Hello friends,

i'm very new here, only joined today,

i've had a good look round but can't find what i'm looking for and my heads starting to spin

basically i have taught myself and designed a web page for my dads roofing business, and so far we're advertiseing on pay per click google and another one,

but after waiting the 8 weeks suggested i am still not on google, or anyone elses ordinary search list,

i had a call ysterday from a company claiming they could get me on the ordinary search engines for a mere £750 !

i would like to know how i can do this myself, i've scanned my "sams teach yourself dreamweaver mx 2004 " and can't find anything,

doe's anyone have a link to a page that explains what i need to know please so them little spiders can start picking my site up


thanks everyone and hope i can be of some help to you one day

Dan

site is www.jandjasphalt.co.uk by the way incase you need to see it for some reason

Your best bet would just to be exchange links with like minded sites and submit your site to various directories. I would not trust any SEO that charges 750, that just seems a bit ridiculous to me.

thanks for such a quick reply,

i have submitted my site to a whole load of search engines,

about 2-3 months ago,

thing is the last phone call i had trying to sell me ordinary listings without pay per click, said that they'd checked my site and i don't have xyz pages that enable spiders to index my site,

any idea what they were talking about?

How can you be so sure that you have not been visited by any spiders? What stats are you using. I noticed that you don't have much info for spiders to want to crawl. Also, spiders really don't like image links I don't think.

any idea what they were talking about?

Yes and it's total crap

1/ you don't submit to search engines, You submit to directories. The crawlers find you from there. I would suggest you start from here
Local business directories are always a good place for a local business. (for local people )

Your site has 0 chance of rankings BTW, the site navigation cannot be crawled by SE bots Try it.

I would not trust any SEO that charges 750, that just seems a bit ridiculous to me.

Too cheap? Too expensive?
Because £750 isn't going to get you a SEO who knows their stuff. Might get you a chancer from some obscure part of the world who adds a few meta tags though or one of the many scammers with doorway domains. Take it from me anyone who contacts you via spam or a telesales call ain't going to do anything for your site and it's ROI.

bit extra after looking at the site

I have a huge problem finding any keywords/phrases anywhere on the site and I'm not talking about metas (which you don't have anyway) how do you think the SEs will fare?

the site is quite pretty looking but hopeless for SE rankings ( I'm not harsh btw, just honest)
There is so much wrong from an SEO POV you need to get a full report done then act on the information.

wow this is great guys,

thanks so much,

so first of all the tele sales people are a waste of time, check

second, i havn' put meta tags on ( i thought i had) so it's back to the sams teach yourself Dreamweaver book to go over adding meta tags again,

third, i need to add some keywords/thrases somehow, again, i think must be back to the book to see how to do this, or if anyone has a handy link to an article i could read that would be handy

ok ok, lots of room for improvement, as expected, this is my first time after all,

what doe's SEO and POV mean pls?

and any suggestions how/where i could get a report done i'd be very grateful,

with regards to "i'm not being harsh just honest" i really appreciate your help and came here hoping to get pointed in the right direction to better myself and my site,
any comments are all taken on board and i'm well impressed how this whole site works,

please be honest don't worry about offending me,

we all have to start somewhere after all,

thanks again guys

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
POV = Point Of View

If so-called "SEOs" are using coldcall telesales and spam emails, avoid them. Any good SEO gets clients by reputation and recommendation.
No book is going to tell you how to put keyphrases in your copy properly you either have a "feel" for it and you improve that skill or you have to learn by trial and error and using the right forums. This is the "art" of a SEO copywriter. SE Copywriting Articles from Karon Thackston.

Site review for design post it here.

Site review for SEO, for free. Head over and join I Help You and head for the Critique forum while you are there do some serious reading on SEO. Also join and have a read at HighRankings Forum. You can't post for a review at HR until you are an active member (20 posts). Full disclosure is I'm a moderator at both.
You can of course hire someone to do a full in-depth review

few points;

Meta KW tags are no use for rankings at all they are simply used by the main engines as a kind of parity check.
Meta Description tag is important as this is used in the main SEs as the text snippet in the SERPs.
Title tag, absolutely vital for SEO in all SEs.

and your site isn't in a really competitive market place so with some word research and some moderate work in the redesign and optimising, good placing aren't going to be too difficult.

Meta Description tag is important as this is used in the main SEs as the text snippet in the SERPs.

That's not true. They get the snippet from the text on your web page.

• Keep your web pages small, keep it under 40K.

• Create lots of quality content, search engines love content

• Try to get a keyword density between 5 to 15%.

• Use your keyword once in the title tag, the url and bold text.

• Build your link popularity, this is one of the most important ones.

actually you are incorrect! If the meta description matches the query it will be used as the snippet in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Take a look at the results for blackpool caravan site. The entry for hamptonroadsc (1 & 2 for me) are showing the meta description tag contents NOT snippets from the page. Now which une looks better? Write a description to match the page content and you get your choice of text in the SERPs.

under 40k. This is a good idea for visitors as it means the page will load quickly for dial-up users, but will make no difference for SEO. Google will stop indexing a page at 101k, Yahoo appears to be a little over 500k and MSN around 300k.

content. Yes, Absolutely

keyword density, don't even care about it. every phrase/page/site is be unique. Some phrases you may only need one mention of in the page, others need more. Write your copy so it makes sense to visitors, They are the ones with credit cards. Having one visitor a day who buys something is far far better than having 100 visitor per hour who leave straight away.

