DragonflyDM wrote:
I have definitely been reading for a few weeks now and I am just as confused on a good SEO strategy as before. (although I understand what you are saying now).
The problem is that there is almost no good way to evaluate SEO businesses and even harder to determine the ROI for the amount of investment.
Like there are known "experts" in the field of photography, there are known experts when it comes to SEO. You will obviously pay for the big boys and girls. Finding the ROI is another story I believe when I last checked into one of the upper end guys the cost started at $3k. That does not include the fees you may pay for things like Yahoo directory submission (human submission as opposed to auto crawlers).
Possibly the most likely explanation is that google just does stupid things quite a lot of the time and probably has nothing against your site in particular. I've put sites up that disappeared before then reappeared, then disappeared, then eventually, *eventually*... ended up being reasonably highly ranked. For no reason at all. And I've had others that have gone on quickly and with no fuss. Google is just a hissy prima donna who has a lot of bad days. You can SEO and tweak like crazy, or you can wait, possibly a long time, for your site to just reappear. Unfortunately you'll never know what fixed it.
Well, I was reading on the Google sites, and I put one of those robots.txt files in via their suggestion. Hopefully that will make it easier to find me again.
It really sucks that I had an average HTML site that was popping up pretty well on the Google, and now I have a more professional site but the only proof of my existence on Google is through everyone else's site. That really sucks.
You went from an html site to a flash site. Google reads html well and uses the information contained in the html to index your site... Google doesn't read flash well, IF AT ALL, but that's changing in the near future. All it has to go by is the meta-data, meta-keywords, etc., plus any html that might be on a "splash" page or sometimes on the index page. Most likely you got dropped because in the "eyes" of the search bot you went invisible.
Yes, like cordell said, those things will penalize you. Such other things like linking to lesser quality sites, or other sites themselves that are using improper SEO indexing can penalize you. Other things like bad re-directs (like purchasing multiple domains and having them all re-direct to your other domain). It takes a lot of reading to really understand it.
The biggest advantage you had before was the HTML. All of that text is indexed. Flash embedded text is not There are ways to make it indexable, but it's hard and usually its the designers that have to know how to do it, not the web or domain managers.
You have to pay a lot of dough to work with the "real" SEO guys. I get calls, no joke, atleast 2 times a day from people wanting me to get me on the front pages of google. 2 times a day! I politely hang the phone up them, as they can rip you off and do you bad.
The most important tools are properly setting up your: title, description, keywords. Your title should definately be short, but should contain the most important keywords. I was having trouble popping up when I searched for "tucson senior portraits". I added that in my title, and now I'm no. 2 in that listing, all for free, just changing the title (and also the description and keywords). Your description should be brief (but longer than your title) and your keywords should be 19 at the max (all separated by commas).
Go to my site, and "view page source" and you can see it will be at the top. Read about google recommendations about these 3 things and it will do the most good for you very quickly.
BTW, I don't use Blu's method, although I just copy the same text into the web editor on their admin site. I just download my "index.html" and manually edit it myself. This is how you also edit your splash page, if you did not know that.
Also . . . add your keywords, title and description on your other pages too, like your index.php (for Blu people), your blog index.html and other pages you might have for proofing, etc.
I've had my website from blu up for a couple weeks and working on getting it searchable for my area. I use google analytics to confirm its visible status using their tracking code. Are the google webmaster tools the same or different?
sboerup wrote:
Yes, like cordell said, those things will penalize you. Such other things like linking to lesser quality sites, or other sites themselves that are using improper SEO indexing can penalize you. Other things like bad re-directs (like purchasing multiple domains and having them all re-direct to your other domain). It takes a lot of reading to really understand it.
The biggest advantage you had before was the HTML. All of that text is indexed. Flash embedded text is not There are ways to make it indexable, but it's hard and usually its the designers that have to know how to do it, not the web or domain managers.
You have to pay a lot of dough to work with the "real" SEO guys. I get calls, no joke, atleast 2 times a day from people wanting me to get me on the front pages of google. 2 times a day! I politely hang the phone up them, as they can rip you off and do you bad.
The most important tools are properly setting up your: title, description, keywords. Your title should definately be short, but should contain the most important keywords. I was having trouble popping up when I searched for "tucson senior portraits". I added that in my title, and now I'm no. 2 in that listing, all for free, just changing the title (and also the description and keywords). Your description should be brief (but longer than your title) and your keywords should be 19 at the max (all separated by commas).
Go to my site, and "view page source" and you can see it will be at the top. Read about google recommendations about these 3 things and it will do the most good for you very quickly.
BTW, I don't use Blu's method, although I just copy the same text into the web editor on their admin site. I just download my "index.html" and manually edit it myself. This is how you also edit your splash page, if you did not know that.
Also . . . add your keywords, title and description on your other pages too, like your index.php (for Blu people), your blog index.html and other pages you might have for proofing, etc....Show more →
Seems like a good method, but it appears that my index.php file is protected when i try to open it in a text-editor. any ideas how to remedy or approach differently. i really would like to find a way for google to find my website.
It has been a month and I have done all that I can do and it still doesn't exits on Google. I even have the bots specivically looking at the files they told me to put in the domain URL.
Mine was on top page for all local key words, then last week gone. I removed all keywords from my splash page to see what happends. I've had a bludomain site for 2 years so nothing new there.
i have two bludomain sites, one is a few months old (weddings) and shows up quite well while the other one (commercial) is a couple of weeks old but cannot find it under google no matter what i type in. funnily enough, its a html/flash double because i thought it'd help with SEO!
I have 2 bludomain websites (designed and hosted by bludomain) and they both are having the same google problems! It just started after years of it not being an issue. I used the tools at google to make sure the site is there, the robots can crawl it, etc. Meta tags are properly formatted too.
Someone touched on this in an earlier post...I think Google is seeing the bludomain version and the URL version of the each website (because bludomain redirects your URL to their link) and is deleting the URL version (i.e. dragonflymedia.com) due to duplicate sites. Just a theory, but it makes a lot of sense. Not sure how to fix this. Google doesn't like duplicate sites!
Is everyone having this problem hosted by bludomain?
I talked to several people with bludomain sites tonight at our local wedding vendor meeting. It looks like people who do not host with bludomain are still listied with Google. Does that make any sence?
I believe when I last checked into one of the upper end guys the cost started at $3k. That does not include the fees you may pay for things like Yahoo directory submission (human submission as opposed to auto crawlers).