Web Design Forums

thomasvining · 27-10-2005, 21:48

Hey all,

I've been doing a spot of SEO our site recently, mainly focusing on titles, h1, h2 etc, and generally making sure the SEs pick up the most relevant pages of our site for search queries. I've made an effort to stear clear of any 'black hat' tactics.

I have read alot about the irrelevance now of meta tags, and inlight of the fact that we're starting to get a steady stream of visits from SEs with no refinements to meta tags, I haven't seen much reason to change them.

I'd really appreciate if any you could just take a quick look at the site and see if you can see any obvious improvements that could be made. I've been told that the dynamic URLs could hurt our ratings, but so far it seems to be fine in google at least:

www.tokyocube.com

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

thomasvining · 27-10-2005, 21:51

PS: The changes I have made to header tags and titles was only over the last few days so hasn't been picked up yet, but I was wondering how long it takes to start getting a good 'page ranking', as I've installed the firefox plugin and see that we currently don't have any ranking. The site has been live for 3 weeks so far, and we've had about 1,500 unique visits.

Limbo · 29-10-2005, 07:26

I cant see any major ones. As you position using CSS you could try to placing your h1 as the first element in the body.

It is rumored that links that contain any javascript are not spidered so you could offer/hide an alternantive

Meta looks fine.

All your on page SEO stuff is fairly comprehensive - you might want to look at long tail search queries as you pages are targeting quite competetive keywords.

To be honest if you have a budget for SEO I'd spend you time looking at securing some high quality in bound links before the next PR update. If you can get 50-100 inbound links a month you are doing really well - 10/20 of those would ideally be heading or bold links or deep links, not just links to your homepage.

thomasvining · 29-10-2005, 08:31

Thanks for the feedback Limbo! Could you just clarify what you mean about inbound links - do you mean the links from other sites to our site need to be from their heading/bold links?

Also, what would you recommend as a go way of getting inbound links, as I don't intend to use a link exchange company as I hear that can really hurt your ratings if the SE cottons on.

We are starting to get some sites linking to us, like www.urbanjunkies.com, but other than that we haven't really pushed any advertising except for posting in forums and a banner ad on japan-guide.com.

Limbo · 29-10-2005, 08:57

indexes, directories, review pages, blogs, e-guides, e-magazines, .orgs, business listings, web portals, forums, rss link lists ....

There are literally millions of sites of this nature that will list yours, some will cost you money, some you can swap, some you cost you nothing. But all can make a big difference to your SERPS.

The result is like google bombing - if you don't know: type "miserable failure" into google and hit i'm feeling lucky - A group of websavvy lefties set about adding the link: <a href="...bush'sbio.com">miserablefailure</a> to 1000,s of pages and before too long google saw it as being the authority page for that search term.

You might consider this Black Hat - in the case of the miserbale failure I think it is, but it's so ambiguous - Google cannot recognise humor in this form

So you can consider this legitimate 'organic' linking IMO.

And yes if you get a link like:

<h3><a href..../tokyocube.com/food-reviews">japanese food reviews</a></h3>

It will have more impact than a link like:

<p><a href.....tokyocube.com">tokyocube</a><p>

Not to say the latter is unhelpful, far from it, but targeted keywords will give you a wider visitor base and deeperlinks in addition to direct links to your home/news pages.

roto · 29-10-2005, 09:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Limbo

The result is like google bombing - if you don't know: type "miserable failure" into google and hit i'm feeling lucky - A group of websavvy lefties set about adding the link: <a href="...bush'sbio.com">miserablefailure</a> to 1000,s of pages and before too long google saw it as being the authority page for that search term.

Now it's only a matter of time until they find this thread...but you should have placed it in an h1 tag

thomasvining · 29-10-2005, 09:14

that miserable failure thing is well funny!

thanks for the seo info, thats a real help!

BlueMountainSam · 29-10-2005, 15:47

I think you should valid your home page. I also think what keywords you put on your title tag should appear on the body content. "the" is usless and waste of good space on your title tag and remove it.

pgo · 29-10-2005, 23:37

Something I've wondered regarding meta keywords that this is a perfect example of...

Code:

Japanese London, Japanese restaurants London, Japanese restaurant London,

What the difference between the above and using...

