Need expert advice !!! :)

davet08 · #1 (**permalink**) 01-21-2004, 04:58 PM

I have been reading posts from everyone on here for a long time now and just continue to try to understand and learn more about SEO's.

I would like to ask the Mods and you wonderful posters out there if you could take a look at http://www.behrents.com and tell me if im going in the right direction to achieve higher rankings in search engines for my key words. Thank you for your time in advance!!!

Dave

sonnie · #2 (**permalink**) 01-21-2004, 07:25 PM

Your title should appear first under your <HEAD>. Your tags, decription and keywords should be found within content on your intro page, which I found very little. Perhaps write a blurb on your intro page describing what you offer. Your product pages are not all SEO'd. Description, keywords, etc. Nice looking site, keep tweaking it, and they will come.

sonnie · #3 (**permalink**) 01-21-2004, 07:30 PM

Quick note. I know you asked for "expert" advice. Not sure who out there is "the" total "expert" when it comes to SEO. I would never claim to be. This is an ever changing game. I do know what has worked for me. Remember these are just suggestions.

Thanks

ronniethedodger · #4 (**permalink**) 01-21-2004, 10:30 PM

I agree with Sonnie, you need some text on that Home Page. There is hardly any at all to speak of...it is mostly images.

Your left navigation panel is all images. Spiders cannot read images. They can read ALT information in the <img> tag itself...but all of your ALT's say "Simpson Helmets" (run your cursor over them to see what I mean. You do show up on Page 4 for "Simpson Helmets" ;0)

I would change that something meaningful like "brakes" maybe for the Brakes link. I would make straight textual links to those pages on the bottom of the page in the footer area also.

Include a sitemap page for your site that will list all of your pages with textual links.

Your subpages (let's go with brakes again). You will need to add some content to this page talking about brakes.

The anchor text in the links you have on your brakes page are fine (so are the other subpages). What is not fine about these links though, are the fact that they go where the spider cannot follow in some cases. They go to some type of merchant account software...these pages will never be indexed.

They are probably having a problem with this link for example Wilwood Superlite IIA Brake Calipers

Some of the links can be followed, but a majority of them cannot. You do appear to have quite a few of them indexed at Google. Here is www.behrents.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&safe=off&start=450&sa=N&filter=0]your indexed pages[/url] at Google. One thing you will notice on these indexed pages is that your company name appears first in the title....you should have that at the end of the title or probably do not put it in there at all. The reason being is that more emphasis is put on words appearing at the beginning....which you will want to be your keywords. Leaving the company name off of the Title altogether will raise the "density" level of those keywords making them even more important.

I used the Lynx Browser to navigate your site with and quite frankly....I got lost. Not all of the links that you see in IE are visible in Lynx. This is probably due to the session ID cookie that I rejected while using Lynx....which is what most search engine spiders will reject also.

You should try using the this text browser (which is what Google recommends) to navigate your site with. Then clean it up accordingly. You can download a free copy of it at http://lynx.isc.org/current/.

You will notice the image tags that say "Simpson Helmets" for just about every link on your homepage. You will also notice a lot of [usemap: imagexx.gif] links as well. All of these either need to be converted to text links (preferred) or use some meaningful ALT text in them.

I think you will go a long way just by making these pages very clear and have some content to read while viewing them in the Lynx Browser. Remember that what you are looking at here, is exactly what the spiders will be indexing (sans images). And accordingly, what they will be referencing for search results.

janeth · #5 (**permalink**) 01-21-2004, 11:08 PM

Some great advice from both sonnie and Ronnie I would only add two things

remove this

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="5 days">

and work on links, links and more links with your key words in your links.

davet08 · #6 (**permalink**) 01-22-2004, 11:32 AM

Quote:

Your left navigation panel is all images. Spiders cannot read images. They can read ALT information in the <img> tag itself...but all of your ALT's say "Simpson Helmets" (run your cursor over them to see what I mean. You do show up on Page 4 for "Simpson Helmets" ;0)

This is something i just did yesterday because i read somewhere that, like ronnie said, search engines can not read images but can read ALT tags. There are only two phrases that are most important to us, "Simpson Helmets" and "Impact Helmets", so i typed those two phrases in all the image ALT's on the index page to try and rank higher in the engines. is this the wrong thing to do?? This is why i asked for help before i resubmitted to any search engines :)Thank you Ronnie for all your help!!

Quote:

remove this

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="5 days">

I removed this from the site!! Thank you so much for your input Janeth..i read your posts all the time and find your posts very helpful with learning about SEO.

What i dont understand is if my index page is PR4 for Simpson Helmets why is it that im on page 4 while all other sites ranked above me are lower in PR points??

Thank you everyone for your help and i am thrilled to be getting help from the people i have been reading posts to learn from!!

minstrel · #7 (**permalink**) 01-22-2004, 11:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by davet08

What i dont understand is if my index page is PR4 for Simpson Helmets why is it that im on page 4 while all other sites ranked above me are lower in PR points??

