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Q: Review my site for search engine optimization ( Answered 5 out of 5 stars,   2 Comments )
Question  
Subject: Review my site for search engine optimization
Category: Computers > Internet
Asked by: reneewood-ga
List Price: $15.00
Posted: 13 Apr 2003 20:37 PDT
Expires: 13 May 2003 20:37 PDT
Question ID: 190164
I would like to request a website review of my site
(www.thecomfortcompany.net).  My keywords are: sympathy gift and
sympathy gifts.  My site is built with templates, so I am concerned
about its ability to be properly spidered.  I have the capability to
add html pages, I just don't understand html.  I am just wondering
what I can do optimize my pages for the search engines.  Are my ALT
tags okay or are they spammy?  Would I be ranked better if I listed
"Sympathy Gift" first in my page title?  Should I remove the commas
from my meta tag list? I shouldn't add comment tags, right?  I am very
new to SEO, so I am looking for some very basic ways to begin
optimizing my pages.  I understand the importance of backlinks and am
working on this.  I do follow the webmasterworld forum and seochat
forums.  Do you have any other resources I should be aware of?  Is
there a script where I can check my placement on multiple search
engines?  Are there more keywords I should target?  Is there any hope
for me?  If I never learn html, can a template-built site do well in
the search engines?  I would welcome any basic to intermediate SEO
tips you would be willing to offer.  Many thanks!
Answer  
Subject: Re: Review my site for search engine optimization
Answered By: aceresearcher-ga on 13 Apr 2003 21:49 PDT
Rated:5 out of 5 stars
 
Greetings, reneewood!

You have asked a great many questions. Bear in mind that one could
spend days -- and hundreds of pages -- answering them all in great
detail. For the purposes of this Question, I am going to answer them
in sufficient detail to meet your current needs, and within your
$15.00 fee.

1) Your "alt" tags are fine. Because Google and other Search Engines
index text -- and "alt" tags are text, it is recommended that you use
them for best search engine indexing. I might recommend that you
remove "sympathy gift..." from all your "alt" tags, since you have it
in the header on all your pages, so that only the name of the item is
in your "alt" tags. If you have labeled each image with its
description, the alt tags can certainly not be considered "spam".

2) Search Engines typically consider the first text words on a page to
be the most important. So yes, you may want to re-work your layout so
that "Sympathy Gift / Memorial Gift" are the first words on your page.
Also, because some Search Engines might have problems indexing the
word "Gift/Memorial" properly, I recommend that you insert a space
both before and after the slash, to make sure that search engines read
the words as "gift" and "memorial".

3) If your main words are "sympathy", "gift" and "gifts", you will
want to make sure that each of these words appears at least once ***in
the text*** on every one of your pages. Because some webmasters tried
to "stack" meta keywords tags with hundreds of unrelated keywords in
order to gain better ranking, Google and some other Search Engines no
longer pay attention to meta tags. However, some Search Engines still
do their indexing based on meta tags, so you do want to have them and
do a good job with them.

4) The commas in your meta keywords list are fine; however, you may
want to remove the trailing comma at the end. For best results, you
should list individual words as well as phrases, in case a web user
enters one but not both of your keywords: "sympathy, gift, gifts,
idea, ideas, memorial, memorials, condolence, condolences, comfort,
comforts, remembrance, remembrances, inspirational, company, jewelry,
candles, books, gemstone, sympathy gift, memorial gift, condolence
gift, memorial jewelry, garden stone, garden stones, inspirational
books, bracelet, gemstone bracelet"> should do the trick. Bear in mind
that if any single word ("gift" and "gifts" are different words)
appears more than 3 times in your keywords, subsequent occurrences are
likely to be ignored or even considered as spam.

5) Your "description" and "keywords" meta tags are really all the
comment tags you need.

6) You mention that you already use Webmaster World (
http://www.webmasterworld.com ) as a source for helpful information.

For more information on developing a Google-friendly website, I
recommend that you study the information in Google's Help Department:
://www.google.com/webmasters     
Guidelines     
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html     
Facts & Fiction (myths dispelled)     
://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html     
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)     
://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html     
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)     
://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html     
User Support Discussion Forum     
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general     
    
I also recommend the resources at Search Engine World:     
http://www.searchengineworld.com 

7) I do not recommend using scripts to check your search results
rankings. Search Engines can consider these "spamming" services, and
you run the risk of getting your site banned because of them.

Be wary of "submit-a-site", website "positioning", and "search engine
optimizer" services, and "link exchanges" (link farms). Such programs
(like WebPosition Gold and LinksToYou) are a good way to get your site
banned from Search Engines.

For Google, I recommend doing the following to check your search
rankings:
On the Google search page, click "Advanced Search" to go to the
Advanced Search form; enter the keyword(s) for which you want to check
your site's ranking in the Google search text box. Pull down "100
results" per page, and click "Google Search". This will bring results
up 100 at a time. You can use your browser's "Find" (usually <ctrl-F>)
function to look for "thecomfortcompany" (don't enter the quotes" to
see if you appear on a given page, and repeat to find any other
occurrences on that page.

8) Yes, there **is** hope for you. Stop stressing about your search
results, and just work calmly toward continuing to increase your
knowledge and improve your website.

