SEO Tycoon

**mattnotfat** · 08-28-2007, 08:01 AM

Hello all

3 years ago I created a site for people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / M.E. - www.beatcfs.info to pass on my experience of alternative health treatments and exercises for dealing with this debilitating illness, including the treatment that eventually cured me.

Lots more people could benefit from my experience I'm sure - the feedback I've had has been that my site's a valuable resource for those that find it. But none of my pages make the first 100 sites listed on Google or Yahoo when I search on phrases like, "Chronic Fatigue treatment", "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome cure", etc. Even when I try searching "treating CFS", the exact phrase for which is in the content header of www.beatcfs.info/treats1.htm I'm still only ranked 50th on Google! Instead sites promoting crap herbal remedies that I know will only give false hope are ranked way above me, and even pages about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in dogs fare better than I do!

1. Could someone have a look at my description and content headers and tell me what I'm doing wrong?
2. Should I put many more words and phrases in the description and content tags? I was concerned about too many getting the site banned, but how many words can I get away with in the content and description tags?
3. Is lack of links my main problem? I have very few to other sites, particularly because I don't want to link to scams. A search on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome does find articles from the BBC, so should I link to these articles to improve my ranking?
4. What if I started putting Google Ads on my site - (I have thought about it before as a minor compensation for not being able to work for 3.5 years while I was ill!), but it just occured to me maybe the presence of ads would actually improve the sites ranking?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated
Wishing you all good health
Matt Benton

**JamieLewis** · 08-28-2007, 08:09 AM

Heya there.

1. Your sites markup is pretty bad and not optimised for search engines at all. If you want to rank high I would suggest an entire remarking up of content. (See Link Below)
2.Optimising those is a must, see point 1.
3. Links only to sites that will help your user and are in context with your other content. You may want to look at incoming links as well.
4. This shouldn't improve ranking.

The main thing I will suggest is looking up semantic markup and correct site structure (link goes to my free ebook on the subject - direct pdf link)

I hope this helps.

Jamie

**bzimage** · 08-28-2007, 10:28 AM

You need to get some strong PR and lots of little small pr links to rank well in any terms! I rank on the front to second page in some of the hardest terms on the net. Like Computer Forum and I did it with lots of linking. Barley any onpage SEO has been done to my sites.

**mattnotfat** · 08-28-2007, 11:53 AM

Thanks all,

I'm not worrying about PR - although I used the work 'rank' rather loosely in my original post - by rank I meant how many search results came above after entering a certain phrase - I'll be more specific from now on....

Jamie, thanks for your pdf doc. I'll need to do some re-writing and re-organisation, which could take some time. Could I clarify a point or two...

1. Are you saying that semantic tags like help the spiders to read the site and help SEO? I don't want to scatter codes around unescessarily, so there aren't many in your list that I could apply. One that I could definitely use is the acronym tag as all the pages are full of 'M.E.' (for Myalgic Encephalytis). Would that assist the Spiders and therefore improve SEO?

2. You talk alot about layout and structure, i.e correct use of headings and paragraphs from the beginning. Of course these are desirable for clarity - will the nested layout you show on page 5 of your doc make any difference to Spiders and SEO?

3. Following on from that, I notice there are hardly any tags in my pages, because I constructed the main content as a large table with <td> tags in Outlook Express. Are the spiders only reading what's enclosed in the tags and ignoring the <td> tags? In which case maybe I should get all my content out of tables?

4. According to SEOBOOK 'Chronic Fatigue' and 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome' are the search terms I should optimise for. If I put "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" into the keywords will Google and Yahoo do a 'starts with' search by default? Or do I need both phrases separately i.e.

Code:

<Keywords>Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue treatments, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome treatments

5. On search terms again, any opinions on the maximum number of words for keywords description? I used a small number because I was worried about getting blacklisted - any danger of that?

Lots of questions I know, but rebuilding this site is going to take time so I'd like to know start off in the right direction.....

Thanks again
Matt

**JamieLewis** · 08-28-2007, 12:08 PM

Heya

1. Semantics are very important and are becoming more so to spiders, if you think about it, it makes sense that the engines would like semantically structured pages more as it shows care and attention. Spiders love clarity using the acronym/abbr tag to expand abbreviations is definitely a step in the right direction.

2.Layout and Structure are VERY important in SEO, the easier a spider can place context in a page (using headings and paragraphs) the better it can decide on the relevance of content.

3.Please do!! Tables for layout are dead. CSS Stylesheets with properly structured pages are the future. It will definitely help SEO as well (see point 2) and your pages will look better.

4/5. Keyword stuffing is frowned upon it is best not to. You should never try to optimise for keywords, they should come naturally. I have had sites where the keyphrase appears once in the title and once in the body and it ranked 3rd for that phrase within 1 week of the site being set up.