Where to use a Keyphrase, Title tag, Yes. Two related phrases per page (3 max) both in the title tag which should be kept below 10 words. URI/foldernames/pagenames, it is only a small part of the picture. Structure the site architecture to make sense to you for maintenance and to your visitors for readability. <hn> tags, <p>, bold italic etc etc use these for the correct purpose, To structure the document.

When building the site content, focus on real visitors and getting them to buy something or contact you NOT the SEs. Funnily enough this is exactly the kind of thing SEs like as well. Forget about "formula SEO" If you start "algo chasing" by following the latest ranking formula theory you will find yourself rebuilding every few months when updates happen. So frustrating and annoying, and you start to doubt yourself. Been there, done it, won't be doing it again.

Link Pop. Yes, Vital in a competitive market but the level of links needed to succeed does vary from site to site and market to market.
When link building, Vary your anchor text so you cover your main phrases not just the one. If you have some deep content that is relevant to the site you are placing the link on the try for a link to that rather than the home page. The rule here is to get the visitor to exactly where on your site they need to be, you have better chance of an impulse purchase that way.

Originally Posted by hammerhead69

basically i have taught myself and designed a web page for my dads roofing business, and so far we're advertiseing on pay per click google and another one,

you seems to be self taught person

Originally Posted by hammerhead69

but after waiting the 8 weeks suggested i am still not on google, or anyone elses ordinary search list,

8 weeks is long time to appear on Search lists

Originally Posted by hammerhead69

i had a call ysterday from a company claiming they could get me on the ordinary search engines for a mere £750 !

Not what I would suggest. You can do that yourself by going through some of the forums by yourself[QUOTE=hammerhead69]

Originally Posted by hammerhead69

doe's anyone have a link to a page that explains what i need to know please so them little spiders can start picking my site up

My sig also can help you

actually you are incorrect! If the meta description matches the query it will be used as the snippet in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Take a look at the results for blackpool caravan site. The entry for hamptonroadsc (1 & 2 for me) are showing the meta description tag contents NOT snippets from the page. Now which une looks better? Write a description to match the page content and you get your choice of text in the SERPs.

Sometimes they do use it, but most of the time they don't.

I would also add that you have a lot of styles and javascript at the top of your page.

I may be totally incorrect about this - so much of SEO seems to depend on who you speak to! - but my understanding is that the easier it is for the spider to get through your page the more it is likely to index?

I may have put that badly, but I believe you want to declutter the code.

If you are using Dreamweaver, export the styles into separate style sheets (right click on the "style" and choose "export", then name it and save it. Then delete the style from the page again by right clicking on it and choosing "delete". Watch page fall apart! But don't panic. Click "attach style sheet" - again right click or use button at bottom of style panel - browse to the style sheet you saved and link to it - not forgetting that you will need to upload the stylesheet to your site too!) and do the same with the javascript - slightly different method - create a new .js file using dreamweaver, name and save it then cut and paste the javascript out of the top of your page - n.b you do NOT need the <script> tags in the new document - you can delete these - then in the head of the page add this link:

<script language="JavaScript" src="YOURFILE.js"></script>

Where YOURFILE is the location where you saved the javascript file.

Dreamweaver makes it very easy to add your METAs - but maybe go to a few other sites which have a similar business, check how well they are doing in a search (think what you would search for if you wanted to find a roofing company, but also ask a few people who don't know about the roofing business what they would search for), and then have a look at what keywords they are using (click "VIEW" then "SOURCE" to check their code) to get some ideas. The <title> tag is important - maybe one sentence of about 50-100 or so characters outlining what the business is. <description> tag, maybe 2-3 sentences explaining what the company does - get in the key terms you think people will search for - and keywords.

I will doubtless get 1000's of replies telling me exactly why I am wrong about this, but hey!

Hope this may help and sorry if I have given you more info than you need here - I was thinking back to when I was a newbie and I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of jargon in the other responses...

hey,

no you havn't given me more information than i need,

thats not to say i understand it all................

but Rome wasn't built in a day right,

thanks for your time,

that go's for all of you,

i've obviously got a lot of reading and learning ahead of me but with the help and response's i've got from just one thread i'm sure i'll get there,

Thanks again everyone whos helped so far,

Dan

well depending on if there going to manuel submit your website to like about 2K dirs then i would not pay and yes flash and Jscript are one of the worst things to have on your site when your trying to have the spiders index you so would not recomend this and also i would also use text links instead of images since it is easer to spider a text link then a image and 8 weeks is not a long time for google when your looking at being in the sandbox some times its 4-9 monnths or longer to come out of the sandbox

For LizzyDripping;

thanks for your advise,

i've tried what you said for the last hour and a half and got nowhere,

i don't even understand what is meant by the first suggestion of "export the styles" or how this is supposed to be carried out,

i reckon you mean using the code view?

but i guess this is all far too complicated for my little brain at the moment,

i thought of adding additional pages to my website full of written content with all my keywords that people might use to search for my dads company, with loads of links to even more pages, a lot of which actually titled with some keywords, all of these coming from a tiny link that can't be seen from my home page
(bearing in mind i don't really wanna baffle any customers with tons of reading, at the moment it's quick and simple and the main purpose is to get them to email me asking for a free roofing quote)

but some of which i've read so far has suggested that maybe the spiders will pick up on this and it have an even worse effect in that i may be banned?

so maybe i should just keep to my pay per click, which i'm very pleased with already i might add,

and hope that someone transports a new brain into my head in the night........................