Search engines - good listings?

[Red Mancunian]

Any of me buddies here know how I can get my business website near the top of search engine results?

Sometimes it appears near the top, and on others it's well down the list, depending on what you search for.

Anyone know how I can 'move it up', (oo-er) if ya know what I mean?

I'll post details of my site and stuff here if anyone can help.

Cheers m8ys...

[doolz]

hmm aint it all to do with ya metatags ?

[fugjostle]

heh

This is the second time you've ask this

Have a look at my reply, you probably never saw it cause I replied much later than I should have done

http://209.151.69.242/forum/showthre...&threadid=8444

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Fug

[Red Mancunian]

Thanks fug.

I don't seem to be having much luck, maybe someone can help me with these meta thingies...

Here's my site: www.bradbell.co.uk (don't laugh, I'm not a web designer, and I don't have much time to spend on it!).

The best search string I could hope to be listed at number one with would be "PAT testing".

Putting this in www.msn.co.uk puts this site first: http://www.apelectricalcontractors.co.uk/

Yet their meta tags don't seem any more relevant than mine.

( My site is listed 17th... )

Putting"PAT testing for colleges" in gives a favourable result :p

"PAT testing for schools" lists me as 3rd...

Is it anything to do with the number of referrals the seach engine makes? ie, if people click on one result more than others, the search engine will rate it higher?

If I'm not making too much sense, it's for 2 reasons:

(1) I don't know what I'm talking about.
(2) I've been on the k1664.

Cheers

[fugjostle]

Well... step 1 is to get your site submitted to the engines... this guarantee's you nothing. Just cause your listed doesn't mean you going to come near the top even if you are the most relevant.

You need to optimise your page for a search engine. Do note that a top ten ranking is pretty good going, many strive just for that. The number 1 rank is a tricky place to be. You need to alter you page so that the web spiders that will trawl through your site will look upon it favourably.

If you want your site to get listed immediately then you should get your boss to fork out a 'search engine submission' budget This will get the spiders coming to you first but you would be looking at a 1 off annual fee of about $700 for the all the main engines.

You need to write a good 25 word or less description of your site and ensure that the words you want to be searched on appear in that description. Be basic... don't write:

"Bradbell - specialising in Portable Appliance Testing for business, organisations, schools and colleges. We provide a service which will enable your organisation to conform to current legislation - the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974."

but

"PAT (Portable Appliance Test) for business, organisations, schools and colleges conforming to Health and Safety at Work Act 1974"

Make sure your target keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page title is most important. The main reason many sites get poor ranked is due to the lack of target keywords in the title.

Try changing your title from:

"<title>Bradbell - Portable Appliance Testing (PAT)</title>"

to:

"<title>PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) from Bradbell </title>"

Sounds dumb but you need keywords mentioned first.

Be very careful with tables... a human would see:

Item 1 PAT Testing
Item 2 Education
Item 3 School

The web spider would see:

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
PAT
Education
School

Your keywords have been moved down the page and are now less relevant. The same applies to large amounts of Javascript (you can hide this from spiders let me know if you want to know how).

And if your following me, you should now be saying... oops, my front page is a graphic. Thats probably why you getting poo rankings.

The key is to do the same thing on all your pages... get the key words mentioned at the top of the files.

The main meta tags to be concerned about are the keywords and description ones. In your keywords try to have something like:

"PAT, P.A.T., PAT Testing, Portable Appliance Testing, Appliance Testing, etc etc"

Don't use frames... that can be a pain in the arse for some spiders and they will ignore it.

Good links can really help. This is what the spiders follow when indexing sites. Every search engine uses rank analysis cause this is one of the few things cannot be easily faked. Look at the guys who are higher than you in the listings... contact them and ask them to link to you and offer to link back. The more links you get the higher you get ranked..

You can try a few sneaky things like puts lots of keyword at the top of the html but make the text the same colour as the background. This may work but engines are getting wise to this.

There's much more but I'm getting tired off typing

I hope some of this helps... if you have a specific issue I can try to help but if I ramble on I'm going to go insane.

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Fug

[butty]

some good info there fug buddy - helped me out there for when i next update the site

osa is slowly going up the search engines rankings - putting old skool in google n were right near the top of the second page i think when we get on the first page wel get a lot more visitors

[Red Mancunian]

Cheers fug mate, you know yer stuff fella!

Better get re-doing my page titles and stuff...

Cheers matey