I am learning web design and have been working really hard for sometime now. I was lucky enough to get some help with this site for sitepoint: http://www.bbasphaltcanberra.com/
It’s for my neighbor, and it’s not really ranking in Google at all. Launched about two months ago. Here is what I have tried
Meta updates
Getting links online (I have created a facebook page for him), and asked him to ask to get links, but I can’t control this too much)
Keywords in content
Update once in a while.
I know it’s not the best looking site, but it’s pretty much my first one so lay off! haha
What search phrases were you hoping to rank well on?
I quite like the design - clean and simple. There isn’t much text though.
One thing I would do is change the gallery from just showing pictures to showing pictures with a description of the work done. Maybe 100 - 200 words for each.
It takes a while for a site to start to look good in Google’s eyes. It helps to have been online for a few years. A few months is too soon to be expecting good rankings, IMHO. You can read up on recommended SEO practices in the sticky threads in this forum. Just keep plugging away, and the site will work its way up the SERPs.
Interestingly, this page: http://www.mylifeisagarden.com/BnB/index.html was on the google’s first page. Is that your development site? If so, I should remove it PDQ - Google doesn’t like duplicate content.
You might like to try registering at a website I developed a few years ago, but don’t own anymore: http://www.onlinecount.com The googlebot passes by the site list daily.
Your major problem is the lack of text on your pages. There is very little there for Google to index. For example, under “Services”, instead of just a list of services, add a descriptive paragraph or two about each. Use MikeBigg’s suggestion and add descriptions to the gallery page, too.
I also noticed that you’ve used the same text in your meta description tag on every page, but each page should be different, with content specific to that page. Google sometimes uses the content of the description tag to display in the search results, so it’s worth making the most of it. You can write two or three sentences here, so be creative.
Thanks guys! All very helpful. I was wonderinf about my dev site/blog. Perhaps I should just remove the page from my blog, I was not sure if it would still be there though (like some kind of ghost page).
Will do re content. Any suggestions on how to implement a gallery with the descriptions (I am spending loads of time with bootstrap atm, so I have the media grid to use there, but this ain boot strap. Wait, Ic ould just pull the code I want and add the licence I suppose?
You could really use more content on your pages. Not just list items, but full on paragraphs. Going on about content, you can try to do some article marketing by writing useful articles and submitting them to places like ezinearticles and article dashboard. There are also plenty of free press release places to announce news for your website.
thanks for this, I’ll work on some more stuff. I suppose that is a big part of web design and I love writing, so I’ll just make some content up and post it - he wont mind he wants business.
The site is for my neighbour and he putting asphalt on the ground, is there much point writing articles about that? this site has been described as a glorified yellow pages entry, so I’m not sure how far I can push it content wise.
What about ‘link farms’ someone mentioned one up above
You can still redirect it using the .htaccess file, so that anybody requesting one of the old development pages is automatically sent to the same page on the new site. Something like
You should also include the canonical meta tag to indicate to Google where the content originated from. Although you have deleted the dev site Google have obviously already index it, by using the canonical tag Google will add weight to the actual site you are trying to optimise.
Hi there thanks for bringing this up, that was a quite simple and nice design. We must just remember this fact in gaining for traffic we must consider the good and well organize web page to attract for visitors and this may cause in increase traffic.
Your design is neat, but you need more content. Yes the one commenter is right about your use of LIST , i.e. http://www.bbasphaltcanberra.com/services.html
Cliche but its what works, “Technique may be Queen but Content is always King”
I agree with adding some descriptions on the images. The site’s cool, simple, and clean. It loads fast. That’s what people are looking for. I took a look at your page source, by the way; if you’re going to use those keywords, it’s definitely going to be a hard battle to get to the top spot of the search results. Have you thought of ranking for the long-tail keywords?
thanks for the cred on the design, I really was not looking for that here but I am pleased the sitepoint peeps like, and I will keep it up! Infact I am launching a browser based game soon! Using bootstrap (and a programmer mate hehe)I love it!
Anyway, I have tried to do some of the stuff here. I am getting my client to write some content for each service, a sentence or two.
I have added some alt tags to the images, and I will get onto the descriptions, however this means I need to re look at the gallery I have. I may need to rebuild it. Any suggestions for some easy to implement css? I may just grab the bootstrap code (and add credit in licence).
I don’t get it, t the directory for dev is gone, 100%, so where do I put it? Should I recreate a folder in my dev site and put the 301 ht access file. I hate ht access files btw!
This goes for the canonical stuff too. Which I also don’t get (even after reading three web pages.)
I think it works like this. Page with duplicate content gets the tag to say - rank this page in the tag higer, it had more important stuff. I can;t see how I would apply that here?
