Any hints or recommendations on how to better show up at the top of the list when people search your keywords? Is there a service that does that for php based sites?... I spoke with my host co. and they were hesitant to do it b/c our site optimization involves the programming.
Believe me, you'll spend multitudes more time optimizing your site for the SEs than you'll ever spend creating it! SEO (search engine optimization) is an entire market unto itself - and each SE is different. Your content, as well as inbound links are critical - just don't overlook one for the other.
gotcha... but I guess my question is who or what company specializes in optimizing websites for php based sites? ...The success of my site relies on showing up first, or close to first, when the estimated 80,000 individuals search my target keywords each month. Everything has a pirice... Who/what do I need to buy, hire or kill to make this happen? any ideas?
The faster’s way is pay-per-click Google AdSense and Yahoo! Search Marketing Organic SEO is not easy, may take years to get good positions and changes every time the search engines change their algorithms, so you have to be on the top all the time. Concentrate more on people not on search engines. If you will create something useful the Word-of-Mouth is the bests SEO. Here some points that you can do yourself (free) to start: 1. Optimize your pages for you target keywords. 2. Submit your site to as many directories you could. 3. Find link partners. 4. Post on the forums with you URL in signature. 5. Write articles and submit to article directories. 6. Put Maffo NEWS Mod on your home page. You will need to create the news at least once a week (once a day is better). 7. Write and submit PR (press release). Hope this will help. Buy the www . medmarketplace . com Hire SEO experts. Kill all your competitors.
Excellent words of advice from SkGold - I agree 110%. BTW, have moved this to 'Site Marketing' (as you can see) as this is a most interesting 'site marketing' thread spaceboy has initiated.
Regarding the SEO work. Take a look this thread. I did more than 2 years of SEO work. I get my site and my client’s sites on the first page in Yahoo Search for many target keywords. And in one day all sites completely dropped from Yahoo just because Yahoo production machine cannot resolve DNS. So no one, even the best SEO expert can fix it.
Great advice SK. I am currently building a website for search engine optimisation called "search-engine-master.co.uk" or searchenginemaster.co.uk. It is aimed at getting the small businesses out there high on the rankings of all the search engines. I cant stand corporations!! It will be forum based and people will be free to try the advice given on the website, hopefully posting results and improvements etc. I will also be setting up a link site using 68 and merging it with the forum so users will be able to post optimised links to their site from this. Its very difficult to go into detail at this point as there are 3 main avenues im going down. My advice to anybody using the Pay Per Click methods is to be extremely careful. I know of many people who have spent thousands on these campaigns and received no business. I personally never use these and like to appear top of the natural listings(unsponsored). Dont concentrate on being found for one or two keywords, be dynamic. Use combinations of words and give these words strengths on your pages. Its difficult to put fully what I mean in one post and could discuss this for hours..... Over the next day or two I try and get some evidence of what I mean and report it back to you. Whilst travelling I have been trying to work out where I am going professionally and I think this area by far is my best strength. In looking to start my own business up, I really would be grateful for any help or good advice.
This is a just a quick example from a site Im optimising. The static keywords for the category page of this website are : FFB Buyers Guide (I dont like this as it drops the ranking but the company insisted) UK Wholesalers exporters suppliers manufacturers The site is a food directory. When I started this website, I spoke about the search engine marketing with the "officials". They wanted to be top for "UK food directory". Firstly I told them that this would be nigh on impossible and they would be forever in a continous battle for the number one slot. I suggested that if we go down the dynamic route, we would get a lot more hits..... and we have Since changing from the old site three months ago, unique visitors have gone from 4000 per month to 87,000. The strange thing is that this new site contains less information than the old one? Anyways, over 80000 of the new visitors per month are coming from search engines. Not only this, the site is being found for 23,000 differnet search phrases. Thats a lot of different search phrases for a site that doesnt yet have too much info. Also at present , the site doesnt have many incoming recipricol links, this is being worked on so the results should be a lot better. Also, the more new data is added to the categories, the more search phrases the site will have. As stated the site sells food. There is a category "cheese". Cheese is very popular, if added to a couple of the static keywords such as "cheese suppliers uk" or "cheese exporters", well these are the results on google uk (for the entire web) PHP: cheese wholesalers 4th 500,000cheese suppliers 3rd 2 millioncheese exporters 4th 900,000cheese territorial 1st 500000cheese wide range 1st 4.7million alcoholic drink suppliers 4th 6.8millionalcoholic drink wholesalers 9th 2.4 millionalcoholic drink exporters 2nd 500000vodka exporters 2nd 138000vodka suppliers 5th 300000cider exporters 1st 100000cider suppliers 6th 300000cider manufacturers 6th 500000cider wholesalers 5th 154,000 wine wide range 1st 15 millionalcoholic carbonates 1st 350000 Notice these results dont include adding "UK" to the search phrases. I aimed the results at getting higher on google first whilst we are in the process of getting recipricol links. Once Im satisfied that google is happy with our site, I will slightly change the meta data to make us as strong on the other search engines. I have just checked the results on Yahoo and Msn and they arent quite as strong, I expected this, but at the early stage of the site, google is more important. However by simply adding UK we are fairly strong on MSN and Yahoo(to be improved). This site has over 150 different foods so you can imagine the search combinations. If the results are appearing in the top ten you are doing a fantastic job, dont be hell bent on getting to number 1. As I have stated, this site is fairly empty, once it gets busy, I expect the results to improve 10 fold.
