How To Improve SERP's?

[redlinemaxed]

My site comes up on the top of page 6 in Google (Number 60) for the search term "Car Styling". How can I improve this?

Will having a sig in forums with Car styling in (like in this forum) help get my site ranked a bit better for that term?

 

[stock_post]

Key to his is to get good content (non duplicate content)
-- Google loves it and indexes so fast that you don't believe it.

Thanks

 

[redlinemaxed]

People keep saying this but what exactly is good content?

Do you mean guides and info such as in this section:

Redline Maxed - Car Sytling and Modifications - Guides and Information

 

[RiverWire]

To improve you Serps you to have quality links (related would be even better) with your keyword anchor text, if you do it right you'll see results fairly fast

 

[RiverWire]

Mate your using Joolma too ? you need to install a couple of things to make your site more SEO friendly i will upload them to my server for you as some of them are hard to find now days.

I will post them in a second when ive done it

 

[redlinemaxed]

sounds good. I did used to have JoomSEF installed but it broke so i uninstalled it.

I have tried a couple of SEO tools but they were totally cr*p to be honest, didn't work at all.

Getting links is difficult. I use about 7 modified car related forums and have my sig with the anchor text as "Car Styling" but haven't really seen any results yet.

 

[RiverWire]

Yeah JoomSEF is slightly different from the older one i use called OpenSef i like it much more, you need to make your URL's Friendly for example

Redline Maxed - Car Sytling and Modifications - Installing In Car Neon Kits

Needs to look like

http://www.redlinemaxed.co.uk/Installing In Car Neon Kits.htm

You can do this with OpenSEF.

Second thing is install a sitemap if you havent got one ive included on in the download.

Sign up for google webmaster tools and submit your sitemap. (After you have set your urls with opensef)

The other seo tool rewrites Meta tages, Header tags and makes joomla's core a little better, this is customizable, personally i do the meta tag's my self and let the tool do the rest.

As for your content you should be fine with as long as it isnt copied from somewhere else.

Links are easy enough, have you try submitting to free Directorys ? every little helps. You can buy links for a good price from good sites. *cough*

But there is lots out there for you to have.

Anyway here are the 3 main mods i use and they work really well

http://www.v-666.com/joomlaseo/

Hope that helps mate

 

[redlinemaxed]

Brilliant. Thanks for all your help. I think i have had JoomSEO installed at one point. I have a feeling i replaced it with JoomSEF though.

I will install these things and see what happens now though.

Alos, i used Vigos Gsitemap to generate a sitemap and upload it to Google but ill have a look at yours.

There seems to be an error in the opensef RAR file though. Thanks anyway though, much appreciated.

 

[redlinemaxed]

oh no, re-downloaded and it works fine.

cheers!

 

[RiverWire]

not sure about the error mate ive just downloaded it and it works ok,maybe a slight glitch try again and see what happens.

Yeah mainly all you need to do is get OpenSef working rename them URL's and the component one's too. Then get links to your site for that keyword. Once you done that you'll start to see a difference. If you need help post here again and either myself or someone else will help out

 

[RiverWire]

oh no, re-downloaded and it works fine.

Good good

 

[redlinemaxed]

having a bit of trouble installing OpenSEF but I'm sure ill get it there shortly. DOes it automatically create the URL's or do i have to do them all myself?

The content i have on the site was written from scratch by myself but i didn't really notice an increase in traffic or anything when i uploaded the pages.

What keywords should i be getting links for? the words in the new URL or some general keywords?

 

[RiverWire]

DOes it automatically create the URL's or do i have to do them all myself?

It creates url's for you but you can make them better

for example it may remake a url with

yoursite.com/news/install neon light.htm

where you can go in and edit it to

yoursite.com/install neon light.htm

it just looks more professional and google likes it easy to read.

i didn't really notice an increase in traffic or anything when i uploaded the pages.

Seo isnt a quick thing where you will see results over night, it also isn't something that you can do then just leave alone, you've got to keep going all the time finding new links,different ways of promoting and keeping up with search engines needs. Changing your content will be more pleasing for your visitors but it will take a while before you will see changes for it.

What keywords should i be getting links for?

Keywords are the words you want to be in google for, so if you wanted to be in google for when people searched for "orange juice" then you would create a link to your site with the Anchor text as Orange juice. The more of these links you have the better and the more high profile sites (quality sites) you get links from google will show you love in return

he words in the new URL or some general keywords?

When rewritting your URL's just use the title of the article or the title of the page as your url makes things alot easier.

 

[redlinemaxed]

thanks for all the advive.

the thing is, my traffic has always been really really bad (As in less than 20 visits/day). I'm having a new, much more expensive, site designed now so hopefully that one will be much more successful. I do still want this one to do at least averagely well though.

9months and still only an average of about 13 visits a day can't be good.

 

[RiverWire]

Looking at the links you already have which is a good start, however 9 months is quite a while, my tottenham site has been running about that time too im getting on average (since the new season) around 500 visitors to 2000 a day.

