is there an easy way to increase your google search ranking?

vibe666

my dad has a website that i did for him for his wheelchair sports club http://ncwak.org.uk/ but it's not really getting anywhere in google searches for wheelchair sports related searches and i was wondering if there's an easy way to get it noticed and push it up the google ranking so they can attract new members?

i'm in IT, but i'm not a web designer (as you can see) by any stretch of the imagination. he'd asked around and got quotes for designing a site and they were all in the many hundreds of pounds bracket, which they just can't afford, so i said i'd throw something together for them, just so they had some kind of online presence.

anyway, i just got him to write a few bits about it and give me a few pics etc. and threw it together in wordpress, but that's about the limit of my web building ability, so i was wondering what to do with it next to get it noticed?

elspecia

vibe666 wrote: »

my dad has a website that i did for him for his wheelchair sports club http://ncwak.org.uk/ but it's not really getting anywhere in google searches for wheelchair sports related searches and i was wondering if there's an easy way to get it noticed and push it up the google ranking so they can attract new members?

i'm in IT, but i'm not a web designer (as you can see) by any stretch of the imagination. he'd asked around and got quotes for designing a site and they were all in the many hundreds of pounds bracket, which they just can't afford, so i said i'd throw something together for them, just so they had some kind of online presence.

anyway, i just got him to write a few bits about it and give me a few pics etc. and threw it together in wordpress, but that's about the limit of my web building ability, so i was wondering what to do with it next to get it noticed?

Meta Tags??I think they are key words that google uses, i think the more of these tags the site has better its ranking i think, hope i helped:rolleyes:

link8r

elspecia wrote: »

Meta Tags??I think they are key words that google uses, i think the more of these tags the site has better its ranking i think, hope i helped:rolleyes:

@elspecia Sorry, nope, Google doesn't read keywords tags. But it does read content.

@OP Its a bit daft to think that the more you repeat a word, that Google will give you more credit. Where do you stop ? 100? 10000?

Build up a good network with your site - and get suppliers and partners to link to you and get customers to review your products and you'll get started!

What do your competitors do - have you tried analysing them?

elspecia

link8r wrote: »

@elspecia Sorry, nope, Google doesn't read keywords tags. But it does read content.

@OP Its a bit daft to think that the more you repeat a word, that Google will give you more credit. Where do you stop ? 100? 10000?

Build up a good network with your site - and get suppliers and partners to link to you and get customers to review your products and you'll get started!

What do your competitors do - have you tried analysing them?

Ok cheers, i was told it did by a lecturer of mine a few years back, but said lecturer is actually useless and nearly always wrong ha ha

mbiking123

I had this type of conversation a while back

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056092642

If you want to read it go ahead, beware of the smart ass comments from some. There are links provided and views. Some interesting points are made but it all boils down to one simple factor

When it comes to google, exactly how they calculate ranking is kept a secret. They just describe the process but dont tell exactly how its calculated.

One guy on previous post mentioned a guy that 'gets it from the horses mouth' - maybe he does ?

link8r

mbiking123 wrote: »

I had this type of conversation a while back

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056092642

If you want to read it go ahead, beware of the smart ass comments from some. There are links provided and views. Some interesting points are made but it all boils down to one simple factor

When it comes to google, exactly how they calculate ranking is kept a secret. They just describe the process but dont tell exactly how its calculated.

One guy on previous post mentioned a guy that 'gets it from the horses mouth' - maybe he does ?

Google actually regularly publish many of their algorithms which are patent protected - you have to do this if you want to secure a patent. Therefore, large aspects of the system are understood. This is briefly summarised as Relevance and Authority. You could assume "Related to" as part of relevance.

Related to/Relevance = content you have on your site - your meta data, images, text, page names and descriptions.

Authority is a mix of who links to you, why, what do they say.

A very lazy and fruitless strategy is to encourage link pages and reciprocal links. This doesn't stop people however.

Google keeps many of the details of how this system has been modified over time quite secret and it keeps its Spam and ToS violation technology very, very secret. This applies to spamming the index as well as Click-fraud.

cormee

Google have a very helpful SEO starter guide, start by implementing the suggestions on that

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

vibe666

thanks guys, looks like i've got some reading to do.

mbiking123

'High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.'

'Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can't rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don't get me wrong, it's still nice, but it's getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.'

