Hi all I have this site I made for a friend, this is my first website in 6 years and from the last one (was actually my first and only) that I made in front page.
the person I made it for is happy with the layout, style and content however he wants to get it decently up on google, like most people do
this site is going to be static and not be updated often, this seems to be a huge problem with SEO as from what I read, the more a site is updated the higher it goes, such as blogs.
Along with this having links to other websites that are related to the one in question seems to be another way to get higher rankings, however in my opinion, having links to other sites can downgrade your own site, making it look cheap and like many other similar sites that are just to get people to visit so they can get add revenue etc. any suggestions?
First of all, donât worry about the lack of updates. More updates arenât going to get you a higher ranking, in-fact, it could even be argued that changing content on the same page regularly will hurt your rankings. Google cares about how useful the content is to the user. If your website was talking about a process or explaining something, then changing that content wouldnât make any sense. What you may be thinking of is the frequency at which Google will crawl your site. The more you change content, the more often the crawl will happen. Just keep in mind that being crawled doesnât help boost your rankings and doesnât even guarantee that the new content will be indexed.
Donât place links to other sites unless theyâre useful. If they serve a purpose and will benefit your reader, then by all means leave them in. But having outbound links certainly isnât going to help boost your ranking.
Remember that Googlebot doesnât look at a website like we do. The spider will read your website from a code level. Youâll want to make sure that your code is well formed and itâs not a bad idea to validate each page. http://validator.w3.org/
When I say that your code should be well formed, Iâm talking about things such as making appropriate use of heading tags, formatting tags and your navigation. Generally people use unordered lists for navigation which is very easy for a spider to understand.
Next youâll need to start promoting your content. If itâs worth something, people will link to it based on your promotions. Those links, as you know, are going to be your biggest benefit to a better rank in the result pages.
thanks for the help mate, great to know I have got a chance still
even better news is that I checked the site and sub pages and all cam back clear apart from a comparability issue that may show up with older browsers, I have checked this in IE 6.0 and was fine, the only issue I had / need to fix is heading tags.
I had heard about them before however from what I read it changed the font and size, however I also remembered recently that actually the heading style was also controlled in CSS, as such should be able to fix this easy.
I have also added alt tags to images, used meta tags in the html header and put key words in the page title that makes sense to users and hopefully for bots, I have requested google to search my site along with adding their bot.txt file thing.
all pages (apart from some plain image links) have a link to all other pages, content has been kept precise and to the point, no over bloating with keywords etc, this is all I can think of doing, anything I am missing that can help?
also how long and when will google index the site, its been a couple days now since I put in my request and nothing so far.
Doesnât sound like youâre missing anything at the moment. SEO is a long process and will require ongoing work. That might be an few hours every month or hundreds of hours every month, depends on your goals and competition.
Google will show up. Even after your site is crawled it may take a few days to be indexed. Donât be surprised if your entire site isnât indexed right away, either. Do you use Google Webmasters Tools? It not, itâs worth a look. Youâll be able to see when Google crawls your site and even submit an XML sitemap. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com is a good place to get one, name it sitemap.xml and place it in your document root. Something like example.com/sitemap.xml.
If youâre really interested in speeding up the process of getting your site crawled, try posting a few links on Twitter of Facebook. Those get picked up fairly quickly as search engines see it as new or useful content. Just donât expect those links to be of much use for you in terms of SEO though.
SEO is an ongoing process and right about now I am finding out that if you neglect it, you will lose traffic to your sites. I wouldnât worry so much about changing content. My main site has a lot of content and it seems to be now that even if I update it with more content, that isnât as important as building backlinks for it, so I am focusing on that now. I would make sure to use meta tags and try to optimize the pages and the home page as much as possible though.
Make sure to cheat your keywords into the content. For example, I have a site about a U2 Tribute Band. We use the phrase âU2 Tribute Bandâ in the site as much as possibleâŚputting it in the text more often then perhaps good prose would suggest. Also, make sure that key phrase is in the title tag and description.
