Harikara
Posts: 1

Apart from using Meta Tags, are there any decent Website promotion sites/software available. Ones that actually do help with promotion.

Joe Gillespie
Posts: 528

There are lots of companies offering SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but before you pay someone to do it, see what guarantees they offer. Better still, check out Google's developer page and you might not need to pay anyone! I didn't

Mpj
Posts: 76

Most of the site promotion software I've looked at is big bucks for something you can learn to do yourself. The same applies for serch engine optimisation companies.

I learned most of the SEO techniques from about 3 weeks of finding online tutorials. If I can find the URLs of the sites I used I'll post them.

A word of warning about SEO. It is possible to go too far and actually get your site penalised by the search engines. Tricks like putting loads of irrelevant keywords on a page in the same colour as the background are considered bad practice and are not liked at Google and co. Some of the SEO companies use these techniques too so be careful.

Cece
Posts: 8

Writing meta tags is a very small, small portion of SEO.  I recommend a lot of reading before you even attack the meta tags. If your website is live, most likely search engine have already indexed the web pages.

So here is what I recommend. GO through all your web pages and make sure TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS are appropriate. Then start your reading. SEO is more complex this year.

Good luck!

Brady
Posts: 5

I just finished working for a company.... that had us place a list of keywords in the title bar, after the actual page title..

Is this considered bad practice?

Just curious..because aside from looking awful it did seem to help some clients.

Joe Gillespie
Posts: 528

If you read Google's guidelines http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html you will see that they take a dim view of any such tricks. In particular they say "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings."

Such tricks will have exacly the opposite effect from what you think.

Brady
Posts: 5

I thought so .... Thanks

Sitetutor
Posts: 1

It's called "over-optimization" and in the long run it will hurt you!
Mike

Jdenny
Posts: 65

Here's a really good example of what NOT to do:
http://www.websites-design-uk.co.uk/ecommerce_web_designer_uk.php

That page redirects, wait for it to load and finish, then when it starts to go to the enxt page press the STOP button to take a look at it. If you have a slow connection like me you may have to repeat the loading untill it's all loaded in, it says copyright at the bottom.

This page is a doorway page to a real site that also spams.

This page pretends to be a Flash 'loading...' message, and redirects to the real page after pretending to load something.

This page is full of keyword spam, and I mean FULL.

This page uses a very tall trasnparent gif to push the words down the page where no-one looks (apart from me)!

This page seems to be targeting "web design __insert_uk_place_name__" where __insert_uk_place_name__ = just about any town and region!

This page and it's friends are on the 1st page of Google search results for "web design ipswich" - my target phrase!

Check out the google results if you target seach phrase is "web design _uk_place_name_" you may find these _insert_obcenity_here__ 's are your direct competition too!

Nataliemac
Posts: 4

I just had a client pay out a lot of money to and SOE company who promised her that they had discovered the "search engine algorithms" and knew exactly what to do to guarantee her more hits.

I advised against it, but she did it anyway.

What they did was add about 100 pages to the site along with about one billion invisible links to web sites that don't exist.

It's *really fun* to work on her Web site now. Just sorting through all those fake pages and fake code is enough to give me a headache.

Mpj
Posts: 76

You may want to speak to your client about this. I remember reading that Google (and possibly other) search engines have algorithms to check if links and text are "invisble". Sites that use this kind of trick are automatically downgraded by the engines so your client may well get the opposite result to that she wanted.

Why don't you just offer to clean up her site and properly optimise it? It's more money in your pocket at the end of the day and your client will probably have a higher ranked site.

Baxter
Posts: 157

Here's what I know about SEO in a nutshell (and I've spent A LOT of time on this lately)....

Meta tags are virtually useless. Google ignores them entirely, and Yahoo pays only a passing glance. About the  only way they seem to help is if EVERY word in them is in the content.

Which brings me to content. Once again, on the web, content is king. Better content gets results, and gets people to link to you.

Which brings me to backlinks. Backlinks are gold, especially for google. But they have to be good links, in context, not just random junk amidst a zillion other links.

Title tags are HUGE. BIG BIG difference. IF you do one thing, write REALLY good title tags

Start writing semantic markup. Google loves it. that mean h tags for headers, LI for list items, and so on. Make your code mean something.

Stop frittering away other opportunities, especially alt and title attributes on images. Not only does it make your page more accessible, but it makes it more spider-friendly. Remember, the spiders go through your page pretty much like a screen reader does.

Which brings me to the last point... view in a text browser. This lets you see what you're feeding the spiders. It also helps you build better, more accessible code.

I like this link:
http://access.ex.ac.uk/

Itsdanny
Posts: 8

Does anyone know what the effect of having a website that was www and is now www2 will have on rankings? For tech reasons (at the ISP) this was done. Now the domain at www instantly redirects the user to the www2 domain. Hope this is clear? Should i get them to sort it out properly?
Thanks
Dan