Hi Adaptor

Many thanks for the indepth reply and looking into my ani site. I guess this is another of these very 'questionable' topics !

When I first started my site I looked into all of this and I even read of Googles OWN information pages regarding page ranking etc that Google does NOT use any Meta Tags and hasn't for 'donkeys years' Most of the big search engines are alleged not to use Meta Tags as I believe someone else said in this post.

Yet as per normal if you search Google some people swear by them while others say the same as above, just don't bother !

quote:

The search term 'free animated gifs' inculde this phrase in your Title, description, and keywords and in your page content repeat the phrase 5-6 times or more and you will see much better results

I definately agree with this Adaptor, again opinions vary, some people say if you repeat phrases etc too much then the search engines will consider it as Spam and so obviously look badly on it, hmmm I just don't know. I regularly come across total garbage websites that are listed in the top 10 and the bottom of the page just has hundreds of keywords & phrases etc that are not part of the actual site but just put there to try and get listed by search engines. Well if these
people are correct that this type of behavour is judged to be spam then WHY are they listed so highly, even at all ?

As an example my Animated Cursor site (that for some reasons 'flies' up and down the rankings on Google like crazy) that has over 1600 seperate images of cursors on it had an invisible text (mouse over) on each one saying 'name Cursor' , 'name' being different for each one obviously. One day after Google had dumped it ( as per normal ) I suddenly thought that Maybe Google thought it was spam because of over 1600 words of 'cursor' So I then removed every single one of the words 'Cursor' from each description and guess what it made absolutely NO difference to any rankings !

This takes me back to my vey first point though which is NO ONE apart from Google themseleves actually have a clue how our pages are ranked !

Re my page title being rather long lol, yes just a little, but again I have changed this, It used to be Very short, for a very long time and then I made it Very long, either way it made no difference as far as I could see.

I did look at the site map 'thing' but decided against it, I can't remeber why though !

Thanks again for all your advice

Regards
Andy

Google may not use meta tags directly but I think they still have value in all of this, here is why.

My index page has a page description:

"Carpentry and Joinery Service Sheffield for Kitchens, Wood Flooring, Loft Conversions, Doors, Staricases, Traditional & Trussed roofs"

Lets take the last 10 words and search in Google:

"Kitchens, Wood Flooring, Loft Conversions, Doors, Staricases, Traditional & Trussed roofs"

It should come up 2'nd in the results in google. But google has found a lot of similair results based on that info. Google is using the page content.

Now repeat the search with the same last 10 words in Yahoo

My site is the only result.
Is yahoo only using meta tags?

So Google is still using the meta tag and providing it is relevant to the info on your page. I assume google will use this info as a small part in ranking your page.

As I am aware other factors are having sites with high page rank link to your site, not only that but these links need to be used regularly. This all makes sense in the fact that a good website with a high PR will only want quality and relative sites to link to. So google considers these as good links. Google will also count how many times a link is clicked and use this info for your PR

If you have too many keywords or a too long description, google will think you are spam! Try keeping it around 5-7 keywords, and don’t let your description get longer then 250 characters.

I noticed that my site that Google finally finds uses my description meta tag for the description it gives verbatim. I have heard that it doesn't look at keywords anymore, but I don't know if that is true or not. Adaptor, good job suckerin' me into losing money at Roulette. LOL.

I think even google do not know how there search enginge works sometimes

The only real way to find out is to read every last little word contained within the google tutorials and help pages which could be a part time job, and then you could still have a PR of 0

So you had a go on Roulette, did you use my technique?

It should of worked but it is gambling

What site did you go on?

Do not worry more tried and tested strategies coming soon so you could get your cash back

I went on GoldenCasino. I used your technique, and it worked great for quite awhile, but I hit a long string of reds that busted me. Oh well. I did have fun until that last string of red #'s. Hopefully, millions of other suckers like me will visit your site and click on ads.

quote:

Do not worry more tried and tested strategies coming soon so you could get your cash back

lol, especially like the 'could' part

I'm sure your both right about the tags ( maybe ) but I can't do it anyway as I can't add them with Webdwarf without manually editing the html file afterwards... and I'm not that bothered about it all !

Regards
Andy

p.s. I am a trained Croupier so I now all about you MUGS lol

I meant to mention before but a good source of very sensible info (if a little dated) re this topic is here..

Weeds

Also lots of other very useful info too !

Andy

quote:

Originally posted by Adaptor:
If I wrote a company mission statement where would the best place for this to go, Index page etc?

