Hi - I started tsptalk.com (using Frontpage) in January and have been very please with the response. I am getting a lot of word of mouth referrals but all of my search engine traffic is coming from paid clicks. There are many sites under "TSP" and "Thrift Savings Plan" in the search engines and mine is lost somewhere way, way down on the lists. I haven't put my link on other pages (how do you do that?). I'm just looking for some hints on how to get better recognition from search engines. Anything you can tell me would be helpful. One thing I was told, and I want to verify it, was to use search words in my title rather than a true title. Does that sound about right? I used to use "TSP Talk - Thrift Savings Plan Strategies" since that is what would show up in someone's favorite places if they saved the page. But because of that suggestion I recently changed it to just "Thrift Savings Plan Strategies." What would suggest for a title? Thanks for your input!
I have answered your query before - you should go and look at the thread "keyword perplexity" and you will find a lot of information Also you should use use Shawns Keyword tool to find the correct keywords eg I did a search on my Wordtracker account for "Thrift Savings Plan Strategies" and got: "Sorry! No results found To appear here, your keyword needs at least three appearances in the last 326 million searches." But "retirement" showed a count of 1249 searches per day! For the phrase "Thrift Savings Plan Strategies" Shawns tool showed the same nil response but "retirement" showed the expected response. So what I an saying is that although you would like that search phrase to be important and thus you have it in your title you should perhaps look for another phrase for the title
Thanks to everyone who have helped. Things are happening. My anchor text link here "TSP Fund Allocation" has put me at #2 on Google for that keyword. A great improvement but I still need to work on other keywords. I am looking to hire someone for help setting up CSS on my home page and just fine tune things a bit in general. If you are any more creative than I am, which is not tough, I'd also be interested in hearing some minor design suggestions. I will then update the rest of my pages based on your updates to my home page. If anyone is interested please PM or email me with your rate. I emailed IONWeb, who's site I really like, but I haven't heard back yet. If you are out there, please contact me. But anyone else who is interested, please send me a bid for CSS, and if you have new design ideas, send me links to some sites you've done. Thanks!
Hi, living on the far shores of Europe and being of an age where one no longer thinks about retirement (it's now a not to distant given) here are me 2 pennies worth: The homepage assumes that all visitors know what TSP is. Just maybe a bit from about us should be fairly high on the homepage, alternatively you may be able to generate a catchphrase under the titel If you only target TSP people than it may not matter but on each page I look at I find myself going back and looking up what TSP is. A subtle reminder once on ech part of the page may help non TSP's) E.G. TSP (Thrift Savings Plan) and on another page Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) and maybe on top of the left navigation). Past 40(ish) lots of us start wearing glasses thus textual elements, if a site is textual heavy which yours is, need to be pleasing to the eye and easy to read. http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_examples.asp (some good tips and examples can be externalised later) Myself, and that is very personal and subjective, tend to use varieties of this verd_9_2_j { font-family: Verdana; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 11pt; letter-spacing: 1px; text-align: justify} For text to be justified and than 8pt or 10pt for alternative sizes etc. Homepage left navigation is longer than content. On an investment site I would expect this to be fairly bussy and not leave any large whitespace. Maybe a graphic of the returns calculator sheet..... or expand the text in the paras a bit. Insurance page you have the other extreem a large portion of the page left and right white. As a quick fix I would just repeat the left navigation on the right anchored to the bottom so it shows along the extended text. But hey that's me - what do I know Best of luck M
Back in early April I created this thread called "Lost in a sea of TSP." I listened to your advice, created some backlinks, created more content, etc. and now I am seeing great results. Many of these on Yahoo are redirects from other domain names I own. How do they get ranked so high? (for example, www.computes.net is #1 for "tsp allocation help"). Anyway, thanks again eveyone. I couldn't have done it without you.
Congrats again - well done It was you that did it by listening - now don't disappear, stay and talk and assist other newbies using your own experience