Search Engine Optimisation tips please...

[SlightlyMadShrek]

OK. We are currently on page 5 of the google listings for the search term

"driving school place". Would liek to bump it up a bit.

I know it all used to be in the meta tags, but google claim that is not important now.

One competitor which is doing very well in the rankings has 3 domain names, has registered their business at 4+ addresses for google maps(but only actually have 2 bona fide addresses ).

They also have hte term driving school village 1, driving school village2, driving school village3, driving instructor village1, driving instructor village2 etc... in their meta tags. (about 15+ villages).

Is it really that simple? I thought that too many repitions of a keyword/phrase actually gave you a negative page rank?

Maybe I am just a bit confused.

[GeekBoy]

what's the URL of the competitor?

Meta-tags and meta description are still important in the overall context of a page which should have a clearly defined hierarchy (in the same way that well written offline articles have a single primary heading, multiple sub-headings, body content, lists, etc.

One things Google does take into account is authority on a given subject. You can increase your authority on a subject by being linked to by other pages - so get your site up and about on local listings, yell, DMOZ, etc.

SEO can be relatively simple but it's a case of having a well constructed site, highly relevant pages (don't write about a lots of things on one page - split them out and link to them). Annotate the main Google map to stick your driving school on it, get in the local online press (new driving school type article, your unique features etc. get linked to)

Sorry about the spouting of info, get in touch if you want something more specific..

Repetitions of key words can be detrimental but "driving instructor burnley" and "driving instructor birmingham" are two distinct keywords/phrases - there is no repetition.

SEO isn't really my thing. User experience, back-end architecture, page semantics and structure and building online communities are more my bag..

[SlightlyMadShrek]

On my way out. Will read your message properly when tomorrow.

The competitor is on my profile if you offewr comments on their strategy, as is my email

[nannynick]

Ideally you need to establish what people actually search for. This can be very hard - though your weblogs / statistics may help give some indicators... certainly will show what search phrases are currently getting you traffic. By looking at your current statistics you may find that there are certain phrases which are more commonly used... for example, is 'driving lessons' or 'driving school' more popular.

"driving school loughborough" sounds a reasonable search phrase... but is likely to be highly competitive. Google found me 202,000 results, for the phrase not in quotes. With quotes around the phrase, Google gave me 348 results.

Google will count words appearing in the page URL... so having a page called driving-lessons-in-loughborough.html may be indexed by Google and ranked quite well for an exact match for "driving lessons in loughborough". The phrase would also need to occur in the body text and ideally also in Header H1.

[GeekBoy]

Oooh, just thought - how long has your site been up and running?

[SlightlyMadShrek]

Site has been up and running 15m-ish.

It has just been completely overhauled though.

Would the font size=h1 have priority over size=20px (for example)?

SO on the keywords thing, do strings of text sperated by commas count as seperate 'keywords' even though they are actually a phrase?

[SlightlyMadShrek]

Oh and I have submitted it to local driving school listings/gumtree etc. although some of them have yet to appear IYSWIM.

[GeekBoy]

I'll drop you an email later SMS. I've got to write a summary for one of our clients sites so I'll rip bits of it out and forward on to you.

[opinionateddad]

15mins.... spiders take time to find the data in the metatags,.... this can take hours, days or even weeks (the www is a big place)...

Metatags are important so fill your boots with keywords and the sit back and be patient...

It is also worth noting that number of hits is also part of the ranking process.. some companies make to pay them and claim they can move you up the tree... all they do is sit there hitting your website for a few thousand click and take the money..

[SlightlyMadShrek]

That would be useful GB.

I have read all the online SEO 'guides', meta-tags, links, back-links, link-throughs (with decent time spent)....

...but putting it all into practice, where do I start?

Should I just posta link on MN and hope that gives me a good page-rank, then tell everyone on here to google a phrase then find me....70K MNetters must be able to bump me

[SlightlyMadShrek]

Yes my size is in my css, but not as a h1 class, but I am still dependant on my crappy template driven site ATM. And my size isn't defined by h1 etc. but a descriptive name (e.g class="company", "slogan" etc...)

Am I right in thinking that the h1 class etc. is more 'powerful' than a size based on px, pt etc.? Also that the h1 class is going to be more powerful than ...

SMS stops waffling....

what I am trying to ask..is he h1, h2, h3... class superior over any other style/class descriptor?

We have registered with a number of directories, but most of them charge a subscription service to put a link on there site rather than just a telephone number and name...so that doesn't actually help....

Also I was worried about putting too many repetions of "driving instructor" "driving school" etc. as I thought that if the keyword density is too high that is baaaad.

....wanders off carrying "Basics of html"...still with lots to learn.

[whomovedmychocolate]

SMS - SEO is my thing -used to work for Google. But I'm v tired at the mo and have only just seen this....let me find you a link to help......

here

[SlightlyMadShrek]

I saw that table and it made my head spin a little but as I didn't know where to start....

