Website ranking help

Mr_BOOMBASTIC

Hi all

I was hoping for some advice on website ranking if anyone knows the answer or where i can look for some good info.

I've just had my website made live last week, Unfortunately i have only turned up on page 4 of Google which is not too good.

Now i thought i was being clever by calling the company name the same thing that most people would actually type into Google should they be searching for our service, but as i mentioned we are on page 4, maybe its early days and we will move or maybe i got it completely wrong with he whole naming thing

Does anyone one know how to get further up the rankings without paying someone to re-write or paying to have the site looked at.

And does anyone know if the website address is the same name as the company instead of abbreviating like I've done to make it quicker to type as know one likes typing in long web addresses. would this make more sense, and come up better in the ranks?

I hope i have made sense and any help is appreciated, as I'm trying to be as money saving as possible and not spend any more cash

tvaughan

There are hundreds of websites around which will tell you how to raise your Google ranking. The quick answer to your question is: no, there is no simple and quick way for you to raise your ranking in Google. The only way to do it is to consistently write good, clear content and attract other websites to link to yours.

If you have a few hours or days to do the research, search for "SEO" and be prepared to take copious notes!

Mr_BOOMBASTIC

Copious...lol, That sounds daunting.

So the fact i called the company the same as what you would type into Google should you be wanting to search for this service made no difference? or would i be even further down the ranks if i hadnt?

Thanks for the reply

kwikbreaks

I'm pretty much certain that the actual url is considered in producing the results (they even get highlighted) and having a domain name which would be a likely search term is a good move.

Consider page names too - e.g. all things being equal a page called widgets.htm would almost certainly rank better that one called page1.htm in a serch for widgets. Most SEO plugins for forums will make the page name the same as the thread title for instance and they do that for a good reason.

Rankings change with time and it would be rare for a page to hit the first page immediately unless the search term used was obscure.

peteb23

Step 1. Get links to your site
Step 2. Get links to your site
Step 3. Return to Step 1...

Of course how you get the links is the fun part

chunter

Patience. It usually takes a few months for your ranking to settle down.

If you website is made up of static pages, make sure your list of search phrases are all in the content of the pages. eg "buy widgets" is prominent in your pages.

Mention your "widget" at every opportunity. Make sure readability is not affected. Once you get the prospect there, you have to impress them.

There's books about this stuff. And putting the effort in does work.
There are far too many lazy web designers out there who are full of excuses.

googler

You need to research "Search Engine Optimisation" or SEO

Funnily enough, I recommend you google it.....

flappy_mcwarbucks

Yup. SEO. There is more to it then keeping content up to date, and getting your links out there.

It's all about how your markup is presented, container depth, keywords (but not to many, if you flood your page with keywords, google will flag you), and how you present them, content, and so on. Yes the domain does a part in this, but it's part of the many cogs that keep the machine going as it where.

It's hard work all this SEO lark *phew* <puts kettle on>

InsideInsurance

SEO can roughly be divided into on site and off site work.

On site is making sure you URLs are strong, copy, tags, well structured etc

Off site is getting inbound links to pages of your site with appropriate anchor text from relevant and respected sites

On site is relatively straight forward to get it right, once you've identified the right keywords to go after. The other is more challenging.

chillsky

I personally would NEVER pay anyone for SEO. Its a waste of money.

They cannot guarantee you higher rankings.

Its all about relevancy in search.

1. Get people linking to your site.
2. Link to other sites.
3. Have a blog on your site for various reasons (1. Brings traffic to you about the content of your blog, 2. Increases your site as a whole's relvancy to the topic)
4. Promote your site via traditional routes.
5. Make sure your site it making use of old traditional methods like keywords, good titles etc. Forget about lots of words in the footer of your site, google will rank you low.

If you make your site dynamic, so that content is added often you will slowly climb rankings. It takes about 2-3 months to notice any difference though.

Try thinking about using wordpress as google seems to love it.

InsideInsurance

chillsky wrote: »

I personally would NEVER pay anyone for SEO. Its a waste of money.

They cannot guarantee you higher rankings.

They cannot guarantee you higher rankings but they can guarantee you getting a refund if they fail to secure you higher rankings.

SEO can be very worthwhile paying for but there are a hell of a lot more bad companies than good ones out there.

At the end of the day if you are a business person running a growing company you will quickly get to a point where you can no longer do absolutely everything yourself and so you have to decide which parts are best to continue to be doing yourself and which are better to pay others to do.

SEO has three parts to it, one is the high skill element of knowing how to do keyword research, generate traffic for long tail search terms etc - this you need occasionally, doesnt take much time to do but takes a lot of time to keep the skills current. This is prime material to get others to do as the cost of the skilling is split between all their clients.

The second part is networking, getting inbound links from reputable sites with contextual relevance. This can be useful to pass out to an industry specific connection as they'll already know people and be able to open doors but at the same time you may have connections already too.

The final part is the donkey work, getting new content, blogs, Facebook posts, getting low value links in to said new content blogs etc. Obviously something you could do easily yourself but given how cheap it is to get someone else to do this sort of thing I'd question your business model if your time is worth little more than minimum wage.

I've known 2 great SEO experts. One only does full time work so one client at a time (not suitable for small companies obviously). The other only takes a commission and so only takes on projects he believes he can make a big impact on as if it doesnt give returns he doesnt get paid at all.

I would pay for either of their time as I know my time is better spent working with my clients bringing in my consultancy rate rather than messing about on websites.