Code:

london, japanese, japan, restaurant, restaurants, food, dining, reviews,

Is there a difference?

thomasvining · 29-10-2005, 23:51

As far as I know and have read recently, it is better not focus on particular key phrases for each page, preferably no more than 3 key phrases per page. My meta tags are far from optimised at the moment, as I don't seem to get the impression there is much weighting in them anymore.

I did optimise my header and title tags though, and since doing so our site has moved significantly higher in the rankings and is even coming no 1 for some of our key phrases, which just shows how important it seems to be ensure that part of the page setup is correct.

thomasvining · 29-10-2005, 23:52

.... sorry, I mean't it 'is' better to focus on keyphrases per page!

pgo · 29-10-2005, 23:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by thomasvining

.... sorry, I mean't it 'is' better to focus on keyphrases per page!

Gotcha. Anyone care to back him up or disagree?

Limbo · 30-10-2005, 07:20

absolutely - you should think about creating a userfreindly page that targets each of you key phrases

So if you sell gizmos, you want pages that concentrates on each type of gizmo

INDEX - Gizmo
SUB INDEX - White gizmo's
Small white gizmo's; large white gizmo's... (money pages)
SUB INDEX- Red gizmo's
small red gizmo's; large red gizmo's... (money pages)

In competetive areas these "money" pages are more likely to be the way people find you as they are more specific and result in a user more inclined to firstly; click from google, maybe bookmark, re-visit, or indeed most importantly; recommend to another.

Let's face it Gizmo is going to be a VERY competetive keyword

In Tom's case it might be Japanese Restaurants - so targeting phrases that each visitor might enter into a SE will deep link to the info they want, not to your home page and the data they dont (in the most part) need. So it might be Japanses Restaurants + post code/town/review/cheap/yaki soba etc etc...)

Did any of that make sense?

pgo · 30-10-2005, 07:30

Kind of.

What I'm getting at is, is there a benefit to using phrases - "Japanese restaurants in London" - over keywords - "japanese, restaurants, london". Presuming in either case my index H1 would be, say..."Japanese Restaurants in London".

For some reason, to me, using "japanese, restaurants, london..." in the meta tags feels like it would be more versatile in defining my keywords - as they can construct (and apply to) multiple phrases that "japanese restaurants in london" cannot.

I'm correct in assuming that when people talk about defining your keywords, they're talking about putting them in meta tags to be repeated in content (naturally) - or is the whole keyword issue an overly complex way of saying, "Use certain words repeatedly in your content" - having nothing to do with meta tags.

It's all so confusing to me.

Limbo · 30-10-2005, 07:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlueMountainSam

... "the" is usless and waste of good space on your title tag and remove it.

Does it help define the page to your visitor?

Google strips out a number of word in it's SERPS like the, in, of, a...anyway. These can actually help a user and are ignored by a search engine so cannot do any harm except add a few bytes to your page weight.

In fact I would recommmend it - any thing that looks like It was built primarily for your visitors will do better than impossibly well structured Super SEO mega keyword technical jargon. Look at 'mom and pop' sites for proof - their SEO knowledge is zero but rank well becasue the page uses common sense.

echo: Defintely validate your html and CSS

pgo · 30-10-2005, 07:36

I really think I'm over-complicating things for myself.

Limbo · 30-10-2005, 07:41

Quote:

or is the whole keyword issue an overly complex way of saying, "Use certain words repeatedly in your content" - having nothing to do with meta tags.

Exactly - forget meta, there are very few meta engines out there - google all but dropped it in 98, Meta is only really useful if your own SE or CMS uses it - I would concetrate your worry on your content and gettin 5-10% on-page visibility for your keywords

PGO, Repeat after me:

META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING, META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING, META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING !!

pgo · 30-10-2005, 07:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by pgo

I really think I'm over-complicating things for myself.

Told ya.

META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING, META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING, META IS DEAD CONTENT IS THE KING !!

But of course I was aware of that. My confusion merely stemmed from the term "keywords" - I had no idea if it was a selection of words or a selection of words placed in a meta tag.

Now I know. Guess I should read more at www.seochat.com

thomasvining · 30-10-2005, 07:59

Can't stress enough how important the 'title' seems to be with the SEs, particularly Google and MSN. By focusing key phrases for the title that are tailored to each page, rather than generalised terms that cover a multitude of pages, we are now getting much higher listings.

