Newbie needs help on search engine results

[charline181]

My site is listed on Google and Yahoo; however, in order for it to come up in a search you have to search for more than one word. I don't know the rules here so I don't know how specific I can be. My site is for my community and if you just search for the community name we don't show up; however, if you search for my community name and news we are first. If you search for my entire site name it is first, however, most people wouldn't add the secondary part of the title. Any suggestions?

[takagi]

Hi charline181, Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

In the blue bar at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), Google shows a number of pages that matched the search query. So if I search for say 'London' it says something like : "Results 1 - 10 of about 31,900,000". With almost 32 million pages, that keyword is very competiteve. What is the number you see when you search for your keyword (i.e. the community name)?

To do better on the search for a keyword, you have to convince Google that the topic of your page/site is that keyword. So it should be in the title; if possible the first word of a short title. The keyword should occur a few times on the page (keyword density) preferably at the top of the page in a big font (with a so called H1 tag). You should try to get links to your page with a link text containing the keyword.

[charline181]

Thanks for the quick response.

There are 72,800 results when searching for our community name on Google.

I think our problem is that our community name is in our web site title but runs together with 2 other words so it doesn't show up as just the community name. Make sense?

I have the community name on the front page several times, and it is in our Meta Tags (although I have read on here that those aren't the key anymore)

Could you ellaborate on the H1 Tag?

[takagi]

See it like this: the title has now 3 words and one of them is the keyword. So 33% of the title is you keyword. If you remove the other 2 words, it is 100%.

By the way, a title like 'WebmasterWorld News' contains 2 words, 'Webmaster World News' contains 3 words. Don't expect Google to break up the words.

Another point is that being in the first page of the SERP, does not automatically mean people will click on the link to your site. So the title still has to convince a potential visitor that your page is the kind of page they were looking for.

As for the H1-tag, that is some HTML code that results in the text to be displayed in a huge font.

[charline181]

Thanks!

I will check into getting the title broken up into 3 separate words.