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/05/27/webmasters-say-google-algorithm-update-costing-them

Only opinions-to draw your own

tomED

mbiking123 wrote: »

Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes.

Google are making the changes to improve their SERPs, nothing to do with keeping webmasters on their toes. If Google had it their way, there would be no such thing as SEO.

mbiking123 wrote: »

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight).

I wouldn't agree that the way people search has changed much, however the way they find websites of interest has. And it's certainly nothing to do with mobile phone usage.

People's habits are constantly evolving, it wasn't too long ago that people were using 2-3 keyphrases when searching, this has greatly changed over the last couple of years - but people use the same search engines on their phones as they do on the desktop in fairness.

There is a major shift in how someone hears about your product though and that's the key - people hearing about you rather than searching for you (or your services for that matter).

I'm sure most here would agree that if they are looking to buy something whether that's a service or product, they use the web to research first - even if they have been recommended by their peers.

@OP You should take Link8rs advice and read the link Cormee suggested. Stick to these principals will certainly help you get started and gain some success.

vibe666

they're not selling anything, it's just a small group of people in wheelchairs who get together to play sports a couple of times a week, looking to get a few new members for wheelchair tennis & basketball.

they just want people to know they're there and be able to be one of the 1st results when people google for "wheelchair sports cumbria" or similar terms, but at the moment, the 1st time they appear is as the 5th result on the 2nd page of google results.

so the best thing to do without spending money on SEO would be to build more content on the site (i'm trying to get some of them to write stories about their experiences since becoming disabled, how their lives have changed, hints & tips and that kind of thing) and get as many other sites as possible to link to them?

Cat Melodeon

vibe666 wrote: »

they're not selling anything, it's just a small group of people in wheelchairs who get together to play sports a couple of times a week, looking to get a few new members for wheelchair tennis & basketball.

they just want people to know they're there and be able to be one of the 1st results when people google for "wheelchair sports cumbria" or similar terms, but at the moment, the 1st time they appear is as the 5th result on the 2nd page of google results.

so the best thing to do without spending money on SEO would be to build more content on the site (i'm trying to get some of them to write stories about their experiences since becoming disabled, how their lives have changed, hints & tips and that kind of thing) and get as many other sites as possible to link to them?

I have a community website that has ranked in 1st place on google since about 3 months after I first put it up (2003) until now. When it first went up it appeared on page 7 (the name of the site is the name of my town, so the name appeared on hundreds of other web pages already). Then I got linking and got a lot of content up and it's been happy days since then. When linking, make sure you get relevant sites to link to you. This could be other ability organisations, sports clubs, local & national tourism sites - anything that is relevant to the locality, sport and wheelchair users. You don't seem to need hundreds of links, just good quality carefully chosen ones which already get a decent amount of traffic and which are regularly updated. You shouldn't have too much trouble getting linked to - most organisations are happy to link to non-profits providing a free service. And keep it updated, add stuff regularly so it has a pulse. Adding a guest book or a message board also helps create regular traffic and build a user community who in turn will link you on.

MeteoritesEire

vibe666 you have a quite a bit of work to do to push this site up the serps but you should be able to get on the first page with a little effort.Some articles will help with the appropriate titles linking to your site.Focus on wheelchair sports cumbria of course.Also try to link from and to the sites which are on the first page for the search term 'wheelchair sports cumbria' which are www.activecumbria.org , www.iknow-lakedistrict.co.uk and www.cumbriacerebalpalsy.net etc etc.Make a squidoo lens and a hubpages page about the club and link to your site --nice link juice from both of those.

You currently have one inlink to your single page site from the post you made here in August 2010.

basically you need more content and more links to put it in a nutshell but it can certainly be done as it's quite a specific niche.

all the best
Jim

adrenaline

Just posted it in old thread my apollogy!

Hey, on site SEO very, very important:

Depending on the site:

- dynamic title for each page
- dynamic description for each page ( no more than 200 characters)
- dynamic keywords for each page
- short 'articles' describing each page (advanced)
- alt and title for each image
- title on each link (doesn't look good but it is worth it)

That should be good for beginning just finished it on www.toprice.ie, you can have a look.

Than give it a time to be well indexed by big G ( could take months, year or two LOL). Check number of pages in webmaster tolls and compare with Google search on site:www.yoursite.xx see what they managed to index.


