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My site is pretty well placed in the major directories but I just can't seem to get anywhere near my older/main competitors on keyword searches. I have studied what they are doing but there are many things I can't emulate because where they have straight html sites mine is all asp (we are talking directory sites) and they have subdomain(?) submissions for each directory entity, and every other page on their site, which allows them to present all sorts of keyword combinations in each page title & keyword tags. (I guess I don't know that they haven't just let the spiders pick all these up, but either way the net result is they manage to claim vast numbers of the top 50+ results, which must p*ss off the users. I don't want to bombard the search results - I have too much empathy for the poor user - but I want to get in there somewhere. Is that the only way?)
Sorry, my specific questions are kind of all over the place, but here goes:
All else being, equal will my older competitors always have age ranking preferences?
I don't have any position analysis software - is it possibly to query a SE manually to find out my ranking (I know I'm indexed but can't find my site it's so buried? Or do I have to get TD or WPG to do this?
(This might be a really dumb one)Can or should I resubmit my default page everytime I tweak the title or metatags, or am I supposed to wait to be re-spidered?
(A more philosophical one) Is the only way to be successful i.e. highly ranked mean subverting your brand name and identity because you have to swamp your title with keywords?
Am I just too naive?
All words of wisdom and encouragement greatly appreciated!
cherryl
As far as age, from what I've seen, Altavista prefers older, more stable sites, but I couldn't say about the rest for sure.
I'm not sure on TD, but WPG just submits a query, the same as any user, and hunts through the results for your domain name. So, you can definitely do that manually, :)
The resubmittal goes along with the age question. Some engines don't like a lot of submissions and prefer to spider your page on their own, while others like to know that your site gets updated every once in a while.
As far as the title, well, from what I've seen, it's just one small part of the whole page, so you probably don't have to swamp it with keywords as long as the rest of your page is optimized.
I don't know how much this helps, but maybe my response will help trigger info from the *experts* around here. :)
Anyway, it's got great info on the major engines and might help you get started a little better than my previous reply. hehe
Oh, a site I just found by accident is pretty neat, too. It's from one of the backend Lycos programmers. Here's the url: [256.com...]
When I asked about manually querying a ranking in a search engine I was looking for something a bit faster than eyeballing the first couple hundred results.
I have now read the thread about Themes which was quite an eye opener. All this time I've been concentrating on my index page ranking. But I'm a bit flumoxed (never used that word before!) about how I could do anything to improve my site in this direction without starting over.
I have another question about keyword density and Brett's minialgo for keywords. I don't understand the reason for wanting to keep the density under 10% for good keywords. Doesn't higher density get better results?
>All else being, equal will my older competitors always have age ranking preferences?
Not necessarily. But an 'elder' site may have acquired more incoming links, have click popularity, or been passed to (or paid to be in) a higher level database.
From what you describe, it sounds as if your competitors are covering many of the 'better' techniques re optimization, such as subdomains and keyword combinations. The phrase "they have straight html sites mine is all asp" caught my attention as a possible problem area, too. And, they might be cloaking.
>subverting your brand name and identity because you have to swamp your title with keywords?
IMO, yes.
