Hi & thanks in advance for your help!  I am desperate to get my site
up on Google, and have been trying for almost 2 months now.  I think
that Google is caching an old version of my site, before I updated it
with better keywords, title, description, etc. and therefore it is not
coming up.  It is frustrating to me that one of my main competitors
(www.jnebridal.com) comes up before me when you search "Discount
Bridal Service, San Diego), even though her site is new and has less
links from other sites than mine, and I think mine has more keywords
than hers!!  I really believe my site should come up first, especially
if you look at all the changes I have made on my site.  I have been
careful to avoid things that would discredit my site (i.e., too many
or multiple keywords, etc.)--but I have done something wrong?  Just
FYI, after making some keywords changes, my site did show up at the
top for this search for a just a day or two a couple of weeks ago, but
has since disappeared.  Please, any help you can give would be GREATLY
appreciated!  I have really tried to optimize my site, and if I'm
doing something wrong, I really need to know.  Thank you!!!

Hi, 

Looking at your site with a PR of 4 and her's with a PR of 2 it
doesn't seem right, but what decides the listing status of a page on
the query results is Page Relevance, and her's has it over yours. I
see you changed the title as Robert suggested. I was surprised he
didn't answer this for you, he's really good at this kind of thing,
but I can help you out with a few things and get you on track.

First off, it would be good to change your menu to an HTML menu system
rather than a Javascript menu system. That is keeping your relevance
down, and all the key words on those links are being ignored.

Second, you mentioned key words several times in your question. If you
are talking about the keywords in your META tags, then don't worry
much about those, they are ignored by Google and most of the other
Search Engines these days. Also the page description is ignored as
well. Too many websites use that area for spamming and trying to get a
listing in areas where they don't have any relevance in, so Google
just ignores the whole header area, except the title. The title is
looked at and given a higher priority on the page, as Robert
suggested.

Before I get into the ways of improving your Page Relevance for the
keywords "Discount Bridal Service, San Diego" are you sure anyone is
searching for you using that? Checking this out will help you preform
better. It doesn't help much if you show up first for a keyword set
that isn't being used by anyone.

I went to this site, on Overture, and although they don't get as much
usage as Google does, they do get quite a bit. According to this tool,
no one is searching for that on their engine. Taken with a grain of
salt, this is something to consider.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

The best thing to do is to look at your web logs, and to see what
people are using to find your website now. There is a good program for
this if you or if you have someone who knows Perl can install it on
your site. It gives great stats, and has all the graphics and bars you
would expect from a log stats program. However it also keeps track of
what search engines people are using to find you and which search
quires they are using to get there. Using a tool like this will help
you optimize your site in the right direction. It could be that those
are the best key words for your site, but why guess about it?

You can see the program in action at
http://www.lucidmatrix.com/cgi/awstats.cgi

Now, when you look at that, the graphics aren't going to be working on
that link, but that's the only way I can show it to you right now.
Normally it looks great.  The program is free and works really well.
You can get a copy of it at

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/


The market you are in on the Internet is huge. For the Keywords Bridal
Services  you show up at number 5, and that is a searched on query.
For many of your other phrases you are not showing up very high.
Google is searching and indexing your whole page. Using this query
"services include bridal gowns, bridesmaid dresses, veils,
invitations, tuxedo rentals " from the bottom of your front page you
show up first. So again, your whole page is being indexed.

The Headline, for lack of a better word, RSVP Bridal is in an image,
which isn't doing you much good like that. I would change that to an
<h> tag of some type, with some redesign in there to keep it looking
good. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can help with that quite a bit.

Although you have probably spent a great deal of time on your wording,
I would consider spending some more. First off, you need to know where
to focus, and like Robert says below, you will probably improve by the
beginning of next month, so my advice right now is to leave it alone
and see what happens, and to get your logs or install the AWSTats
logger as soon as possible so you have some data next month to work
with. After you have those two events, then start looking at the copy
of your web page with a robot in mind. Yes it needs to read well to
the viewers and visitors, but they need to find you too, before they
can read it (there is definitely a tight-rope to walk there).

Right now you have 221 words on the front page. For an optimized page
and Page Relevance you should have about 350-500 words on the front
page. Looking at the results where your Facts page comes up
illistrates this point rather well. When searching for "major bridal
manufacturers"

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=major+bridal+manufacturers

You come up number 2. 


Here are some links you may be interested in. 

