ok, i have a site called myminiaturepainting.com selected because my major keyword is miniature painting. it's only 2 months old but have been indexed by google. when i type in miniature painting in google i'm lost somewhere in page 13. when i look at the source code for some of the top ten sites, the word miniature painting is not even in their meta tags yet they are in the top 10 . there was even a page just full of external links to other painting sites yet it ranked number 3 the last time i looked.so what am i doing wrong and what do i need to do in order to get to the top 10. i have other minor keywords that i ranked in the top 10 but my major keyword is my domain name and is in my meta tag and description so why am i number 130 something for that specific keyword. any help is appreciated.
The keywords might be ones that alot of sites want. Make sure to get links to the site with those keywpords in them from directories and any place that allows them. It takes a long time to get listed in first page for some keywords and alot of work. 2 months is very little time so just keep working on site and links to it.
miniature painting - not exactly a hard keyword to top 10. Just concentrate on building your backlinks with the anchor text, and with time, you should be able to break into top 10 -- consistent linkbuilding is the way to go here. good luck
yes. it makes sense that i continue building links. just was surprised that some of my article pages that were not even optimized at all was getting into top 10 and like you said miniature painting is not exactly a very competetive keyword so if i continue to build links i will see some results
You need off-site optimization. A few hundred links in the anchor text pointing to your site will do the trick. 1. Use keywords in your title tag, <h> tags, and in bold on your site 2. Code every link with a keyphrase from a select list of phrases that have high traffic. Do not worry about competition in you niche, it can be beat. use a list of 5-10 phrases and rotate their placement in links to your site as well as internal links. 3. Get a large number of blog posts and Directory submissions, being sure the link contains your keyphrases. 4. Repeat this process for your inner pages, choosing a different keyphrase for each. (Deeplinks). PM me if you want more help on this.
Well said amanamission. Just keep following the simple methods, and you can eventually rank for just about anything you can imagine. It helps to be very systematic about your SEO efforts to keep track of everything you do. I use Base Camp for this, and it works very well for me. Good luck, Conquer Apathy
amanamission, thank you for giving such specific instructions i could work on but i have a bit of problem understanding it as i'm a noob when it comes to seo. 1. off site optimization? other sites that link back to your site right? i don't understand links in the anchor text pointing to me. what are anchor texts? 2. how do i code every link. when i post in forum or submit to directories the link given is always my indexpage. in the index page my keywords are there but i can't constantly change my meta tags and description right? number 3 i understand and 4 i would probably understand it if i understand point number 2 thank you very much for taking the time to help me out. this is exactly the kind of info a noob need. stetp by step instruction.
Learn how to use CSS, you have alot of redundant coding on your pages. For example, on your acrylic painting article, you have this chunk of code: <td width="110" height="21"> <div align="center"><b><font size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="index.html">Home</a></font></b></div> </td> <td width="116" height="21"> <div align="center"><font size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><a href="gallery1.html">Gallery</a></b></font></div> </td> <td width="179" height="21"> <div align="center"><font size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><a href="paintingservice.html">Painting Service </a></b></font></div> </td> Code (markup): With CSS you could chop that down to just this: <ul> <li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li> <li><a href="gallery1.html">Gallery</a></li> <li><a href="paintingservice.html">Painting Service</a></li> </ul> Code (markup): Search engine spiders hate seeing excess coding. Also - you images are missing ALT/Title tags, and your images need to be named more appropriately. Example, again on the same page above you have this: <div align="center"><img src="graphics/p3.jpg" width="130" height="163"><br> <font size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="ffffe8">P3 Paints</font></div> Code (markup): With some simple CSS coding and renaming the image, you could have this: <div class="sideimage"> <img src="grapics/p3-paints.jpg" alt="P3 Paints" title="P3 Paints"> P3 Paints </div> Code (markup): Aside from making it alot more search engine friendly, you also have a greater chance of the image being indexed by Google Images, which is always a plus. And lastly - get a robots.txt file going, you currently don't have one setup. EDIT: You also should consider turning it into a blog rather than a static site. There's alot of extra features such as syndication and it's really easy to add new content, and lots of marketing tools out there to help you promote your site (i.e. FeedBurner.com)
yes, someone mentioned that i've got some really complicated code going on which gave me some major headaches when viewed in firefox but since i don't know how to read code it's all a bit hard to try to fix it. wow did all that extra code managed to get pared down to only a few lines. quite amazing. i didn't realized that all those extra coding would make it difficult for the search engine. thank you for pointing that out to me. actually i do have a robots.txt file thanks to this forum! but it's only for excluding all my images and now you say it's actually quite good for google to index my images? i did kind of think about the blog idea but that would mean finding something to talk regularly or worse each day. i much prefer to hide behind the curtains. lol!
Then either you have put the robots in the wrong space or named it bad. I should be able to go to www.myminiaturepainting.com/robots.txt and be able to see it, but I'm getting a 404 error when I try, which means the search engines won't be seeing it either. You should invest the time to learn HTML, rather than using a webpage maker. You can make way nicer sites if you do it yourself rather than using WYSIWYG editor. Search around google for html tutorials and start learning it, it's really easy to pickup. Then once you've got that down, look for CSS tutorials to get some really cool stuff going. The extra code doesn't make it difficult for spiders, but they don't like to see alot of useless coding, so you can get a very small penalty from it. But it's not a huge penalty, just a good practice to start doing in case google decides CSS is more important down the road. And yes you want google to index your images. If somebody goes to http://images.google.com and searches for "p3 paints" for example, it lists all the matching images with links to the site that has the image. What you want to do is make it so the search engines can use your images, but you hotlink protect them from anywhere else so people don't start using your images on their sites while sucking up your bandwidth. Most hosting companies have a 'hotlink protector' of some sort in the control panel or your account. Or you can do what I do - I embed the url of the site in the image. That way if somebody leaches one of my pics, it will have "http://www.christianlittle.com" at the very bottom of the image, that way you at least get some free marketing in exchange
You're quite right at your point. But the fact is that putting keyword in meta elements is a good practice. But this is just one important factor which is responsible for high rank in SERP. But what about other points? Get quality back links to get better rank. Thats what exactly your competitors are doing!