SEO is non existent in the way I see it. If you structure web documents correctly and provide great content then there is no reason why you shouldn't be ranked highly for phrases.

One thing I would recommend is getting Google Analytics or another form of stats analyser and use it to see what search terms bring people to you site, you might be surprised (one I had recently was 'developing secret powers', the page they found was an article on meta data)

Hope that helped.

Jamie

**mattnotfat** · 08-28-2007, 01:33 PM

Thanks Jamie,

That really does clear things up. Looks like structure is the key.

Thanks again,
matt

**chrishirst** · 08-28-2007, 06:02 PM

No, No, No, structure isn't the key

Everything is the key!

There is only one thing that is needed to get good SERP positioning, and that is to do more things right than the pages currently in front of your pages.

Doing more things better than them, does not mean doing slightly more that whatever they have;
eg
They have 50 backlinks so you get 60,
Their pages have the keyphrase 10 times on a page, so you go for 12 times.
etc etc

It really doesn't work like that.
Do everything a little better. A well thought out structure, using all the appropriate semantic markup for headings etc.
DO resist the temptation to embolden every keyphrase. Write your copy, then read it out aloud and add inflections and empahsis where you would naturally speak it when reading to an audience, these words go in or etc.
Go for fewer, but better links

Basically forget about SEO and go for USO (User Search Optimising). Tends to be less work and far more rewarding.

**Learning Newbie** · 08-28-2007, 06:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Basically forget about SEO and go for USO (User Search Optimising). Tends to be less work and far more rewarding.

There was a USO siting in Roswell, New Mexico.

**usearchme** · 07:05 PM

Hi there

Some good advice there, i know it must be a bit daunting to have to redesign ur site matt, but it will be worth it in the end, especially with the help of some of the people on here, I had to do it with one of my sites, took me ages lol, but was defo worth it

Woc

**CSS4Life** · 08-28-2007, 07:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

There was a USO siting in Roswell, New Mexico.

Area 51 as well I think. Some huge conspiracy theory surrounds that place, just like the Bermuda Triange

**mattnotfat** · 08-29-2007, 08:32 AM

Hi all,

Thanks for the advice (don't get the Roswell relevance personally... ).

Jamie, do you reckon that the <keywords> tag is basically being ignored by the search engines and maybe worth not populating at all?

Also, I'm probably being a bit dense but I don't quite get from your pdf doc how to format titles, and the use of <> brackets. Should I be putting the page title inside <> so they don't display but do get found by the spiders? Say for example for www.beatcfs.info/homeop.htm

Code:

<title><Chronic_Fatigue_Syndrome_Homeopathy></title>

Is that valid html? Or do you mean:

Quote:

<title>Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Homeopathy</title>

I didn't put the phrase 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome' into the page titles for each treatment, as they seem unescessary - but maybe they are very necessary for the spiders?

Could you do me a quick example of writing the title for that Homeopathy page?

Much appreciated
matt

**chrishirst** · 08-29-2007, 10:15 AM

Yes the meta keywords element is pretty much useless.

I'd guess that Jamie is using the <> as "placeholders"

"Homeopathic Treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME"
as a title, with a meta description of:

"Using Homeopathic treatments for ME/CFS are an alternative to antibiotics and can have dramatic results for some sufferers"

A title should be a concise statement of the page contents, and don't worry about character counts, imaginary "word density" figures etc. keep your main keyphrase in the first 10 words and it will be fine.

**mattnotfat** · 09-02-2007, 06:10 PM

Thanks all for the pointers,

I've rebuilt about 15 pages on my site using CSS in preference to tables, and mostly following Jamie's guidelines about semantic structure. See www.beatcfs.homeop.htm

I've done all the pages in the treatment and self treatment sections (except Acupressure) and all the pages on Mickel Therapy / Reverse Therapy.

Question is, how long do the Google and Yahoo spiders take to examine this content. I put these pages online yesterday and today (Sun 2nd Sept), so hopefully I'll see an improvement in September's site report. Do I need to do anything like re-submit the site to Google et al?

Thanks
Matt

**chrishirst** · 09-03-2007, 07:46 AM

How long is the proverbial piece of string question.

The closest answer is 3 to 4 days after the pages have been crawled by the respective user agents.

There's never a need to submit in the first place, so resubmitting is doubly pointless.

**contact247** · 09-07-2007, 06:00 AM

Try social bookmarkings and link exchanges maybe it could help a bit or more.

**CSS4Life** · 09-07-2007, 06:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by contact247

Try social bookmarkings and link exchanges maybe it could help a bit or more.

Yet again, more pointless advice from contact247