Because PageRank is only part of what determines where you place in the search listings.

See the PR, PageRank, and page ranking discussion here at WebProWorld.

fathom · #8 (**permalink**) 01-22-2004, 11:58 AM

[quote][quote="davet08"]

Quote:

Your left navigation panel is all images. Spiders cannot read images. They can read ALT information in the <img> tag itself...but all of your ALT's say "Simpson Helmets" (run your cursor over them to see what I mean. You do show up on Page 4 for "Simpson Helmets" ;0)

Quote:

This is something i just did yesterday because i read somewhere that, like ronnie said, search engines can not read images but can read ALT tags. There are only two phrases that are most important to us, "Simpson Helmets" and "Impact Helmets", so i typed those two phrases in all the image ALT's on the index page to try and rank higher in the engines. is this the wrong thing to do?? This is why i asked for help before i resubmitted to any search engines :)Thank you Ronnie for all your help!!

Although Search engines continue to read Alt="" they (Google) place no weight (that's zero weight) to ranking ability... if an image is a "link" then the alt="" has ranking weight.

Notwithstanding Alt="" should be on all images including spacer for proper valid code.

Quote:

What i dont understand is if my index page is PR4 for Simpson Helmets why is it that im on page 4 while all other sites ranked above me are lower in PR points??

PageRank (PR) is a measure of "importance" and not ranking potential. People often confuse importance as being better but that isn't really the case.

To illustrate PageRank in simple terms: your index page is somewhere on the forth floor with millions of other PR4 pages and as you observe higher floors you will find less pages there... however this set of floors is but one tower in a one hundered tower complex (Google uses 100 hundred attributes to determine rankings) thus attempting to observe "rankings" by merely observing PageRank can't really be done.

Really a higher PageRank guarantees only one thing - that a page and the ones it links to get crawled, more often and deeper.

snair007in · #9 (**permalink**) 01-23-2004, 02:20 AM

Hi,

Your Home page have hidden Texts. ie, in the color of background. U wud be penalized.

Also take the <title> tag just below the <Head>.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and to submit your site to a million search engine indexes and directories. The first promotion step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first-page search engine results. An early step is to build a great content-rich site. One of the last steps is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory.

Plz read www.bruceclay.com for more info.

Also see that, The keywords shud be repeated in ur <Title>, Description, Keywords and Page copy.

Also try to get ur website listed in directories..

Add more TEXT Links to ur home page and also more texts which have Keywords listed in it.

Regards

ronniethedodger · #10 (**permalink**) 01-23-2004, 04:13 AM

Quote:

What i dont understand is if my index page is PR4 for Simpson Helmets why is it that im on page 4 while all other sites ranked above me are lower in PR points??

Ditto on a lot of what was said in regards to PR issues. I won't go over that again.

One thing you have to remember is to make those ALT tags clear as to what they are going to. If it says Simpson Helmets, then there should darn well be Simpson Helmets where that image link is pointing to. The way you have it set up....almost every darn link says Simpson Helmets. You have Simpson Helmet Brakes, Simpson Helmet Scales, Simpson Helmet Wheels (getting my drift?)

Those Simpson Helmet links are going to to anything but, for the most part. It can also be referred to as keyword stuffing. It is also diluting the strength of your actual keyword by dividing into multiple parts and spreading that value in a wasted manner.

Visualize this. You have many inbound creeks (links) coming down off of the mountain into the Simpson Helmet River which runs towards the Simpson Helmet Dam (your site). The river gets bigger and more powerful and starts filling up your lake with lots and lots of water. It is now Simpson Helmet Lake.

You could open up that flood gate (one link) and rush all of that into one gigantic Simpson River torrent right at your helmets. But you chose to open up multiple gates (numerous links) all trickling out into different areas of the valley and each little creek is called Simpson Helmet Creek. Which one is the real creek?

Googlebot is in his little raft swimming up and down all of these Simpson Helmet creeks looking for helmets. Your map of your river system said it would lead him to the Helmets. Where are they?

Well -- the little rafter only has just a couple of hours to shoot a couple of rapids on your river system today....he makes a note of what he found on the Simpson Helmet Creek in his rafting journal "Hmmm...nice brakes dude!" and goes off into the sunset to somebody elses river. Where are the helmets? Maybe he will find them the next time.

Everything you are doing is in reverse. What you really want to have is hundreds of Simpson Helmet Creeks running down off of the mountain into your lake....then you open up the one Simpson Helmet Floodgate and lead the googlebot raft right to the helmets.

How does he know he has found the right helmet place this time? You make it obvious with Simpson Helmet Banners (Meta Title) over the river. There is a Simpson Helmet Dock (H1 Tag), he gets onto the dock and there is a little sign (paragraph) that says "Simpson Helmet Dock - Your landing place for the best damn Simpson Helmets in the whole damn valley." (Don't use exclamtion points...googlebot is does not care about such things)

You can effectively do this even if you have a lake the size of Lake Michigan or even a tinier lake like Lake Washington -- it is all damn good effective dam management.