I still can not work out how google assigned these odd keywords.
Google appears to have randomly picked keywords from the text on my website. A few of the keywors are from www.woodfx.co.uk/doorsizes.html. You would of thought google would of chose the first few words from the index page 'For all your Carpentry & Joinery Requirements'

Or is this information based on what people have typed into google, then clicked my website?

larry i have a question about that
im sure it would be a no no but!!!!
if i were to use a black background
put a text file (keywords if you will)
in black so they dont show up
or place them behind a layer
would the spiders pick this up?

Yes, they would pick that up and promptly blacklist you from what I've read. I think porno sites used to use hidden text to fool search engines to list their site's content. They caught on after a while and from what I've read if they "see" text using a text color that matches the background color, they stop looking at your site and place you into a "do not search" list for an undetermined amount of time.

Hi

I don't want to contradict Larry as I am sure he is correct but I will just add that I have had 'invisible text' ( same colour as the background) on two of my websites and it made no difference what so ever to the ranking.. up or down..Google Certainly didn't remove them or blacklist me !

Yet again who the hell knows with Google !

Just to say though I have removed it a while ago incase Google didn't like it in the hope ranks would go Up... They have Not !

Maybe it depends on the kind of site or the the type of words or more importantly context that they are used in..

Andy

Contradict away! I get most of my info from the web, and you know only about 50% (or less) is accurate. I've never used hidden text, so I will not say for certain that it will hurt you. I do not think it will help though.

However, I do not think that a search engine would want to index terms that the visitor will not see when that page is visited. But in that same light, how many times have you done a google search for something ridiculous, only to see a click-thru ad for it from Amazon or e-Bay?

quote:

I do not think it will help though.

I think that has to be true Larry, I just used Invisible text for 'other' reasons rather than promotion.

quote:

how many times have you done a google search for something ridiculous, only to see a click-thru ad for it from Amazon or e-Bay?

lol, so true, and so annoying ;-) Maybe it's just me but the only results from Google searches that I seem to get these days are damn price comparison sites, Amazon, and Ebay, totally irrelevant to what I was looking for really !

Andy

quote:

Virtual Mechanics: Support Virtual Mechanics: User Forums and FAQs Virtual Mechanics: User Forums and FAQs WebDwarf, SiteSpinner, Web Engine 'How do I...' Getting your website on search engines

Google is definitely concentrating on page content now to rank sites. I can very clearly see this with some of my sites as Google is picking on specific keywords in the whole page.

So, pages need need to contain useful information and the words used need to reflect the subject. An 'electrician' therefore needs to have 'electrical contractor' 'electrical work' 'electrical repairs' 'rewiring' etc on key pages, but in a grammatical and informative way. Also, for local businesses, the location could be very useful.

The more you think about this and how searchers will try to find your site, the better your site will be ranked at present(subject to other criteria!)

Google is currently looking for content-rich, informative sites. It wants to satisfy its searchers .... it wants to see good grammar, spelling etc. Google regards itself as an educational/informative tool .... and just wants the best, for its searchers.

Input 'beating sticks'or 'straightening sticks' into Google and you may well see a link to the Shootpics site. Why? Probably because Google is looking for such information.

Google also tries to be clever so 'beat sticks' or 'straighten sticks' could produce similar results. If it doesn't this week, it may well do so next week! The guys at Google are definitely working hard on this, to benefit those searching via Google.

mccifa

I would agree that Google is concentrating on page content but keywords are still important and this is the thinking of some others according to some articles on the internet. There is a lot of information here from SEO Guru’s.

I have just finished another website www.dormerscottages.co.uk and tried to put some of the tips I have been reading about into practice before trying to get it on Google and in the process I kept a diary of events as a matter of interest.

While building the site I tried to keep in mind the words and phrases prospective clients would use to find the site on a search engine. [URL=https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ]Google's Keyword Tool[/URL], can help with this.

Next I included the keywords in the text so the main ones appeared at the beginning, also I included the keywords in meta tags, in the description and very importantly in the title; then made sure that all links to other pages and pop up pics had titles (“alt” attributes); added additional links to other pages at the bottom of each page; then uploaded the site on 20th August 2008.

After uploading the site I ran it through a Web Page Analyser and made adjustments where necessary to get Title, Description and Keyword to Content relevancy as near 100% as possible.

This is the sequence of events after that:
20th August Submitted the URL to Google
Created and submitted a Sitemap to Google http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Created a Robot Text File – Google Webmaster Tools
Opened an account with Google Analytics with Benchmarking

21st August Google Downloaded Sitemap - Status OK

22nd August Google accessed robot.txt file – Status Success

23rd August Favicon displayed on IE

24th August Site submitted to Web Host for inclusion in their site listing and also on another of my sites - to establish external links

26th August Site listed in two sections of Web Host Site Listings – Accommodation/Travel

27th August Site listed in Google under the URL and under “self catering cottages Dymchurch” Number 3 Page 4.