...will devote some time to that table tomorrow.

[Baddaughterinlaw]

Who moved, where do you live, you sound like a very useful person to find!

[whomovedmychocolate]

These days I live in Oxfordshire. Sorry I'm pregnant and have a bad cold so I'm not being very communicative. Will try and check back in later and explain SMS.

[WendyWeber]

This thread is like reading German or something...

Geeks!

[whomovedmychocolate]

Thanks Lapin but pregnant so can't have the Sudafed. Am settling for tea and sympathy from DH. He's good at that.

Wendy - some of us speak pure geek, I'm more prone to a nerdesque patois.

SMS tell me which terms you don't understand from the table and I'll try and explain them in broad terms.

[GeekBoy]

hey SMS - you should definitely be trying to move away from (by the sounds of it) a badly templated site. Pages should have a clearly defined hierarchy (as previously mentioned.)

Taking the link from wmmc above and looking at some of the top tips, imagine you have a page about your driving school. Using the good domain, good url, good keywords, good description, good hierarchy tips it might look like

Domain/URL www.shreksdrivingschool.com/about_shreks_driving_school
title : About Shreks driving school
Keywords : Shreks driving school, driving lessons, driving lessons in the swamp
Description : Need to learn to drive in a swamp? Shreks driving school is number 1 in the swamp.

h1About Shreks driving school - (should match the page title)
h2 Why are we different
Learning to drive in a swamp is never easy. Here at Shreks driving school blah, blah, blah, blah ,etc
h2 History
We've been teaching gnomes,princesses,dwarves and other magical creatures to drive safely and avoid accidents with swamp donkeys since 1999. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah

Obviously you might want to replace blah, blah, blah with better words but you should get the idea.

H1 and Title tag content should match - H1 and Title are essentially the same as the headline in a newspaper/magazine. Sub-headings are defined by h2,h3,h4,etc. Content should have relevance to the title, keywords should have high relevance to the content and title etc. The more you can tie the elements together, the more relevant a page will appear.

Take heed of the last link LL posted - avoid using 'Click here' links - link the words that relate to the page you're linking - even better if they match the title of the page they're linking to.

Don't use images without ALT tags - search engines don't see images - they DO see the ALT tags. Make the alt tags descriptive relevant to the page .

As the article suggests at the end, SEO doesn't just depend on page structure, following rules, etc! If you could nail SEO google etc would just have to break it again in order to make money (everyone can't appear at number 1 in the results for the same query).

Using classes to define styles that are externalised into a stylesheet is a good idea. Styles are exactly that though - they define style NOT hierarchy/importance.

hope some of that made some sense. wmmc, please correct any mistakes if I've said something glaringly wrong!

One thing you should be doing is using something like Google analytics to see who is coming to your site, what they're looking at, how long they're staying etc. That way you can look at improving your content/page structure/links etc.

With GA, you'll be able to see what search terms lead people to your site. That might give you the confidenc.e to start using adSense

Got to run..

[SlightlyMadShrek]

Right this is getting really useful, but first I have to say that I didn't realise google had proper people, I thought it was just a nest of spiders making their nest on some big server somewhere .

Right I have a plan...

1. Improve my URLs. Domain name is OK, could improve the individual page URLs though...
2. Improve my title tags - can deffo do, and deffo see room for improvment
3. Add ALT tags, they are all blank ATM
4. I can also tweak the page content as I have realised that I could use the phrase driving instructor more (I often refer to just "instructor", and add a few "driving school" references as ATM I am just referring to the school as "Shrek's".

I am still confused about optimising the value of hte metatags.

According to WMMCs link there is a limit on 10 keywords, and 200words in description. Repetition is also peanlised. That means that stuffing the meta keywords full with "driving lessons far far away, driving lessons swamp, driving lessons far far far away, driving instructor far far away, driving instructor swamp, driving instructor far far far away" is surely going to be bad because it is stuffing no??? Surely the example on my profile (didn't want to post it in thread as I didn't want them to benefit from a good pagerank link in IYSWIM ) is a bad example of metatag use?

Also - are subscribing to national driving school lists like Lapin suggested not just an example of using a Link farm which is reportedly bad?

I am using programs like Awstats (and others, all provided by my host) to monitor search terms. Problem is the hits are coming in from generic phrases like "where can I get a provisional licence?" I want them to come in from "driving school swamp" or "driving instructor swamp", but because I am on page 5+ for those queries the clicks don't come through to me, they go to my competitors. I am assuming that I can't just google and click on myself all day as it won't count because I will be identified as 1 visitor by cookies/isp?

[SlightlyMadShrek]

Oh and I know my templates driven html is crap (I have already had a lecture from LL ). I am working towards designing my site from scratch, but that is going to take time. I have to put up with the template for the time being.

[GeekBoy]

can you add/alter your templates?

if you want another opinion drop me a line with your URL at

familyt at mac dot com