Well I probably dis agree with you. Having a links to another website cannot downgrade your own site and cannot look it cheap. This is what SEOâs work is to get more backlinks from another website but you should make sure that the site you have submitted has no penalty by GoogleâŚ
JeffWalden is very right about contents change and rank improvement. Static website enjoy good ranking, after getting good ranking static website dont need the change of contents as against these content website enjoy ranking. If you change the contents then may be search engine dont like your change.
You have know the impact of changing contents. Secondly for improving the ranking you need to be very good in SEO basic, Static website enjoy good ranking on search engine if they are optimized well both in terms of on-page and off-pageâŚ
Keywords, Iâll agree with you on, but <meta description> is a vital tag to include, because that is what usually shows in the snippet on the results page. It wonât improve your ranking, but it can make a huge difference to your click-through rate if youâve got a well-crafted description rather than Googlesâs generated extract.
thanks for all the help, I have another question, I recently changed the site as it started to show in google and I thought I could boost the page rank.
some searches its coming up top, but these searches are a little too specific, so first thing I noticed in the header tag I had a typo, I had one letter before it should be, google has now picked this up as a keyword, I have since changed it however google has the old keyword still and has not added the new, it has been a couple of days, the keyword was relating to a place âBirminghamâ wich is a extremely important key word for the site, this is also very popular with about a million and 1 other sites though.
my question is will google find this new content and replace the misspelled word with this new one (other one being very unique as it was a mistake :P) if so how long will it take, will the old keyword stay there even though there is no reference to it at all now and any idea if the new keyword as it is also within the content of the pages alot replace this?
second question, I added the H1 tag to the first part of the front page main content (out of 2 parts) this contained a fair bit of content about couple hundred words, I changed this at the same time as the spelling mistake and I swear the rating has gone down for some searches, somewhat expected this as I was trying to give too many keywords to google, I have now removed the H1 tag and currently thinking of where and how to use it, however I am wondering if this has now permanently or long-termly effected the sites rating, (I gather this is the cause and its not due to having one less unique wrongly spelt word on all header tags of the site)
Google will in time update its index, but donât expect instant service, it may take a few days, even weeks sometimes. Thereâs not much more you can do now except be patient. Itâs unlikely that there will be many people searching for âbimringhamâ, and those that do will probably see the message âDo you mean birmingham?â first and click on that before looking at the results.
second question, I added the H1 tag to the first part of the front page main content (out of 2 parts) this contained a fair bit of content about couple hundred words, I changed this at the same time as the spelling mistake and I swear the rating has gone down for some searches, somewhat expected this as I was trying to give too many keywords to google, I have now removed the H1 tag and currently thinking of where and how to use it, however I am wondering if this has now permanently or long-termly effected the sites rating, (I gather this is the cause and its not due to having one less unique wrongly spelt word on all header tags of the site)
200 words is definitely not a top-level heading, and putting that much text into an <h1> is a bad plan, because what it tells Google is that it canât trust you ⌠it canât trust you to use heading and other markup tags appropriately, and therefore it will treat anything in heading tags, and probably anything in bold, strong or any other kind of âstand outâ tags as plain, regular, basic, unadorned text ⌠so itâs no wonder that your site fell in the rankings.
The good news is that Google doesnât hold a grudge about things like that, and once youâve fixed the mistake, shown that you can do things properly for a little while and given it time to get its index back in shape, you should see your rankings pick back up.
So, the two morals of the story ⌠one, always check your spelling, especially on key words and headings, because Google isnât the only visitor who is going to turn away in disgust if you canât spell your own city name properly ⌠two, use markup tags as they are supposed to be used, donât just keyword stuff them with whole paragraphs.
Thanks for the feedback, went and saw my friend about the site today, explained what happened, he a little impatient but hay, told him I was new at this.
the spelling was in the meta tags so the end user wouldnât see it as such I had copied and pasted this to all sub-pages so was a fairly big mistake :P, all fixed now with some more improvements I thought up of, if they work will post back, donât want to look like a complete idiot
I was reading this thread i came across a term âGOOGLE PANDAâ , i am a bit confused and not able to understand what Google panda is ?
Please can anyone explain it me in a proper manner.
I apologize if i am asking wrong question in wrong thread. Moderators please forgive me