Google Technology   
://www.google.com/technology/   
   
Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it   
http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html   
  
Google Under the Scope 
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm 
  
PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web 
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/ 
  
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine  
http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html  
 
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/searches.html 
 
 
Thanks

webadept-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by fogcity-ga on 08 Nov 2002 06:44 PST

I just wanted to say thank you for your indepth answer.  It's so nice
to have someone spend the time to really answer my question with some
true thought behind it :)  I'll definitely rate the answer and spend
some time using your tips.  I may have a question or two, but thanks
again SO much.
Karen

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 08 Nov 2002 10:31 PST

Hi, you are welcome and thanks for the comment.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by fogcity-ga on 11 Nov 2002 19:29 PST

Hi & thanks again for your indepth previous answer.  I still am
unclear on one point, though--re: Google's cache of my site and
whether or not this is effecting my page ranking.  If you search for
www.rsvpbridal.com and check Google's cache,  you can see that this is
the old version of my page from the verbage, which is prior to all the
changes I made to make it more search engine friendly, many of which
were made well over a month ago.  Does this mean that the last time
google crawled my site it was with this older, cached version?  That
would make sense as to why my site is ranking lower than sites like
www.jnebridal.com, which are showing up ranking higher than my site,
which doesn't seem possible since the changes I've made.

Is there any way to force Google to not use the cached version of my
page, and to refresh my site on it's next visit?  Most of my site has
changed since then.  I really think this would improve my listing
dramatically.  I think the last time my site was visited by Google was
well after I made many of my changes (which were made early in
October), and it still shows caching my old site, from the beginning
of October or earlier.

Any suggestions?  Thanks SO much!

Karen

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 11 Nov 2002 21:03 PST

Yes, you can stop a robot from cacheing your page by puting a tag in
the header which tells it not too. I don't recommend this, as it's not
really affecting your PR. At your level PR is probably calculated only
once a month. So any changes you made in the last few weeks are
probably not being looked at for PR yet. The cache is only there for
if you site is not availble to a searcher at that moment. This allows
people to see your site even though your site is down for what ever
reason.

If you wish to turn off the cacheing though, put this tag in the
Header of your page.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

or
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

See this page for more information
://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#cached

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Request for Answer Clarification by fogcity-ga on 12 Nov 2002 06:31 PST

Hi again, and thanks.  So, if I'm understanding this correctly, since
Google is showing the older version of my site in their cache, that
means it has not yet scanned the current, updated version of my site
for PR yet?  Even though I made those changes some time ago?  That
would make sense as to why www.jnebridal.com is coming up before me in
most of my searches, even thought I think I should have a higher PR
than her.  What I don't then understand is that I made my changes to
my site on or before the dates that she re-did hers, and her new site
is coming up, but mine is not.  Perhaps my site was unavailable to
Google during the last update (which I can't imagine?).  I just wanted
to make sure I didn't have to tell Google to refresh the cache so they
can see the new changes on my site.

What is really curious is my site did show up as no. 1 for a few days
about 2 weeks ago (under "Discount Bridal Service, San Diego"), with
the new version of my site showing, and has since disappeared and gone
back down to its original and current ranking.  Hmmm......  So then I
really don't understand why Google would have scanned my new site,
adjusted my ranking with it and then gone back to the previously
cached version with the lower PR.  Any ideas?

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 12 Nov 2002 11:13 PST

Hi, 

This is going to sound a bit scarce, but really it's common for this
to happen, especially for pages that rank 4 and below. The Google
Engine indexes and keeps track of over a billion pages. Literally.

What you want to do is to look in your logs for the last time the
googlebot showed up. You may be able to find this quickly in the
error_log since you don't have a robots.txt (something you should
change as well) Open the error_log and use the ctrl-f key search and
search for googlebot. Check the date that it was last there.

Really what you need to do is wait until the next real indexing, which
will probably happen near the beginning of December. See what happens
then. You've listed on DMOZ, and you have a pagerank of 4, which is
really good. It will all work out.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by fogcity-ga on 03 Dec 2002 06:25 PST

Hello!  I just wanted to say THANK YOU because I am now listed no. 1
in most of the categories I was interested in, and at least in the top
10 in the others.  I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to
help me out with this.   I hope you have a joyous holiday season :-)
Karen

Thanks for your answer, I'm implementing your suggestions and hope it helps!

Your site is fine, and is coming in at number 12 for the keywords you
mentioned. Most of the sites above you have either "discount bridal
service" or "san diego" in the title. The way that you have updated
your site will certainly improve things. It's probably just a case of
being patient, and i wouldn't be surpised if you were number one after
the next Google update (probably the end of this month).

It wouldn't hurt to mention a keyword or phrase in a <H1> tag, and in
my opinion a better title would read:

RSVP - Discount Bridal Service - San Diego

In my experience Google prefers titles which are smaller.