Is this ranking any good?

[sem_services]

Hi All, Im a noob to all this. With that said my site ranked around 17th in Yahoo,Aol,and Google. My search was: Bathtub refinishing michigan. Im a bathtub refinishing company located in michigan and want to gain exposure for this area. I also had similar results with other key words.

This is my first site. Any suggestions to bring more clients to this site from michigan would be appreciated.

www.bathtubs.20m.com

[rlrouse]

Hello sem_services.

You need a couple of paragraphs of text on your home page using your main keywords and the word Michigan a couple of times each.

Your title is a bit too long IMO. I would shorten it to no more than 5 or 6 words, something like: Professional Bathtub Refinishing In Michigan.

I would remove these metas as they really don't do anything to help your page or your ranking:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
<META NAME="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="GLOBAL">
<META NAME="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" CONTENT="EN-US">
<META NAME="RATING" CONTENT="GENERAL">
<META NAME="RESOURCE-TYPE" CONTENT="DOCUMENT">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="15 DAYS">
<META NAME="REPLY-TO" CONTENT="WEB SITE">
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="SEM Specialty Services">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="15 DAYS">
<Meta name="Generator" content="Notepad">

There are other tweaks as well but these will get you started. I hope this helps. Good luck with your new site!

[sem_services]

Thanks rlrouse,
I agree with the home page, it needs work. My question is the meta, theres no need for them or are you saying the context is more important? Also when I remove them do I need to resumit my site?
Please go easy on me, I only learned from what I read on the internet.

[rlrouse]

My question is the meta, theres no need for them or are you saying the context is more important? Also when I remove them do I need to resumit my site?

There is no need for those particular metas at all. They just add more bytes for your users to download without providing any real benefits. They also push your content further down on the page which isn't good.

I went back and checked your incoming links (backlinks) on Google. You don't have any. You need to get some links to your site from other sites so that you can get some pagerank and some traffic.

The links will also ensure that Google's spider will keep crawling your site periodically. If you have at least one site that is already in Google linking to your homepage you'll never have to (nor should you want to) submit your site again.

[sem_services]

Thank you for the helpful advice. I'm removing those metas and adding more content to the the home page. The link thing is another story. Should I do a link exchange from this site or do a google Adshare, or both?

Thanks again for your help

[mm99]

You should submit to dirs as well. Once you're listed you can forget about it and it has the same effect as incomming links because that's exactly what they are. I have some listed on the left side of my sig website. Just do 'em all. Avoid auto-submitters.

peace...Paul

[sem_services]

Hi all,
Ive updated a few things suggested in this thread. I changed the title and shortened it up, removed the metas as suggestion, Increased my content, and I got approved today for the google ad. I have the banner up, but I need to get the filters setup so competition doesnt advertiise. Hopefully this will help.

Thanks again

[simonm]

You might do a search for "Bathtub refinishing michigan" but will your customer?

Try this link which shows what people search for on overture.

A similar level of intelligence can be achieved with adwords alongside the chance of people clicking through to your site.

What I do to find out what search terms to use is both analyse the site stats showing the search terms people use to access my sites and the site search stats to show what terms they use once they are on the site.

Suggest targetting more generic publicly terms that the non professional might use though I do see that the search suggestion tool shows that 4713 people looked for "bath tub refinishing" during October. 1157 looked for "bath tub reglazing"

[sem_services]

You might do a search for "Bathtub refinishing michigan" but will your customer?

Suggest targetting more generic publicly terms that the non professional might use though I do see that the search suggestion tool shows that 4713 people looked for "bath tub refinishing" during October. 1157 looked for "bath tub reglazing"

Thanks for your info. I have thought about this in great depth. When I do a search "bathtub refinishing"
I was ranking 200 or so "not PR", so I put alot of emphasis on improving that number.

When googlebot visited me last time, actually the first time, I had a different home page with poor content rich words. Plus my meta keywords just had too many that weren't relevant to my content. My density is alot better now, not perfect though.

I guess I'll just sit back til googlebot visits again and see how this has helped.

[eggman]

The page title, (some) meta information and structure are critical to getting listed with the appropriate keywords. Your PR (Page Rank) is perhaps the greatest determining factor on where you appear in the results for these keywords. That's just Google.

My suggestion is to focus on getting your HTML right by using meaningful headings, the appropriate comments, descriptive image alts & titles and more than anything...good content! The "how to" part of it can be tricky, but if you build it from a standpoint of making sense it will turn out right. Basically what I am saying is to build it for your customers to find the info they are looking for, not for Google. Do this and it works more often than not.

Next is PR. It's somewhat tricky, but Google does explain it well. It's about getting good links (the right ones) in from high PR sites while limiting links out in general. It's far more complex that that (http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/), but in short that's it's essence.

It takes some skill to get good with Google, and it takes a bit of knowledge, but build it for your customers if you want your customers to come. Out of doing that people will want to link with you...because good sites are often times hard to find.

Bottom line: build a good site for your customers. Ceteris Paribus, good sites win in the long run.