie if the BBC has a link to your site off their home page it counts a lot more than a link 10 pages into an obscure business directory

How long the site has been running - the longer the better

How regularly it is updated - the more frequent the better

Then there are some other tricks like sitemaps etc which help the search engine understand the structure of your site.

If you do a search for search engine optomisation you will get thousands of sites giving advice.... the important thing to remember is that Google and co keep the exact way they rate websites as a closely guarded corporate secrets but through trial and error people have found many "guidelines" but as it is unknown you will see some contradictory advice on different sites

sunsetgirl

Thanks for your advice, I will go back and see if I can add some more key words and look into the other points you made.
A sock monkey is a toy made from socks that is a monkey.

the_optimist

How long have you had your website?
I saw a report the other day (don't know which website, but I printed it out, so I quote) which said: "Google's complex and secret algorithms have been finely tuned to prevent new entrants to the web from surging straight to the top of the engine rankings. New sites have to undergo a kind of probationary period, where pages are indexed by Google, but will rarely feature for targeted search terms. This is a quite deliberate attempt to prevent 'fly by night' and other spammers from creating larger numbers of new sites which would litter key search terms on the web."

So apart from the tips already given - be patient!

Astaroth

I have to say that I dont believe that their "sandboxing" exists... my hobby site was on page 1 of natural listings on google within a month of it going live (unfortunately it isnt a business site) but certainly, as per my original post, the age of your site is one of the rating criteria.

save-a-lot

Hi

About SEO - have a look at something I posted a while ago

Hi

Loads of inbound links is the key, try submitting to directories first off - here is a list List of directories - these are both paid for inclusion and free.

When a website is brand new with Google it enters a limbo called the sandbox, look this up on google, there is plenty of forum discussion about this. Basically, PR will not be awarded to brand new sites.

With regard to SEO try this approach (this is a copy/paste from one of my posts on another forum)

1]
The first page of a site is the most important from a search engine point of view - the text on your "index.htm" page should total about 250 words. Into this 250 words pick a keyphrase that people are likely to search on, for the instance of my site I use "online shopping directory". I use this phrase six times (these terms can also be used in hyperlinks). Also, in the instance of my site the repetition of "UK" is used. It is important to incorporate these keywords into the site for search engines to rank it.

Note: I have used heading tags <h1></h1> at the top of the page with the text 'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory... No.1 Shopping Online' - this indicates to a search engine spider the start of the content and includes the keyphrase.

So what have I done here?
The repetition of keyphrases has made a positive indication to a search engine that this page is to do with an online shopping directory, the repetition reinforces that.

2]
The page title (meta title) - I never use more than ten words, there is little worth writing more... I repeat the 'UK Online Shopping Directory' keyphrase here, that I mentioned in point 1. On pages further into the site I use different titles that are relevant to the page category or the product I am selling.

3]
Keywords:
Ideally each page should have different keywords but their importance has diminished considerably as search engines tend to look moreso at content rather than the keywords tag - so I don't go to too much trouble. If you do only use a maximum of 25 keywords, it is not worth typing more as a spider will not pick all of them up after a certain threshold limit. (I think)

Also, no word should be used more than three times, otherwise the effectiveness of your keywords may be diluted.

4]
Description:
Ideally each page should have different description but again the importance of the description tag has diminished considerably and it is not worth going to much trouble. Limit your descriptions to around 25 words.

5]
CSS: Always place CSS in an external file and call it in i.e.
<LINK
href="http://www.website.com/css.css&quot; type=text/css
rel=stylesheet>

- if there is lots of CSS style sheet code on your site, this will cause search engines to perceive relevant text as being much further down the page, and therefore less important than it actually is.

6]
Images:
always make use of the alt attribute and give images a keyword specifiic name, i.e. if you have an image of a villa in spain call the image villa_in_spain.jpg

see the full tag below...

<img src="images/villa_in_spain.jpg" alt="Villa in Spain" border="0">

make sure that your images are also optimised for the web, i.e. images saved "for the web" via photoshop etc.

7]
Getting Reciprocal Links:

Then, when requesting reciprocal links stay completely relevant to your own subject area (and I tend to stay Country specific aswell - since I run a UK Directory).

Whilst images as reciprocal links look nice, they are not as powerful as keyworded text links - I request from other webmasters to have:

'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory' - (or variations of this)

as it strengthens the view that search engines will have of my page(s) - i.e. lots of incoming links saying the page is to do with shopping in the UK... compounding this is the keyword density of the phrases on the homepage that are saying the same thing. It is this combination that will make your search engine positioning move up the rankings.

All the Best, and I hope this is helpful

then in another post I mentioned...

To create an XML site map for Google download this software

http://gsitecrawler.com/

it crawls your whole site and produces a google sitemap.

Then, goto https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and sign up, then go through the submission process.

Ballroom_Dancer_2

Sunsetgirl,

If you haven’t already done so, submit your website to http://www.dmoz.com and visit http://searchenginewatch.com for some good ideas!

EDIT:

a robots.txt file will also be useful, see http://www.schogini.com/articles/SEO-Robots.txt-HowTo.html for advice

Good Luck,

BD

save-a-lot

Hi

If you can get into dmoz that is good as it is syndicated all over the internet on many sites. I even used to syndicate it on one of my sites. So one link there can get you many 1000s of links into your site.

sunsetgirl

Thanks for all your helpful replies, I will try and put all your advice into action.

sunsetgirl

I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who gave me advice recently. My website is now the first listing on a U.K search on Google and on the first page of a worldwide search.
I really apreciate the kindness of everyone on this site who take time to post replies and to help other people.
I hope I can pass on some help to

Astaroth

Not a problem.

Now that you have done it for your main search terms you just need to replicate good results for your secondary terms without damaging the position for the main ones... its where the real fun/ art begins