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Well, as so many of us do, I read GGs comments carefully, read them again, looked between the lines, tried to work out what they said, and more importantly what they didn't say. The "I wouldn't worry about xxx" comments were always noted by me as being 100% good advice!
Here are some of the things that I did to my smallest website...
I went after links - of course - but since it's a minority topic I had minimal success. I got a bit dispirited at first - a feeling of me against the world, but hey, on the grounds that there's more ways of killing a cat than permanently redirecting it, I did all the other things...
I tried DMOZ but there's no editor on the pages I want, and I've tried Yahoo. Zilch.
I got into Zeal UK after completing their quiz - that was a fun time! That has the side effect of getting me to the top of MSN UK from seventh.
I swapped from <FONT= to CSS, which cleaned up the code greatly, and I did that dodge of making the left hand navigation panel in the main table appear below the page text, by adding a spacer cell above it.
With the CSS working, I stripped out all the Javascript rollovers and did CSS hover instead, which meant I had proper anchor links on the navigation, and I added TITLE= for IE users.
The CSS made it easier to use a nice looking <H1> at the top of each page, and these tied in with the page titles more closely than they used to. I put some META description in as well, in case Google's snippet was the top part of the page - it reads better that way.
Having seen google offer up a URL for a low-level page of mine that had a bizarre filename, when I searched for that bizarre name (which was nowhere else on my site), I decided that there was some mileage in getting a better filename convention going for my pages so that the pages that focus on keyword "derekh-widget" are in a directory called derekh-widget, and yes, I'm happy with hyphens!
This site uses a Free ISP so I can't use a 301 - all the old pages were replaced by a message and a Meta Refresh to the new pages, and I added a <NOINDEX, FOLLOW> - I'll wait for them to leave the index. At first, I set the refresh time to zero (it still took over a second on my browser), but google was putting the redirected content into a SERPS for the old file. So I've slowed the refresh down and I've got to wait again.
In the same way, all my images that used to have the date on as follows... yymmddwidget.jpg are now called yymmdd-widget.jpg and they have an ALT that's been more carefully chosen so that the image ALT makes sense out of context (eg on a SERPS) as well as while the page is loading.
The new names are easier on the eye in dreamweaver too.
I added more content.
I brought in a hierarchical navigation scheme so that I can keep the PR where I want it (not that the PR is much to shout about, but I can stop it sinking too far down into the site).
I added more forms where visitors can get in touch.
I changed my logo into a button that takes one to the home page, and put a better ALT on it (it's the first thing on each page, and so often appears in the SERPS
I put a breadcrumb on every page to show where in the site the user is, and by matching the navigation button name to the breadcrumb to the page content, I can get better discrimination on keywords, and the breadcrumb means I could get rid of the personalisation of each navigation bar to indicate where the viewer was in my site.
I come top out of 613,000 for the two word phrase I wanted, and one word plus my county name gets me to number 3 so I can catch regional traffic too.
Then I put some effort into making sure that someone would click on my site when they saw it. Not all that lot has percolated through yet, but Google offers two lines or so in which to interest the person reading the SERPS. I try to use them better - if Google picks out the most relevant sentence on my webpage, I try to make that sentence say everything I want!
I looked wider - I starting using ixquick.com to see what other SEs didn't like my site - the latest pages are still to be indexed by other engines, it seems. And I looked at how inviting the entries were when my site appeared on other search engines (pretty naff, some of them!) so I did what I could to clean those up too.
But, as I said in another thread, what has bemused me is that one site of mine has done well and all the pages are freshed up and in the cache except the index page, which is still stale, as at April 25th, and I've no idea why.
So there we are - a small site by most standards, and I hope I don't come across as over-confident with it - all I did was to rework my site, and I have to say that the HTML is much more pleasing to the eye now than it was, and I hope to god that the content is too!
And I'm embarrassed to say, I actually enjoyed do it!
Best regards DerekH
They mean that the text in links to the page is the same as the title and the same as the text in the page header (H1 HTML tag).
Yahoo and DMOZ both are good examples of this.
Home : Sports : Racket Sports : Tennis
Hope that helps
thanks for sharing, Derek.
I will add a few more.
The last few sites I designed got into google before I was finished and it took about 2 months for them to update the cache so I installed an Index.no.follow tag until I was ready to list the site.
Also when I listed the site with search engines and directories (I do it all manually) I started with smaller ones that list a site immediately and I saved Google for last. That way Google will hopefully pick up some of those links and give it a better ranking.
I also try to get a site done before the 15th or end of the month when Google is likely to crawl my site and pick up the new links.
My newest site only had 2 links to it other than the search engines and it was picked up by google within 10 days. But, as someone mentioned--it was the keywords on some inside pages that ranked the highest.
PS. I am also switching all my sites over to CSS and removing JS in the menu mouseovers and using CSS instead. I'm trying everything I can to make my sites more accessible to all users as Dereck has suggested and I think that's why my sites are doing so well with google.
Thanks for eliminating my ignorance (at least about that). I appreciate the explanation.
Harwich
To me that makes sense for a focused page?
Thanks
Harwich
100%allinanchor=alltoyourindexpage=allintitle=allinH1 may be the issue. That = too focused maybe to be natural.
Changing the allintext and having links to secondary pages is not bad thing in any book, right ;-)
I'm thinking a simple clearly understood title is best. Plus I think people are more likely to click on a site with a real title instead of a long spammy title.
So I would say the best thing I've done of late for my sites is to make nice clear titles.
Can you (or anyone) elaborate on SE tactical advantage of breadcrumbs?
Home > Widgets > Blue Widgets > Deep Blue Widgets
In this example "Widgets > Blue Widgets" = Keyword rich Anchor text
Deep Blue Widgets = target keyword occurance
