SEO - A Black Art
OK, my site for a Cheltenham Based Construction Company has been live for about a month now. It has made it onto the search engines but I am amazed at how they have indexed it. For example, if you search for "Industrial Construction" it appears at number 43 on Yahoo, 5 on MSN, 16 on Google (UK only) and nowhere on Google. Not too shabby.
Now, a search for "Industrial Construction in Gloucestershire" returns a number 1 spot in Google (yay) but fails to register in the top 100 on MSN or Yahoo (boo). What is that all about? I don’t get it - how does the more generic search term fare better on MSN and Yahoo than the more specific one that Google appears to prefer?
How queer.
Well. That sounds like a meta keyword: MSN and Yahoo might not (don’t) check out the Meta Tags. Google do - but pay them attention after: links in, domain name, title, h1, h2, meta description, meta keywords, page content.
Although, of course, that is not the whole story. If you have an h2 tag with an in-page link attached, and I link to it from my site which has a higher PR than yours, using the same text in my link as your h2 tag… You win more points and a greater chance of being found, and being found near the top.
I use http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords to check my SERPs. It is very good.
Also - you’ll notice that Dove get a PR of 1/10… But your blog gets 5/10. I link to you 6/10, Olly does 6/10, Sara does 5/10, Simon does 4/10.
I think you could try to sell them a week / day of link improvement.
April 25th, 2006 at 10:36 amI’m experiencing some of this myself! Right now MSN is treating some of my sites quite well, while google still hasn’t indexed anything after the home page
I’ve been using free monitor for google, although I’d reall like to get an analytics account.
April 25th, 2006 at 1:45 pmAlso - you could join sitemaps.xml to improve your Google performance.
They also have a great online tool to check Robots.txt.
One of the thngs I forgot to mention above is the frequency or ‘page density’ of your keywords. There is an approximate metric to show how often you should repeat keyphrases.
Also - use css to shape the page, but put the page content higher up the html than the navigation. The crawler likes the links, so might miss your content - thus reducing your PR. (not sure how much I believe this, but there is no harm in building pages in this way for the future, but I wouldn’t go back over the old ones.)
Above all, the advice that I have read over the last 6 months suggests that a page designed with the stupid readers in mind will perform better. This is because you’ll tend to say the things that others might ‘get’ from the context.
April 25th, 2006 at 2:35 pmSéan - putting content before navigation (with a skip-to-navigation link) is good practise anyway, because it accommodates non-CSS and mobile browsers.
Has anybody had any experience with Google Sitemaps? I’ve got a plug-in for Wordpress that auto-generates one for me, but I’ve no idea if the thing is actually any good…
April 26th, 2006 at 9:41 amOooh, there was I thinking it was best practice to put the Nav before the content. Hmm, time to radically re-think my site building methods…
I do struggle to get even vaguely enthused about SEO but it is a necessary evil unfortunately. Print design is the future for me, there is less to worry about on the periphery!
April 26th, 2006 at 12:57 pmSitemaps do mean that google crawls more of your pages.
That said, I have noticed a problem with the indexing of lower level pages.
For example: We have sorted everysubject into folders, each with sub-folders representing sub categories… Thus: \pollutants_and_hazardous_substances\hazardous_substances\arsenic-poisoning-compensation-claims.html
So that you know where everything is. BUT although MSN and Yahoo have these pages listed, Google (even though it is through sitemaps) does not.
Bummer
May 2nd, 2006 at 7:03 am