Hi, I run a tennis site dedicated to Swedish legend Stefan Edberg, which I do believe is the most complete among the tributes to this great champion: http://stefanstennis.free.fr In May I built a new version which is much more Google friendly (included meta-tags, alternate text, keywords, increased back-linking and so on) and in these months its rank has in fact improved from 13th page in Google to the 4th/5th, typing as search keywords stefan edberg. But it's been a couple of months since its position has last improved. I would love it to be in the top three results, since, as I wrote, I think it's much more complete than many sites ranked above it. Could you give me any suggestion or post some helpful links to improve my position?
Get some more links to the website using the proper anchor text. Your website is very nice and clean. What CMS do you use by the way, it looks very good.
the .fr domain might make things harder for you as although the site is in English, most would assume it to be French
I don't use any CMS. I do everything by myself and I built the first page from nothing, using Photoshop 7.0 for graphics and CuteFTP for upload to server. Vagrant, I also think the .fr domain could be a bad factor, but looks strange that the first result for stefan edberg in google.it is a .fr site: http://www.google.it/search?hl=it&q=stefan+edberg&meta=
I just did simple research Top 3 sites in Google for "stefan edberg" are http://stefanedberg.free.fr PR 4, it doesn't have keywords in text content of the page (and there is no content at all, but I think it's # 1 because it has keywords in domain name) http://www.edberg.de PR 3 and good keywords density in text http://www.geocities.com/edhead01us PR 3 and also good keywords density in text but it doesn't have metatags!!! this link popularity report from http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop URL Total Google/AOL HotBot MSN Yahoo!/FAST/AltaVista stefanedberg.free.fr 5,635 67 67 221 5,280 stefanstennis.free.fr 1,988 38 38 42 1,870 www.edberg.de 1,078 12 7 206 853 geocities.com/edhead01us 1,050 0 0 0 1,050 Your site has more links than 2nd and 3rd placed, PR 3, good metatags, but I don't see the keywords in the text. I think this can be a reason. Work on text content, make it interesting for visitors but having enough density of keywords. And it's better to add the text in the first 1/3 part of the HTML code
Julia, do you mean I should type Stefan Edberg here and there in the pages even when it's not necessary to help Google spiders?
I mean add good content which will be interesting for users but also contain Stefan Edberg for Google. Now I see only images on your home page, and no text content. How could your site be top ranked if it doesn't have it? I mean at home page which you are promoting in Google. Just visited your site again.. Have you redesigned it??? It looked different in my browser yesterday
Yes Julia, I redesigned my homepage to suit it to your advice. What do you think of it? At the moment my site is out of Google rankings..., but I think it's normal, maybe the next time it's spidered it will be much higher (at least I hope so...) Thanks again.
it looks great! small notice - I have counted "Stefan Edberg" 10 times among the page code. This is a liitle bit more than necessary I would delete the "Stefan Edberg..." from alt for this image /images/index-thumb.jpg because it's the same as for image in the header. Have the "Stefan Edberg" mentioned in the text not more than 6 times otherwise it will be considered spamming! Also, I find this metatag content not rational <meta name="page_title" content="Stefan Edberg fan page - STE...fans [stefanstennis.free.fr] tribute to the great Edberg"> Maybe you should remove this part "STE...fans [stefanstennis.free.fr] tribute to the great Edberg" and replace it with more keywords? For example like this <meta name="page_title" content="Stefan Edberg fan page site - pictures, photos, news, images"> Usually title is more for SE than for users
i like your site a lot, let us know what your rankings are after each optimalisation (be sure to ping your site after each change!)
Julia, thanks a lot for your precious advise. I'll try to follow it and let you know. By the way, is it normal that a site disappeares for some time from google listings after a search engine optimization? because I can't find mine anymore Ideas, what do you mean by "be sure to ping your site after each change!"?
Google still stores previous version of your site - redesigned but like it was before the last alterations. It must take about 2-3 days more to update it. also for "Stefan Edberg fan page" your site is #1 so I think you will see better results in a couple of weeks. I have redesigned slightly my site and changed metatags 3 weeks ago and only now I see it's slowly going up in SERPs. Do you use keywords tracker here at digitalpoint?
I just checked my site position in Google...it's been dropped 2-3 pages lower than it was yesterday. And for 1 keyword it's better for 1 point. I did no changes to my site recently so probably something is going on with Google. I am sure everything will be back soon.