Hello all, This is my first post here and it's a question to start with. First of all I need to say I have no real experience with SEO or anything alike so please bare with me and try not to use all the technical terms that are possibly involved as I probably don't understand them But anyway, I am a dutch rodbuilder and I made a site to try and poromote my rods worldwide. I have been reading alot of stuff about how to get listed in the search engines and tried to use some of them on my site. But I'm not sure if I'm doing it right I only launched this new site about a month ago so there are no real results yet but I was hoping if you could take a peek at my site and see if I'm on the right track. The main keyword phrase I try to get listed for is "bamboo fly rods". Should there be results yet? MSN for instance is starting to show results already but all others don't. Another question is that -just for the fun of it- I asked Alexa to make me a site report and they returned a message to me that they could not crawl my site because of a 500 internal server error (twice). Now I'm a bit worried that more engines will also have that same problem. Could anyone explain me why those errors are returned and how I could prevent that from happening? I hope you are willing to take the time to take a look at my site. Thank you for your time. Danny http://www.keone.com
Dear Danny What a great looking website, really fits with fishing. Just had a quick look at it and I clearly see the amount of effort you have put into it! However there are some issues with the code that could make it better! Like wise with your search engineering. Code wise you have used XHTML a standard that requires all tags to be closed and in lowercase. If you use Dreamweaver you can do this by selecting all and then right click selection and choose "convert tags to lowercase". You have an external style sheet and some in-line styles. Would be better to move the inline to the external source. Also when you have attributes like LEFTMARGIN=0 it should read leftmargin="0". If your DOCTYPE allows it. White space in the code adds to file size and lengthens download time etc. So reducing this makes browsing your website more enjoyable for surfers and spiders etc. Finally SEO. hmmmmmmmmmm keep that close to my chest. Just validate your work with the W3C.org (HTML Validator) and you will be on your way. Good Luck! Cheers David
Yes, congratulations on a very impressive looking website. One thing I would add is make sure all of your images have descriptive 'alt' tags - I noticed that your main pic on the front page doesn't. T
That was more work than I thought. I have been working on that the past 4 hours. Not just for the first page but for the rest too. I still have one or two errors on the template I need to fix but i got rid of the 122 other faults. *takes a deep breath* Thanks for keeping me off the streets David Thanks for the compliments by the way from the both of you. Any other things I should give attention? I hear people speaking about that it should be easy to get ranked in yahoo but besides that I sent them my txt file with links I don't know what else to do to optimize my pages. Any tips? or should I just be patient now? Thank you! Danny http://www.keone.com
Dear Danny I have just had wee look at your website and you have been a trooper. You are right making a website validate is a complete nightmare. Once it is done the beneifts outway the bad bits. Also once it validates on the W3C website and your design has not changed, there is a certain sense of acheivement of creating a website that is approved. It is after all a propper website! Be patient with your listings. You have a good website and as long as you have inbound links then all the better, you will be indexed. There are a few things you can do to help though. Create an XML sitemap. Most people think that XML sitemaps are only for Google. But in fact they help with a number of aspects of the web. So creating one is a good idea. I used to do mine by hand in a text editor. But it gets too much after about 100 urls. I have tried a number of online versions of sitemap creators and there is one that I recommend. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ If you have a website that is less than 500 pages, then it will spider your website and let you download the site map so you can upload it to your website dir. Then its a simple case of linking to the site map from your home page. Either a simple hypertext link (<a href=""></a>) behind an XML image or a <link rel="alternate" type="xml" title="sitemap of Keone.com" href="http://www.keone.com/sitemap.php"> (tag does not need to be closed!) should do the trick. This tag is placed in your HTML prior to the close tag of </html> This will be spidered by all spiders that visit your website and point out all your pages to the spider. By all means register your sitemap with Google Sitemaps (Search Sitemaps in Google) You will need to sign up for an account (its free) or if you have gmail (or googlemail as it will be in Europe soon) you can use that log in. One thing about Google sitemaps, you can varify your website. This is great because it points out any errors you have in your directory. Hope this helps and keeps you off the streets for another day or two. Once you have got that sorted post again and we will talk advanced navigation options, if you like? This is athe good thing about accessibility. Using it creates an increased amount narural content, without trying!!!! Cheers David NB you can apply styles to your xml sitemap if you wish aswell!
Dear David et others, The rest of the validation has to wait a bit because I have to rearange my complete template for the table background and height problems. I will get it done though but this will take a bit longer. I made a sitemap for google about a week ago, and made a textfile for yahoo and sent them that yesterday. I don't know if it has something to do with the google update but google visited my site 26 times yesterday and today already 11. MSN also did a complete check but Yahoo still sucks and only showed up 2 times and only tries to crawl pages that do not exist. I had 62 spider visits yesterday Could I also link to my sitemap link the way I did for the Icra label? Right when I launched the new site I also started an adwords campaign at google to find out about keyword phrases. I just spammed it with keyword phrases and now I have a pretty good overview from what people use as search terms when they search for the rods that I make. Is it a good thing to buy domains that use those exact keyword phrases and redirect them to my site? Or is there a better way to use them? Number 2, 3 and 5 of the top 5 are (were) available. What do you mean with advanced navigation options and the increased amount of natural content? Thanks for helping me David it is much appreciated! Although your messages keep me from working on my rods. I feel that it is better to give my work the attention it needs or don't start working on it at all. I treat my rods the same way. They need to be perfect or I will brake them and make another for my customer. Danny
Dont break your website. You have done such a great job!!!!! The navigation aspect is not really rocket science. I it simply a case of assigning keys to pages so that your browsers do not need to use a mouse. Also the accessibility aspect adds content by a text only version of your website. Again all bonafide content. You really do know your stuff, so I think that I dont need to give anymore input!! The Yahoo thing, with a text file does that work? I regularily get slurpy visits? Cheers David
I don't know yet. I just sent them the link to that textfile yesterday. But since they do not visit me that often yet and only view pages that were used by the old owner of my domain name I thought I would give it a try. I figured that if it would not work than it would not hurt either. The sitemap for Google really helped. I hope it will do the same for Yahoo, I made the sitemap.php and added the <link rel Why does that have to placed on the bottom of the file just before the </htm> by the way? Danny
it DOES NOT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I made a typo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I meant before the </head> Sorry been so busy!!!!!!!! I give anyone permission to give me crap rating for my posts in here! It goes before the close tag of </head> I was not awake properly when I posted that sorry!