Getting a website to number 1 position

I did some work for a client, Gareth Herbert, to make an official website detailing what he has done and what he does now. However I just cannot work out how to get it to number 1 spot. The domain I bought (www.garethherbert.com) is great if someone searches for 'garetherbert' but not Gareth herbert. I have Gareth Herbert in my actual title but it is not in the top 100 for google. I have submitted it to many search engines, optimized the Meta-tags but i don't understand why. Please help!

 

It is very easy to see why. What would you do if you were Google and found a page with very few words and two garethherbert's?

Put in a few hundred words with 'Gareth Herbert' sprinkled around and get a few backlinks with 'Gareth Herbert' as the anchor text and you will notice a big difference.

- Michael

 

Looking at that front page, there is very little text for Google to spider. You need a bit more information to give it something to work with (a couple of paragraphs of introductory text would help).

 

What the others said. Also, Meta Tags are not all that important for most search engines now.

 

Wingdude, the first url is right but in the second one there is a typo.

check some lynxviewers like:

http://www1.yellowpipe.com/tools/lynx/lynxview.cgi?url=http://www.garethherbert.com/

to see what the spiders see, there is almost no content on the main page.
Get more links, and/or join the coop.

 

Thanks for the tips guys. I will probably see how I can add more text but it is meant to be a splash page!

 

And on a strictly technical point you never get a "site" to be #1, you get a page to be #1. Google doesn't list sites in their SERPs, they list pages.

So if you must have a splash page -- I think splash pages are stupid -- then optimize the first inner page and get it to show up in the SERPs.

 

What's the point in having a splash page though? When I click on a link to visit a site, I expect to see the information I'm looking for, not another page that I have to click through to get it. You're just putting another obstacle in front of users and (more importantly in this case) the search engines.

 

I'm sure you are a great person so I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you have not seen the purpose of my splash page, that is, to let the user choose whether to see a low bandwith flash or a high one as well as a text-only version for others. It is the easiest way for me to branch out on to 3 different pages.

 

I have seen your splash page, but why do you need three different versions of the same site? You could just have a nice low-bandwidth text one and link to any flash movies you want. Sites built entirely in Flash are not going to get indexed because there's no text to crawl.

By the way, the body text on your flash home page is practically unreadable in Linux.

 

with a splash page leading to a flash site i doubt it will ever list well in google... there is nothing text wise for it to go at.

 

I know, that is the problem, I have searched around and according to google they have started primitively indexing Flash pages but because mine uses complex files, it is impossible to be read. What can i do?

 

You could still offer those options on a true home page with content. Splash pages are just that "splash" or "fluff". The search engine's job is to offer pages with relevant content in return for a search on a particular keyword or phrase. A splash page will never look relevant, because it is just "splash".

 

Don't use flash for the content. If you *must* use flash on the site don't use it for the following:

- Links (otherwise the search engines won't know where to find the other pages beyond the first one)
- Body text (can't be crawled easily - yes Google might be working on a way but there's no doubt that plain text will be much easier)