Hi there, I'm not sure how to go about this without breaking any rules, so I just thought I'd ask the question first without posting any urls. I run a credible IYP and would like some seriously white hat SEO's to take a look and give me some guidance. I'm not looking for hands-on work to be done, just consultation I suppose, since there's just too many keywords and pages to do anything custom. However, for some reason Yahoo loves us yet Google doesn't, and I can't see for the life of my why not! Maybe I can't see the wood for the trees. If you're good and interested please let me know. Thanks. (ps. If I'm not allowed to make such a request, please accept my apologies and disregard)
Posts like this are the reason the forum exists - but there is a 'Site Review' section that I think these requests get moved to, but the forum Mods are SUPER-COOL so no worries They may just move it over there. If you post the URL there are plenty of SEO-ers here that will take a look at it and let you know what they come up with.
current site is www . manchester has it . co. uk (obviously no spaces!) - that's been around for about 2 years now. There is a new site design that we have recently live-tested and are just making final tweaks to, that's at dev. has it . co . uk at the moment. The best thing to do is to look at the dev version first (since this is where we're heading) and click on some of the recent searches to get an idea of the site. The pages that we're interested in doing well in the search engines are the business pages themselves - formated as root/business/number/. As you will see from the meta info (and robots.txt on the live site), we're only interested in the "overview" page being indexed. Thank you for your help and I look forward to reading your comments and advise.
Okay I only spent 30 seconds on the site but it looks to me like its a search engine. You want us to help you optimize a search engine? If so, first step would be to make it a true directory, that features a search. Check out www.site-sift.com or www.massivelinks.com or any of the 5 billion other directories out there for an example. You need to have a site navigation structure. Classify businesses by categories and subcategories. Include links to those categories from your main page. The directory concept necessitates that it be possible for someone to "drill down" by clicking links to get to a list of sites they are looking for. Search features in theory are just supplements to this. You must have a structure that is more than search results. Am I completely missing something here?
You broke one by not posting it in Website Reviews but you didn't have enough posts anyway. You underused a very good rule and that is that live linking (once you get that privilige) is allowed and the posting of URLs with questions is even encouraged. Even though you;re one post short, I moved it because as quoted above, we're SUPER COOL . Welcome by the way. Don't forget an intro thread if yuo haven't done so already. Here's the live link BTW: http://www.manchesterhasit.co.uk (Too bad 'we' don't have the FA Cup, bloody gunners )
Firstly, nice looking directory.. especially from someone from lancashire ... only joking! The best tip I can give from my own experience is links.. get tons of them, use the anchor text 'Manchester business directory'
Thanks ephricon and TOP30 - your comments are much appreciated, oh, and TOP30, it was a good match at the very least! The site is business directory but works on the premise of being a search engine since we list the products and services that business sell or do, rather than just exist as another Yellow Pages. The new site is having a more "directory style" backend to help the spidering of the listings, but the (old) site has done well over the years when it comes to the like of Google and Yahoo, so I know that the structure and the content is liked by them. I'm just concerned that we may be inadvertently doing something wrong on the pages that we want to get indexed (once again, I'm mostly concerned that we get it right on the new site). When I do site: searched on Google there aren't any cached pages showing up and I'm concerned that we may be at the mercy of the duplicate content filter? The site's primary focus is the be easily useable and useful to searches (real people) and attracts a great number of them, and returning visitor stats are very good. My main concern though is that googlebot and the like are interpreting things that we do as "offensive". Do you think that might be the case? Also,TOP30 - what's an intro thread? Sorry, but I'm new to forums :-l
It was only one-way traffic. Good but not great. See http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2 It's where you say "Hi, I'm such-and-such and I do xyz, this forum is great and I hope to teach all of you a lot (and learn alot frmo you)".
ha ha ha, thanks for that - in fact I'm from over the Pennines, Stoke in fact, but then again, I'm not sure if that's better or worse! EDIT- also, where you on about the live site or the dev site? EDIT Links, links, links - I'm working on those next, so wish me luck! No, seriously, we're ramping up to a big marketing campaign, online, offline, pr, stunts, etc etc, which should be fun. My big question right now is, in your view, are we doing anything deemed to be wrong, or is there anything we could do better, in order for our business listings to perform better in the serps?