For link building start with getting a blog, make sure it is dofollow (for wordpress you will need to self hosted). After some time you will be tired of spam reaching your blog and mailbox:)!

After that you are ready to start posting comments. ( not sure if how it will play out in future as big G is warning!)

Start with dofellow.com software. In my opinion it is great tool for white hat SEO.
You will be required to be patient, make sure you will pick blogs with PR 1 or more to be on the safe side.

Post good comments, relevant to the topic like the one that you wished to receive while deleting hundreds of spammy ones from the blog I advised to set up at first.

Now you are fully trained when it comes to beginner SEO. Remember the site must be worth using it!

One more thing, content, it is easier to SEO site with unique content ie. not from other site (major difficulty for affiliate site)

pwd

Any seo attempt can backfire badly. Google attempts to nullify and penalise attempts at artificial rank inflation. This can often result in completely fair seo practices being penalised. For example if the number of incoming links goes up by a factor of five in a week, you are likely to drop in the rankings, rather than go up, even if it was valid practice such as directory submissions or simply gaining interest.

One thing that is clearly a factor in pagerank, and which is usually overlooked or not recognised, is links clicked in results. If you look at the url of links in the results you'll see that they are not direct links to the pages, but links to google itself.
For example, the link to boards.ie in the results for querying "boards" is this:

/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDQQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boards.ie%2F&ei=DR4vTenICMeHhQejo7jpCg&usg=AFQjCNH0IzKGt54FxMrwmDu0SWXrwFynMQ

So clearly they track what results are clicked on. It is logical to assume that they trace different IPs and users, and that they examine the behviour after clicking the link. So if you dont do anything on google for a bit after that, you probably found what you were looking for, whereas if you immediately click on another result, the page was probably less relevant. Obviously this approach is massively flawed: I'm certain it's the reason that pretty girls and/or pornographic images come up high in image search results for practically anything. It ranks the most effective distractions above the most pertinent results.

But google are our masters for some reason, so what they look at is what is important, even if it is actually misleading and frivolous.

Actually a good question would be whether using the links from the results as the urls in your page would trick google into thinking every click was a click on its results. If it worked your ranking might rocket. They probably check for stuff like this though.

notnem

adrenaline wrote: »

Just posted it in old thread my apollogy!

Hey, on site SEO very, very important:

Depending on the site:

- dynamic title for each page
- dynamic description for each page ( no more than 200 characters)
- dynamic keywords for each page
- short 'articles' describing each page (advanced)
- alt and title for each image
- title on each link (doesn't look good but it is worth it)

That should be good for beginning just finished it on www.toprice.ie, you can have a look.

Than give it a time to be well indexed by big G ( could take months, year or two LOL). Check number of pages in webmaster tolls and compare with Google search on site:www.yoursite.xx see what they managed to index.


For link building start with getting a blog, make sure it is dofollow (for wordpress you will need to self hosted). After some time you will be tired of spam reaching your blog and mailbox:)!

After that you are ready to start posting comments. ( not sure if how it will play out in future as big G is warning!)

Start with dofellow.com software. In my opinion it is great tool for white hat SEO.
You will be required to be patient, make sure you will pick blogs with PR 1 or more to be on the safe side.

Post good comments, relevant to the topic like the one that you wished to receive while deleting hundreds of spammy ones from the blog I advised to set up at first.

Now you are fully trained when it comes to beginner SEO. Remember the site must be worth using it!

One more thing, content, it is easier to SEO site with unique content ie. not from other site (major difficulty for affiliate site)

Eh - I wouldn't pay any attention to this. I presume it is just a way of getting a link on boards.ie - but this is not SEO advice anybody with a site should follow.

link8r

notnem wrote: »

Eh - I wouldn't pay any attention to this. I presume it is just a way of getting a link on boards.ie - but this is not SEO advice anybody with a site should follow.

I quite agree with @notnem. This list posted above is just a mash of reading unqualified blogs and Top Ten SEO "tricks".

You don't need any of these things to get indexed. Just because a site has them, doesn't mean that they are the reason.

If you submit your site to a forum like this or IWF.IE in the new sites announcement and submit a sitemap to Google Webmasters, you should know in a couple of days.

We can and regularly (weekly) get new domains indexed within hours.