I always cringe when a customer or client of mine asks me to SEO his/her site. I usually just tell them to get as many links in to their site from related sites as they can. That's the best you can possibly hope for. One lady INSISTED I install meta tags on her site. I laughed and said I would. I did. They're useless.
Chad, sorry, but you are totally wrong on this. Meta data combined with page content is "VITAL" to achieving good ranking. Lets just highlight this point. For example, your customer has 2000 incoming links from the best sites in the world. Exactly what will your customer be found for? Without optimised meta data and site content, nothing. You have customers?
Actually, I think you're the one that is wrong, of course, or we wouldn't be debating it Very few search engines give much weight at all to meta tags because they're "hidden" from the viewer and as such, prime for keyword spamming, abuse and misuse. Now, I'm not saying meta tags are useless but since so many search engines basically ignore them, any tags you DO have should be very concise and VERY appropriate to your site's subject matter. http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061
I actually prefer to look in the source, before I start listen what people talking about it. And all search engines (including Google, Yahoo, MSN) still recommend using meta tags. Here just one example from Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines. In some small search engines you will not show up at all without using meta tags. So I absolutely agree with Maffo.
I think we're in agreement then. I do think meta tags are useful, just not VERY useful. Site content is much more important. Meta tags don't help much but you're right, small search engines might still use them.
Yes you are, thats exaclty what you put, in the previous post. "Theyre Useless". And I also dont think that anybody is any kind of agreement with you like you have stated. This is clearly a field you dont understand. The results I posted on the previous page are from google. This website has hardly any site content. It has no incoming recipricol links. All link tags, meta-data, alt-tags, page titles are dynamically generated. Please can you explain to me how this site is getting the 80000 hits through search engines for 26000 different search phrases. I would end this now if I were you as you are clearly making a fool of yourself.
Ok then I'll rephrase it. They're MOSTLY useless. THIS site (the forum) is getting hits because of the content in the pages. The main site, 68classifieds.com DOESN'T EVEN HAVE META TAGS!!!! It is getting hits through search engines because the admins buy google ad words. lmao, not because of meta tags. July 2002, Altavista, the last major search engine to use Meta Tags stopped including them in search criteria. Google does not use Meta Tags AT ALL. The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henziger (in 2002): --(Journal of Internet Cataloging, Volume 5(1), 2002). Just because you're on the internet doesn't make you an expert. I think you've made your point clear that you firmly believe meta tags are all important and I have attempted to counter that point effectively. However, telling me I'm making a fool of myself is kin to a personal attack and really just brings your effectiveness down a notch, though I see by your tagline, this isn't news to you. You worship your meta tags, I'll go with what I already know to be true. They are given little weight and shouldn't be the focus for SEO. I don't care what SEO expert you quote. The staff at the search engines know the truth of the Meta Tag. If you can bring one of them here to tell me the Meta Tag is key, I'll listen. Until then, you go polish up your tags. I'm #3 on Google using search words that aren't in my tags. Explain that.
For more information from actual experts in the field, go to http://webhostingtalk.com and search for "META TAGS SEARCH ENGINE" and you'll be shocked to read that I'm right. Either way, if you want to use them as SEO or not, I don't care. *I* use them but I know they're almost useless. I really don't care to argue this point with you any further as I don't much like debating and prefer to just be happy and friendly to everyone and have the same back at me.
If you read my post properly I was talking about the site that I originally put the stats up about, not this forum. You place a quote stating "Currently we don't trust metadata" that is 4 years old? Please can you explain to me what defines an expert? I myself have worked for two actual Search Engine companies. I have just completed a complete remake of a website for the British Government, they werent getting any hits. I told them I would need to completely remake the site, which I have and got it top of the search engines, without any sponsored links or recipricol links. If two websites are exaclty the same, one has the meta data inserted, one doesnt , which will come higher? Meta-tags are VITAL to giving your website the edge over your competition and if your so-called experts are telling you otherwise, well think what you want, I have no time for this no more.
I understand where you're coming from and I think I understand how you've been mis-informed but it remains the meta tags went out of fashion in the late 90's. And died officially in 2002 with Altavista. Now to answer your question, and give you a little bit of a victory, if two websites are identical and one has meta KEYWORD tags and the other doesn't, it's theroretically possible that the one with tags will rank higher when searching for those specific keywords. Let's not confuse meta data, which is perfectly valid, with keyword tags. Maffo, just because we argue this topic doesn't mean I don't respect your skills as a developer so please don't take it personally.
Im in no way aggressive amigo, I just find your statements a little confusing. I just see no logic in any of your posts on this thread Im sorry. My first response was to your post that stated "metatags", not "keywords" were useless. I am fully aware that the metatag<keywords> bears little if any significance to the ranking of a page. In general, as a safeguard, on a dynamic page I combine the title, description and the text of page and display the first thousand characters. It probably has no effect but it doesnt hurt to do it. As far as all the other meta data is concerned, it is vital to be optimised. I optimise every fine little detail on all of my sites for subject matter and location. All dynamically So lets leave this one here, theres no problem from me