9) I do not think that a template-built site will ever do as well in
the search engines as a site that you tweak and customize yourself.
However, you have already learned something about html, and you are
increasing your knowledge by making use of sites like Webmaster World.
Bear in mind that there is **NO** quick and easy fix to high placement
in search engines, regardless of what those flim-flam "SEO" companies
and link farms try to tell you. The rocket scientists at Google are
constantly becoming aware of the "tricks" these companies and other
webmasters try to use to improve their placement -- and tweaking the
Google algorithms to negate such tinkering.

To help you gain proficiency in html, I recommend that you make use of
the excellent WebMonkey Web Developer's resource site at
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey

10) You say that you are working on getting backward links for your
site. Remember that links from a few ***quality*** sites with related
themes who link to only a few other pages (including yours) will do
far more to improve your Page Rank than links from one hundred other
pages that link to hundreds of sites. You want to find pages with a PR
(Page Rank) of 4 or higher to link to yours; this will help increase
your own Page Rank.

For more information on how Google Page Ranking works, I encourage you
to
read the following excellent papers:

"The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works" by Ian Rogers, IPR
Computing Ltd. (Last edited: 16th May 2002):
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/index.html  
  
"PageRank Uncovered" by Chris Riding on the Search Engine Optimization
Support Forums website:
a page of explanation and examples: 
http://www.supportforums.org/pagerank 
"PageRank Uncovered" by Chris Ridings 
http://www.supportforums.org/PageRank.pdf 


If you take full advantage of all the resources listed above to
increase your knowledge and proficiency as a webmaster, I am confident
that you will see it pay off in improved Search Engine Results.


Before Rating my Answer, if you have any questions about this
information, please post a Request for Clarification, and I will be
glad to see what I can do for you.
   
Best Wishes on getting your website Ranking high, with lots of search
hits!
   
Regards,   
   
aceresearcher

Request for Answer Clarification by reneewood-ga on 14 Apr 2003 05:24 PDT
"If your main words are "sympathy", "gift" and "gifts", you will
want to make sure that each of these words appears at least once ***in
the text*** on every one of your pages."

So, does it appear that the "spider" can reach all of my pages?  I've
wondered because of the templates if freshbot/googlebot can access the
pages adequately and I don't know how to check its spiderability.

Clarification of Answer by aceresearcher-ga on 14 Apr 2003 06:19 PDT
<< So, does it appear that the "spider" can reach all of my pages? 
I've wondered because of the templates if freshbot/googlebot can
access the pages adequately and I don't know how to check its
spiderability. >>

A good way to get an idea of how your site looks to Search Engine
Spiders is to run it through the Spider Simulator at Search Engine
World:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

It looks to me as if all your links are being spidered, but you will
want to doublecheck your results to be sure.


Also, here are a couple more suggestions for changes to your html
source:

To conform to html standards (which will help make your pages as
compatible with all spiders and browsers as possible), it's a really
good idea to include a DOCTYPE attribute at the very beginning of each
page; the best form for yours is probably:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

It's also a really good idea to include the "content-type" meta tag;
this can go right after your <title>...</title> tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1">

And you will want to include a </p> tag at the end of your paragraph
that starts with <p align=left>.


Also, please note robertskelton-ga's excellent suggestion below
regarding changing the <title> tags on each of your pages (thanks,
robert!).


Once you have made these changes, you can check your html code at
http://validator.w3.org

(Note that you can get rid of the script "error" message by changing
your code to read:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> 
or you can just ignore it.)

and that the 
marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 attributes
inside your <body> tag will generate an error message, since they are
not standard (or supported by all browsers). You're probably fine
leaving them in anyway.

I hope that this additional information will further assist you in
formatting your site to do well in Search Engine Results!

Regards,

aceresearcher
reneewood-ga rated this answer:5 out of 5 stars
Adressed each of my questions and concerns with excellent answers and
related references.  Thank you!

Comments  
Subject: Re: Review my site for search engine optimization
From: robertskelton-ga on 13 Apr 2003 23:49 PDT
 
In addition to aceresearcher-ga's excellent answer, I would like to
add one extra suggestion:

Title Tags
----------

Google places a lot of importance on the keywords within the title
tags of each web page. I suggest that, if possible, change the title
tag of every page in your site to make each one unique. Make sure that
the title:

- is as concise as possible
- is using words which also appear in the text of the page
- contains the types of words folk might search for
- (if possible) matches the text used in links pointing to it,
internal and external

For example, I would change the title of
http://www.thecomfortcompany.net/category.html?UCIDs=1133853

from:
The Comfort Company - sympathy gifts, sympathy gift idea, memorial
gift

to:
Memorial Jewelry

I appreciate that ordinarily you would want your business name in the
title. But for Google optimization, the closer it matches the searched
for phrase, the better. Less words are better. Try it on a few pages
at least, wait a month or two, and see if they get more hits.
Subject: Re: Review my site for search engine optimization
From: journalist-ga on 14 Apr 2003 06:02 PDT
 
An excellent answer indeed!  :)  I also use a site called JimWorld
located at http://www.jimworld.com/ - he offers a toolkit for
webmasters at http://www.jimtools.com/

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