Terms like 'Speaking Japanese Tutorials' are now ranking us as no 1 on MSN, and is yet to be indexed by google, and that was simply from alittle tweaking of the title,h1,h2 and h3 tags.

pgo · 30-10-2005, 22:07

I'm beginning to love MSN and hate Google. Google will not get rid of sites that I had up 3 years ago that are no longer there!

There are still hundreds of pages (a forum that I forgot to block with robots.txt) that were on my old domain that are yet to be removed from Google's index. Lazy fucks - all of them go to the same GoDaddy parking page!

Anyway, MSN is great. I regularly get 10-20 times more visitors from MSN than Google. If I get 2 Google visitors in a month, I get 40 or even 50 from MSN. MSN loves my clean code. And it loves MSN. MSN indexes quickly, updates quickly, and ranks you well if you have a good site built to standards, with focus on your titles and headings.

27-10-2005, 21:48	#1 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	Can you spot any major SEO flaws in my code? Hey all, I've been doing a spot of SEO our site recently, mainly focusing on titles, h1, h2 etc, and generally making sure the SEs pick up the most relevant pages of our site for search queries. I've made an effort to stear clear of any 'black hat' tactics. I have read alot about the irrelevance now of meta tags, and inlight of the fact that we're starting to get a steady stream of visits from SEs with no refinements to meta tags, I haven't seen much reason to change them. I'd really appreciate if any you could just take a quick look at the site and see if you can see any obvious improvements that could be made. I've been told that the dynamic URLs could hurt our ratings, but so far it seems to be fine in google at least: www.tokyocube.com Thanks in advance for your feedback!

29-10-2005, 08:57	#5 (permalink)
Limbo Baskin' Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 5,560	indexes, directories, review pages, blogs, e-guides, e-magazines, .orgs, business listings, web portals, forums, rss link lists .... There are literally millions of sites of this nature that will list yours, some will cost you money, some you can swap, some you cost you nothing. But all can make a big difference to your SERPS. The result is like google bombing - if you don't know: type "miserable failure" into google and hit i'm feeling lucky - A group of websavvy lefties set about adding the link: <a href="...bush'sbio.com">miserablefailure</a> to 1000,s of pages and before too long google saw it as being the authority page for that search term. You might consider this Black Hat - in the case of the miserbale failure I think it is, but it's so ambiguous - Google cannot recognise humor in this form So you can consider this legitimate 'organic' linking IMO. And yes if you get a link like: <h3><a href..../tokyocube.com/food-reviews">japanese food reviews</a></h3> It will have more impact than a link like: <p><a href.....tokyocube.com">tokyocube</a><p> Not to say the latter is unhelpful, far from it, but targeted keywords will give you a wider visitor base and deeperlinks in addition to direct links to your home/news pages. Last edited by Limbo : 29-10-2005 at 09:11.

29-10-2005, 23:37	#9 (permalink)
pgo Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 12,358	Something I've wondered regarding meta keywords that this is a perfect example of... Code: Japanese London, Japanese restaurants London, Japanese restaurant London, What the difference between the above and using... Code: london, japanese, japan, restaurant, restaurants, food, dining, reviews, Is there a difference?

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27-10-2005, 21:51	#2 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	PS: The changes I have made to header tags and titles was only over the last few days so hasn't been picked up yet, but I was wondering how long it takes to start getting a good 'page ranking', as I've installed the firefox plugin and see that we currently don't have any ranking. The site has been live for 3 weeks so far, and we've had about 1,500 unique visits.

29-10-2005, 07:26	#3 (permalink)
Limbo Baskin' Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 5,560	I cant see any major ones. As you position using CSS you could try to placing your h1 as the first element in the body. It is rumored that links that contain any javascript are not spidered so you could offer/hide an alternantive Meta looks fine. All your on page SEO stuff is fairly comprehensive - you might want to look at long tail search queries as you pages are targeting quite competetive keywords. To be honest if you have a budget for SEO I'd spend you time looking at securing some high quality in bound links before the next PR update. If you can get 50-100 inbound links a month you are doing really well - 10/20 of those would ideally be heading or bold links or deep links, not just links to your homepage.