30th August Listed the site and location on Google Maps

04th Sept A Google search produced the following
“Cottages to let Dymchurch” - Page 1
“Cottages to rent Kent” - Page 5
“Self catering accommodation Dymchurch” - Page 4.

05th Sept Sitemap Indexed by Google: Total - 7 URL’s - Indexed - 7URL’s

06th Sept. Added an RSS feed for live road traffic reports

Some points worth noting:
Site was recognised by Google in 7 days
I only have 4 external links on the site to date
Yahoo found the site before Google without the URL being submitted
All the above searches are on page 1 or 2 of Yahoo Search

Obviously the words that people use to try and find whatever the website is selling vary enormously and these might not be the keywords chosen, however these can be checked on your Google Account> Webmaster Tools> Statistics> Top Search Queries and altered but it must be remembered to change the text on the page accordingly as well.

I hope that this maybe of some interest.
Thanks to all for some really interesting posts
Tony

At long last I have a page rank with google 1/10

Funny thing is I just deleted my whole site and uploaded a new updated version. I thought google did not like to many changes or maybe they do.

I had the previous site uploaded about a month after the start of this topic so around 1st september 2007. That is just over a year for a page rank of 1

Ok so it is only 1/10 but it is a start

Well done! My best ever is 0/10

Found out the best keywords and phrases with keyword generator to base your page content on.

Hi

After reading some of the above info I changed my title name from about 3000 (!) characters to well under the recommended 89 and added a meta tag description, you see sometimes, very rarely, just about never but on the odd occasion ( ) I DO listen ...

Unsurprisingly after Google re cached it it had made no obvious difference what so ever. The thing that is really bugging me though that I thought doing the above may 'fix' is ( as I've said before) if you do a search for 'Andys Animated Cursors' Without the quotes then my Home page comes up second below my old servers link that just has a redirect on it.

Now I left my old server AT least 6 months ago, there is NO content on it what so ever except from the one index page you see in front of you. If one of googles ranking criteria is content quality / type then how on earth does it rank that above my actual site after over 6 months ? ( Sorry for shouting.. it makes me mad ! )

I'm starting to be off the impression that google has a dislike for Free servers, or maybe just particular servers in general. I reckon all my sites that are now with 110mb rather than Tiscali that they used to be are all ranked lower.. what other reason could they be ?

I did notice when I just checked that the meta tag info wasn't used ( It has been ) so I can only presume it has re cached it again while I was working on it and had forgotten to add the tag.. hopefully !

Ok back to the grindstone

Andy

p.s. Well done on your page rank Adaptor :-) I have also just done what I thought I would never do and added Adsense to my some of my sites ( Arm was twisted by Dan (!), American Landscaping ) I hope I have better luck with it than you did

quote:

Now I left my old server AT least 6 months ago, there is NO content on it what so ever except from the one index page you see in front of you. If one of googles ranking criteria is content quality / type then how on earth does it rank that above my actual site after over 6 months ?

This is a problem that I have also encountered. If you should ever find time to read the Google help (take a year out!) then you'd see that they state that sites are trawled 'regularly'. They then go on to say that the gap between visits is determined by their page rank .... which is made up of over 200 different criteria with different weightings.

So, if your initial site didn't get a good Google rank perhaps it hasn't been re-trawled yet? Google will still be regurgitating the old info. The easy way to check is call up the those Google results again and click 'cached'and see what image Google has stored.

I did this with a site and it took months for the old site pages to disappear despite doing what somebody above did: setting up a site map file, joining the Google elite etc! It was all a waste of time IMHO.

Other new sites have appeared much more quickly, but a recent new site was submitted to Google about 6 weeks ago and it still isn't recognised by Google. It's a 'first' so once Google finds it I'm hoping it will do well.

What exactly goes on within Google is a mystery to many of us. I added pages to an existing site using a different but associated theme and Google gives me great positions for those new pages and recognises changes incredibly quickly. Why? Well I think it's simply because the content is so different to almost anything else on the web. It's something nobody else has thought about building a site about, it's full of information etc etc. If there was some competition perhaps I'd be struggling with it?

As the Adsense ads on it are paying very nicely for the running of the site etc I'd now like to find a few more unique subjects to write about!

Good luck.

mccifa

Hi Mccifa

Both sites have current pages cached !

I'm intrigued about your site now but unless I'm really dim can't find a link in your profile, are you keeping it a closely guarded secret so we can't cop it lol ..

Andy