I done this by link building for many keywords looked into different ways of marketing the site like myspace, bebo.

Used places like

digg.com
del.icio.us
Netscape
Furl

And more to get the general word out.

Traffic is a funny old thing and for a business its a bit harder. i take it you'd rather not spend the money on adwords advertising untill you get a better search engine ranking ?

Have you checked to see how many searches a month there are for you keywords (uk Search engines) , only reason i ask is because there is no point in promoting a key word if it only has 100 searches a month because you may not even get 1 hit from that 100, you need to research the keywords get one 6 or 7 different ones that have 4000 or above searches a month and then link build with them keywords could take a couple of months or more but if you work hard you will start to see the benefits

 

[RiverWire]

Just had a quick look for you with the keywords, Car styling is currently around 1400 searches a month while "car accessory" is over 110,000 searches a month which would you rather be fighting for ?

Not sure if you do car stereo's but "car audio" has over 60,000 hits a month, "in car entertainment" has 30,000 hits a month.

"Car Modifications" has over 3000 searches a month, i would say you need to spread your keywords out a bit and find some good one's, Car styling isnt really a massive market you are looking at.

Anyway hope what ive said helps in some way. Im off to bed now got to be up in 5 hours :doh2: Good luck with the site let us know if you need help

 

[OldWelshGuy]

I agree with what RW is saying.

Sorry if I appeared negative but you seem to be playing a lot of faith in the new site, when there is not a whole lot wrong with the old site!

Now I am more concerned as you appear to be saying that 'new site' also means new domain name etc, is this the case?

Starting from scratch is going to be a whole lot harder than getting your current site ranking. You cited the 'oxo tin' thing as being top but there are only 70 pages with the word 'oxo tin' in the title so competition is like non existent

KW research would be the LASt thing I would allow my clients to do, honestly KW research is the ABSOLUTE cornerstone of Successful web marketing. I have worked on sites that have been chasing as many as 30 THOUSAND Keywords! (I worked on the Norwich Union Website in the UK).

What you really need is for a decent SEO to look at your site, carry out your KW research and advise you on how to improve your rankings. This should include advice on link building to deep pages, structuring of urls, navigation, page titles, internal anchor text etc. If you are page 6 for car styling then a little nudge should get you up there. As google treats phrases also as individual words ie car accessories and car styling have the common word 'car' shared, so the anchor text of one will help the other rank. as this is the case, once you start ranking for one phrase, directly (as car) and semantically linked phrases will be easier to rank for.

You need to carry out your KW research, group the phrases, test them live on Google adwords NOT to a single landing page, you need a different landing page for each small group or phrase. Lots of work ? YES, but hey if you want to make REAL money then you have to work.

 

[redlinemaxed]

Thanks for the info there guys, it's much appreciated. I still can't get OpenSEF working, on install it says something like can't upload index.php. Anyway, i'll get that sorted soon.

The new site doesn't mean a new domain by the way. When the site is built, the old domain will be transfered across and ill get a new domain for the site i currently have.

From the advice you have given, I think i should have a chat with John when he gets back from his holiday and ask if he will expand upon the keyword research i have done so far. Under his instruction, i thought of all the keywords that were relevant to my area and then took them and put them into a keyword discovery tool to find relevant phrases and how many searches they got. i then inputted those phrases into a google tool that told me the average CPC. Then i grouped all the good results into clusters. I'm waiting for teh next step now.

I'll have a look on digg, netscape, etc and see what i can find there but i already use myspace, bebo and squidoo with no success. I must be really bad at this type of thing or something.

The odd thing is, when you search Link:domain, i have only one link, google webmaster tools says i have just over a hundred and yahoo site explorer says i have over 350, yet still no PR. granted most of those links are from forums pages with no or little PR but there are a few that are from PR3 or above.

 

[Westoner]

Hello Guys,

Sorry to jump in on this thread, but, I also run a Joomla site and the information I've just read is soooooo valuable to the common man. Lots of work needed, but worth the effort to build business.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your knowledge and advice.

Kind regards
Chris

 

[OldWelshGuy]

The odd thing is, when you search Link:domain, i have only one link, google webmaster tools says i have just over a hundred and yahoo site explorer says i have over 350, yet still no PR. granted most of those links are from forums pages with no or little PR but there are a few that are from PR3 or above.

You DO have PR it has just not yet been exported to the toolbar

PR is updated DAILY, (well instantly really), via a process known as everflux. Everflux means what it says, that the Google index is in a constant state of flux (or change), this is also the reason why pages come and go as your search is routed to different datacentres.

Google does not have one central computer that holds their index, it is spread across a myriad of data centres. Each datacentre has its own version of the data, each one gets updated on a rolling basis called propogation, from other datacentres.

When a page is found, it is added to that index, the link benefit and PR are added at the same time, so a search on that datacentre will include those values. The data is then propagated across other datacentres.

Perdiodically the PR values are snapshotted, and exported to the toolbar a few weeks (or months normally) later. THAT is the time you start to see your PR on the silly green toolbar