29-10-2005, 08:31	#4 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	Thanks for the feedback Limbo! Could you just clarify what you mean about inbound links - do you mean the links from other sites to our site need to be from their heading/bold links? Also, what would you recommend as a go way of getting inbound links, as I don't intend to use a link exchange company as I hear that can really hurt your ratings if the SE cottons on. We are starting to get some sites linking to us, like www.urbanjunkies.com, but other than that we haven't really pushed any advertising except for posting in forums and a banner ad on japan-guide.com.

29-10-2005, 09:14	#7 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	that miserable failure thing is well funny! thanks for the seo info, thats a real help!

29-10-2005, 15:47	#8 (permalink)
BlueMountainSam Registered User Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 2	I think you should valid your home page. I also think what keywords you put on your title tag should appear on the body content. "the" is usless and waste of good space on your title tag and remove it.

29-10-2005, 23:51	#10 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	As far as I know and have read recently, it is better not focus on particular key phrases for each page, preferably no more than 3 key phrases per page. My meta tags are far from optimised at the moment, as I don't seem to get the impression there is much weighting in them anymore. I did optimise my header and title tags though, and since doing so our site has moved significantly higher in the rankings and is even coming no 1 for some of our key phrases, which just shows how important it seems to be ensure that part of the page setup is correct.

29-10-2005, 23:52	#11 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	.... sorry, I mean't it 'is' better to focus on keyphrases per page!

30-10-2005, 07:20	#13 (permalink)
Limbo Baskin' Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 5,560	absolutely - you should think about creating a userfreindly page that targets each of you key phrases So if you sell gizmos, you want pages that concentrates on each type of gizmo INDEX - Gizmo SUB INDEX - White gizmo's Small white gizmo's; large white gizmo's... (money pages) SUB INDEX- Red gizmo's small red gizmo's; large red gizmo's... (money pages) In competetive areas these "money" pages are more likely to be the way people find you as they are more specific and result in a user more inclined to firstly; click from google, maybe bookmark, re-visit, or indeed most importantly; recommend to another. Let's face it Gizmo is going to be a VERY competetive keyword In Tom's case it might be Japanese Restaurants - so targeting phrases that each visitor might enter into a SE will deep link to the info they want, not to your home page and the data they dont (in the most part) need. So it might be Japanses Restaurants + post code/town/review/cheap/yaki soba etc etc...) Did any of that make sense?

30-10-2005, 07:30	#14 (permalink)
pgo Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 12,358	Kind of. What I'm getting at is, is there a benefit to using phrases - "Japanese restaurants in London" - over keywords - "japanese, restaurants, london". Presuming in either case my index H1 would be, say..."Japanese Restaurants in London". For some reason, to me, using "japanese, restaurants, london..." in the meta tags feels like it would be more versatile in defining my keywords - as they can construct (and apply to) multiple phrases that "japanese restaurants in london" cannot. I'm correct in assuming that when people talk about defining your keywords, they're talking about putting them in meta tags to be repeated in content (naturally) - or is the whole keyword issue an overly complex way of saying, "Use certain words repeatedly in your content" - having nothing to do with meta tags. It's all so confusing to me.

30-10-2005, 07:36	#16 (permalink)
pgo Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 12,358	I really think I'm over-complicating things for myself.

30-10-2005, 07:59	#19 (permalink)
thomasvining Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Tokyo Posts: 350	Can't stress enough how important the 'title' seems to be with the SEs, particularly Google and MSN. By focusing key phrases for the title that are tailored to each page, rather than generalised terms that cover a multitude of pages, we are now getting much higher listings. Terms like 'Speaking Japanese Tutorials' are now ranking us as no 1 on MSN, and is yet to be indexed by google, and that was simply from alittle tweaking of the title,h1,h2 and h3 tags.

30-10-2005, 22:07	#20 (permalink)
pgo Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 12,358	I'm beginning to love MSN and hate Google. Google will not get rid of sites that I had up 3 years ago that are no longer there! There are still hundreds of pages (a forum that I forgot to block with robots.txt) that were on my old domain that are yet to be removed from Google's index. Lazy fucks - all of them go to the same GoDaddy parking page! Anyway, MSN is great. I regularly get 10-20 times more visitors from MSN than Google. If I get 2 Google visitors in a month, I get 40 or even 50 from MSN. MSN loves my clean code. And it loves MSN. MSN indexes quickly, updates quickly, and ranks you well if you have a good site built to standards, with focus on your titles and headings.

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