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.

oh... ...national driving school list is directory not a link farm so no problems there...

I wasn't necessarily highlighting the specific one LL linked to...I was thinking about the principle. What defines the difference between a directory and link farm?

I am happy to sort out my templates (it is a very basic site). I knwo how much web-designers charge and can't afford to pay for one when I have something which is servicable myself - at least as far as the end user is concerned. I just need to sort everything out behind the scenes.

I have essentially created my own template, but the coding that gets put behind it automatically is crap.

I can see exactly what changes I need to make though to tidy it up (I have one of Lapins fine examples to guide me ), but will shout one of you if I get stuck .

SMS template based design isn't always a problem and it's 10 keywords PER PAGE not per site remember! You can have multiple landing pages.

Personally I'd be searching for 'driving lessons' in an area though.

quite happy to take a look or comment templates for the grand total of £0 if it's only a little site.. ..it'll take my mind of the 1000s lines of code I'm plodding through.... ;-)

LL said teh same.....but I know how much such a service should cost me, and feel it would be very rude of me to ask.

I may be back if I have a specific problem though

And "driving lessons" was the 3rd variant I could have included (and will readdress)

you're not asking though!! Have fun..

Come back.......

I have addressed titles
I have addressed metatags

Now I am looking at my links in.

Using this site I have determined how many links in are recorded by the search engines for myself and our competitors.

We have a grand total of 1 link in registered on google, 4 on Yahoo/altavista etc. (incidently the main 'google' competitor has 0 google registered links in, but they are still top )

Most competitors only have

Yahoo is ahem less discerning in avoiding link farms.

BTW, you ought to do a site search (type in site:yoururl.com into google) and see what is already crawled to assess how you are doing. Often people are surprised to find how much is not crawled or that what is crawled is showing up not quite how they'd expect

I had done that. I think I have 10 pages and 9 have been crawled, so doing OK there I think - at least with google.

BUT looking at the last crawl date it was before my major overhaul.

Is there any way to ensure that all of my pages get crawled sooner rather than later?

By the way have I ever tikd you how much I love chocolate

Sitemaps are useful in telling Google what's on your site. You can also use a metatag to show when it was last updated...

I didn't think Sitemaps were necessary/important as long as all pages were linked to all others on your site (I have a menu on every page which links to all internal pages)?

OK another inane/boring question...

According to Google web-master tools I was last Indexed on 31 Jan

According to my hosts web stats I was last crawled by googlebot last night (and have been crawled 8 times in Feb).

Why is there a discrepancy?
Is Indexing a collation of the data and therefore delayed? How often does indexing take place?

You'll see that Google recommend sitemaps to tell it every piece of content you have. You can also use them to let the Googlebot know how often content should be crawled.

You'll almost certainly get a visit from Googlebot poking to see if anything has changed - might not necessarily crawl during a visit.

You should also remember that user-agents can be user specified so and I'd go with when Google said it crawled rather than when a site detected something with the useragent string set to Googlebot visited...

This thread ranks higher than my own page

But it hasn't been indexed since my (hopeful)improvements.

Thankyou all.

I have now beein re-indexed and boosted myself 10 pages up the google listings.

I have just made another quite significant change too regarding my keywords & headers, so may jump another page or two when I am next re-indexed..

Slowly but surely I will get there. At least I am out of double figres as far as the results pages are concerned

oh god i dont get that.