despite trying, submitting site maps etc my ranking seems to have gone down, all I’m expecting people to do is type in to Google “Design Southampton” and find me on (ideally) the first page but second or third would be OK but I’m down to page 8, even my secondary site
Sometime around 26/1/09 (at 02:16 -0500) Roger Burton said:
all I’m expecting people to do is type in to Google “Design
Southampton” and find me on (ideally) the first page but second or
third would be OK but I’m down to page 8
Out of roughly 5 million results (according to Google at the moment)?
That’s not so bad, really. As Dave just said, that search term is
perhaps a little on the general side.
Also, when I searched for “site:www.rogerburton.co.uk” in Google I
got a whole load of pages that weren’t much to do with design and
southampton, or at least not design as such. ‘House for sale’,
‘holiday photographs’, ‘Photoshop and After Effects training’,
‘jigsaw’, ‘birthday’, ‘DVD authoring’, ‘Christmas card’, and so on.
All these things are fine in terms of real life, but they don’t help
Google see your site as authorative in the subject of design or
design consultancy. In fact, there seem to be far more indexed pages
about Ethelburt Avenue than anything else! (And searching for
Ethelburt Southampton brings your site up at slot number 3 on page 1.
And slot 4.
For instance if you want to get found on “web design southhampton”, why not start a new page and call it “web design southhampton” and make sure your talk about this subject on the page. make the file name web-design-southhampton.html. Make a link from you home page to this page. See what happens after that.
You will be competing against many clever other web design companies, that are not even in that area doing similar things, so it won’t be easy. Also consider other searches like your 3D or video work that might bring in traffic.
despite trying, submitting site maps etc my ranking seems to have gone down, all I’m expecting people to do is type in to Google “Design Southampton” and find me on (ideally) the first page but second or third would be OK but I’m down to page 8, even my secondary site
despite trying, submitting site maps etc my ranking seems to have gone down, all I’m expecting people to do is type in to Google “Design Southampton” and find me on (ideally) the first page but second or third would be OK but I’m down to page 8, even my secondary site
You come in second there (first in the maps section which is the first
thing my eye was drawn to) which isn’t bad at all, especially since
the first hit is a directory site. A couple of things you can do to
try and appear first are:
Change your profile in the directory site. I searched for your name on http://www.touchsouthampton.co.uk
(the site that is first in the search results page) and you are on
there, just not under design consultants. If you add that to your
business type then there is every chance you will appear at the top.
Add more instances of common keywords. Look at the first result, the
word “Southampton” appears five times which adds extra clout to a
search. Take a look at the description meta tag they’re using and do
something similar with yours.
Hope this helps.
Joe
On 26 Jan 2009, at 09:04, DeltaDave wrote:
What I would say Roger is that ‘Design Southampton’ is pretty vague
as far as search terms go to start with.
What sort of Design?
Bear in mind that using a search term like ‘Southampton’ is going to
bring in thousands, nay millions of results.
I wouldn’t be too discouraged by your result with such vague terms
as these.
This file name is “video%20content%20page%20southam.html”
Freeway will truncate long file names. This can be adjusted in the
Document Setup dialog; click the Output tab abd change the Max
Filename Length to something greater than 21.
But Freeway will only output file names with spaces if you edit the
page’s File field directly. This is not a good idea at all. Use
dashes or underscores to break words up within a page file name.
(Spaces are file in the page title, just not the file name.)
(And BTW, a little while ago I saw tests that determined that Google
prefers dashes to underscores when it comes to treating and finding
parts of file names as individual words in its indexes.)
So impressed, thank you both Daves, keith and Joe, I was feeling a little down this morning but you’ve all cheered me up and I’ll apply your comments. I’ve been away from Fway for a few weeks (I’m trying to learn Cinema 4D and it’s stretching my brain a bit so I’m having a break from it for a couple of days) … very good of you all. Roger
