Hi there

i've been building up my website for a number of months now but site is not easily found via google which is frustrating, considering i have 1'000+ pages

i have submitted my site with various search engines, not sure what i'm doing wrong

meta data for my homepage
<META name="description" CONTENT="BTCC-Racing.com, BTCC, British Touring Car Championship. Information on 2005, 2004, Drivers, Circuits, Results, Teams, as well as Photos, Links">
<META name="keywords" CONTENT="btcc, british, touring, car, touring cars, championship, toca, toca tour, 2005, 2004, Drivers, Circuits, Results, Teams, Photos, Links, racing, ">

meta data for a driver profile
<META name="description" CONTENT="James Thompson BTCC driver profile and information">
<META name="keywords" CONTENT="James Thompson, Thompson, btcc, british, touring, car, touring cars, championship, toca, toca tour, 2005 ">

questions
1) google hasnt indexed many of my pages eg not homepage, why is this?
2) is there a way to see why my site is placed without sifting through all the google pages?
3) How does google work, does your site raise in the rankings based on how many people find it through google?

cheers

Firstly google bascially ignores meta tags now, you also need links to your site to get it indexed, and you can use http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php to check your good ranking, and you get a better place in google by mostly getting links to your site with 'Your keyword' in anchor text of the link, i.e. your keyword like to yoursite.com instead of type yoursite.com If you have any other probs just ask

You should also submit your URL to directories

like mine http://www.robo-hosting.com/dir

that google rankings site is very quick and easy - i like that, my sites no 1 if you search for btcc 050904 (date event took place) im going to try and re-submit my site to google because it seems to be stuck in the past e.g. the pages that have been indexed are all the pages i had bout a month ago, altho its not even in the top 1000

i dont understand what you mean about having the keyword in the anchor text of the link, can you explain a bit further do you mean have a link "btcc" that links to my site?

obenix how and which directories should i submit my site to?

Don't bother to resubmit, once Google knows your site it will recrawl every so often and reindex your new pages (time dependent on number of backlinks).

With regard to Meta tags, don't worry to much about them as said before. Your <title> will hold a lot of weight so make sure each page has it's main keywords (not to many). Something on the lines of "James Thompson BTCC driver profile and information" would fine. This will also be displayed in the search results so make it appealing to searchers.

Then just try to get some links to each page you want to be ranked from similar websites using each pages keywords as the clickable part of the link (anchor text). Try to use your index page for targeting the most competative keywords.

Happy SEOing

A good idea is to add a link to your site in your signature for this forum, with your desired search phrase. (on RHS user cp->signature or something like that) I have found google visits sites very quickly after they are mentioned here! (or maybe it's just a happy coincidence)

For directories, this link gives a very comprehensive list - it's just laborious to submit them
http://www.definiteweb.com/list-of-directories.htm

Make sure that you include your key search words in your site title when submitting to directories, as google uses this quite heavily

okay thanks guys i understand the anchor text now, i'll add that to my forums ids where allowed and add my site with various directories

should i retitle my pages do you think instead of "James Thompson BTCC driver profile and information" i have "BTCC-Racing.com | Drivers | James Thompson" ?

i've altered my signature but it hasnt appeared in previous posts so im just testing it!

Originally Posted by btcc-thunder

okay thanks guys i understand the anchor text now, i'll add that to my forums ids where allowed and add my site with various directories

should i retitle my pages do you think instead of "James Thompson BTCC driver profile and information" i have "BTCC-Racing.com | Drivers | James Thompson" ?

Try to do some keyword research to see what people are searching for.

A good tool is the Overture keyword suggest tool, click here to see how many searches are made on the Overture network for "James Thompson". The tool allows you to type in a keyword/phrase and tells you how many times it was searched for in the last month.

I wrote an article on conducting keyword research a few months back, it gives some some good tips.

Hope this helps

cool i've added that overture site to my favourites too, very insightful, it would seem that the most popular terms for looking at my sort of site generally are "btcc / british touring car championship / touring car" and with regards to drivers no-one is searching for "james thompson profile" just the drivers name so i guess im on the right track with how i've named my pages.

Altho should i just name my pages with the drivers name?

saw this in an article linked to above

"3) Keyword saturation
Keywords are very important to search engines on the whole but to overly use a keyword in hope that it will bring your page rank up is not recommended. Overuse of keywords on a web page can create the opposite effect by being viewed as spamming the search engine and thus being dropped altogether. Always use a good mix of your keywords on your web pages that make it legible for your visitor and you will be on the right track."

does the meta data really have very little effect? reason i ask is because i think i have the same keywords on every page which reading the above sounds like it could hurt my pages

Reagrds to Meta: All depends on what SE your talking about, in general most major engines only look at a couple of tags, description being most important. Try make the description tag unique for each page.

Over use of keywords: In short, just dont over do it and remember that your writing for both SE and users. Make it sound natural.

okay thanks for the advice on the tags, the only pages on which the descriptions arent unique are the photo pages so i'll look at sorting that.

just looking at some other succesful btcc sites, the way i've named titled my pages is identical, interestingly through google btccinfo.co.uk is very succesful even tho the meta description and keywords are identical through the site, which proves that meta tags are unimportant to google, page title must be most important.

Luckily i've named my pages pretty well so theres not a lot of work to do there, so my plan of action is
1) Directories to get those anchor links to my site
2) Pages Titles, make unique for photo pages
3) Meta Description make unique for photo pages
4) Meta Keywords make more specific throughout site