Hello Mike. Good search engine placement can seem arbitrary and
elusive, but there are definitely ways to increase your odds of
getting noticed. Lets take apart your site and see what is working and
what is not.
Lets start with your metatags. For your keyword metatags there are too
many and some of the keywords are used too often. You are currently
using 953 characters. You need to greatly shorten this to no more than
200 characters as most search engines will not spider past that and
may even penalize you for having more. Try not to use a particular
word or phrase more than 3 times. Here's my suggested metatags:
<meta name="keywords" content="florida retreat center, orange springs,
ocala, florida vacation,conventions, youth groups, leadership
development, gatherings, seminars, meetings, florida camping, youth
retreat center, camp, tampa, orlando, jacksonville, gainesville">
You can play around with these but don't make it much longer than
that. Make sure that your really important keywords are in there. I
may have missed some. You might also want to spend some time at
Overtures Keyword Suggestion Tool
(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) which
will tell you how popular particular keyword/keyphrases are and give
you suggestions on other combinations.
Your description metatag is pretty good. Again, this should contain
your most important keywords. and it mostly does.
Your Page Titles can be longer and could again include your most
important keywords, but not more than 100 characters. For example:
"Orange Springs - A Florida Retreat Center perfect for conventions,
youth groups and vacations."
For more on creating optimal metatags here are some good articles:
http://www.stickysauce.com/articles/searchenginetips/doiturself.htm
http://www.apromotionguide.com/metatag.html
http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/metatagtips.html
Again you can play around with your metatags, but now lets talk about
something many people overlook. It is vitally important that the
keywords that you have used show up in the text of your site,
preferably several times. I would highly suggest rewriting the text
for your site so that it does this. You don't want to mention a
particular keyword/keyphrase too many times or the search engine might
think you are trying to spam it, but I would say try to mention each
one at least 2-3 times if possible.
One strategy you can use is to focus on different keywords on
different pages. For example you might be able to get away with using
"florida retreat center" 3 time in a cleverly worded page, but if you
also want to use "youth retreat center" 3 times that might make the
text awkward so maybe use another page to do that. I noticed that your
site is only 4 pages, so in this case you could do two things: either
create another page on your site that talks specifically about "youth
retreat centers", which is the best course of action because the more
text on a site the more material a search engine has to work with.
Alternately you can create what is called a "doorway page", which is a
page that can be very basic (just text) but has a specific
keyword/phrase(s) mentioned several times both in the body and the
metatags. It then either automatically redirects visitors to the main
site or has a "click here for more information" link which links to
the main site.
This article has some good tips on effectively writing keyword loaded copy:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2168021
Here are two good articles on creating doorway pages:
Creating Keyword Specific Doorway Pages: A Step By Step Guide
http://www.web-source.net/doorways.htm
Creating Doorway Pages
http://www.stickysauce.com/articles/searchenginetips/doorway1.htm
A good tip is to pick a particular keyword/phrase, put them in a
search engine and examine the sites that come up in the number one and
number two position for that keyword. What does their site copy look
like? What keywords are they using in their metatags? Then make yours
even better.
Another thing I noticed was that your images do not have 'alt' tags.
This is text that shows up if someone has their browser set to not
display images.
A normal image tag looks like this:
<IMG SRC="tenniscourt.gif" width="150" height="150">
A search engine optimized image tag looks like this:
<IMG SRC="tenniscourt.gif" width="150" height="150" alt="Tennis Court
at our Florida Retreat Center">
Make sure all your images have keyword loaded alt tags.
Another very important task to get traffic to your site is to get
recipricol links from other sites. Create a link page on your site and
then ask other related sites to exchange links with you. Search
engines like Google place a lot of weight on how many other sites have
links to your site when it is ranking it. The Google advanced search
(://www.google.com/advanced_search) came up with zero sites that
link to yours. The tool here:
http://www.highrankers.com/free_link_popularity_check.html showed zero
for 5 different search engines. So at first glance it looks like you
have no sites that link to yours. This is not good! You should really
spend some time getting other sites to link to yours. It will help
your search engine rating tremendously. Don't bother using sites that
will submit your link to 5000 "free for all' link pages. Submit to
real sites that are related to yours and offer a recipricol link. It
takes time but is well worth it.
You should regularly resubmit your site to all of the major search
engines and directories. I resubmit mine every 3-4 months...more if I
make a lot of changes to the site. This is probably why you are still
showing up under 'weight loss' because Google probably has not
respidered your site for a long time.
I use a free tool called Self Promotion (http://selfpromotion.com/)
which works great. Bear in mind that even after you have fixed the
metatags and text and added recipricol links and finally resubmit your
site to the search engines that it will take months (yes months) for
most of the search engines to respider your site. Some of them do it
much faster, but you can expect to wait a while for most of them.
Finally if you are not using cost per click advertising I highly
recommend you do. I imagine that it would be well worth it to you to
pay $.10 - $.20 to get a visitor to your site. The two main players in
CPC advertising are Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com) and
Overture (http://www.overture.com). Make sure that you are very
specific with they keywords that you choose and that you set your
limit as to what you want to spend each day to fit your marketing
budget.
You can see a good collection of CPC advertising tips that I wrote
here at Google Answers at
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=193878.
And here is another good article:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/churchill/2003/1202_cc1.html
And finally here are some more resources for you:
An excellent collection of articles on search engine optimization:
http://www.stickysauce.com/articles/searchenginetips/searchengine_tipsarticles_index.htm
From the same site a collection of articles about driving traffic to your site:
http://www.stickysauce.com/articles/increasetraffictips/increasetraffic_articlesindex.htm
Search Engine Watch - One of the most popular and well respected sites
on search engine optimization
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
Submit Corner - A collection of useful tools and articles.
http://www.submitcorner.com/
Search Engine World - Tons of resources
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
Web Position Gold - If you want to get serious about it, there are
plenty of software packages that will help you to optimize your site,
but this is the one the pros use.
http://www.webposition.com
Search Engine Spam: What not to do - Be aware that search engines can
penalize you or even ban you outright if they think you are trying to
spam them. Here is an article on what not to do. Make sure to read the
related articles at the bottom as well.
http://www.searchenginesbook.com/spam.html
Google Webmaster FAQ - Answers to your Google specific questions
://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html
Mike, I hope that this analysis helps you to increase traffic at your
site. If you have any questions or need clarification on anything I
have written please feel free to use the 'clarify answer' option
before rating this question. Thank you and good luck with your site!
-shiva777 |
Clarification of Answer by
shiva777-ga
on
17 Jan 2004 20:31 PST
Hi Mike. I did mention this in my answer, but I wanted to clarify it a
bit. When search bots spider the Internet they do it through the
network of hyperlinks. Since you do not have any recipricol links, it
is an island unto itself so to speak. The search engine spider never
comes across a link to you while spidering other sites. Also, to the
spider, this makes your site rank low in importance as far as
priorities go for revisiting and reindexing. Apparently, there are a
lot of sites that are well linked to and have fresh content that rank
higher in their priority because they haven't visited you in a while.
However, if you get some fresh content with well chosen copy and
keywords, a number of related sites giving you recripricol links, and
re-submit your site to the search engines then I think you will be
successfuly in changing your situation.
Best of luck!
-John
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