Please Add Me Too!

[buddingchef]

Site Name: A Budding Chef - Online Cooking School

 

URL: http://www.abuddingchef.com

 

Despcription: Membership required. Weekly lessons, 100's of recipes, message board, monthly challenges & more!

 

Link to TCH: on above URL, next page and most of my member area pages.

 

Rank eval please.

 

Deb

[SEO]

Deb:

 

Your site has been added

 

SEO Thoughts:

 

First things first.... could you please change the TCH graphic links to text links? Actual wording is pretty important.

 

You can find that here.

 

You are not in Google's index but I believe this is a new site... True? The best way to get indexed by Google is to have other web sites pointing to yours. You know have our family page pointing to you so it will be indexed.

 

You have not incorporated any SEO techniques that have been described here at TotalChoice... there really is a wealth of knowledge to be applied.

 

I would strongly recommend you read all the pinned threads in the Web Site Promotion Forum.

 

Also, read Search Engine Optimization - An Overview, link found on the main SEO page.

 

Make yourself a strong cup of coffee and read all of these over... then come back with any questions.

 

I promise it will be well worth your time.

[buddingchef]

Thanks for the advice. I have spent the last week getting backlinks, as I know from my graphics site this is a good way.

You're correct, my site only opened on May 27 so I'm not indexed by any of the Search Engines yet.

I did find a site today which allows free submission to 110 engines. Of course you get the odd dud page, 404 error or some wanting money (in fine print), but I've gone through 1-40 (tedious as hell but .......) and plan to do the rest tomorrow.

Here's that link in case anyone wants to sit at their computer for hours as I have

adding themselves to these search engines...

http://www.submitplus.com/freeprograms.php?b=best100

There's also some site testing tools available at this link.

 

I'm also writing emails to food/cooking related sites asking for partnering or reciprocal linking.

 

I haven't got the 499.00 to spend for "top ranking", specially since that's plus 58% or better Canadian dollars ...but have read the SEO pages briefly and will do so more in

depth tomorrow.

 

Oh! And I put meta tags on my main page yesterday too....duh...completely forgot about that at first.

 

Have also changed all TCH links to graphical at your request.

 

Also, I found that with Google, the more hits I got to my midi site the higher I ranked in the Google directory with ALL my key words. I had the top position with country midis on that page as well as a couple others I don't recall. The phenomenal numbers (that trashed my bandwidth every freakin' month!) were due to a "back link"

from Crescendo where I was awarded the midi site of the month. I ended up taking the site down for about six months, and it's been back up now another six, but I just checked Google and I'm not even listed on the first 8 pages....didn't look harder than that. So is it fair to say major hits increase your ranking on the search engines?

That's my guess.

 

Thanks again!

Deb

[SEO]

Warning!

 

Here's that link in case anyone wants to sit at their computer for hours as I have

adding themselves to these search engines...

Most search engines (the good ones) do not like these kinds of submissions. It is best to go directly to the Search Engine and submit by hand. For the little guys, I would not worry; but then again, the little guys do nothing for you in any way (including offering an indexed backlink). Just be darn sure to not use this for any of the majors.

 

Next on my 'to write' list is 'Search Engine Submission'... but do not hold your breath, I have too much to do!

 

Here are words directly from Google:

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

 

Bottom line, I strongly discourage use of any such service.

[SEO]

I am addressing your other comments... one sec.

[SEO]

In order as I see them:

 

You need a Title tag.... probably the most important.

 

Get rid of the bravenet counter... sort of a scam. Moreover, you do not need it with the stat programs available in cPanel.

 

You have way too many outbound links on you main page (index2). Create a resource page and move all the outbound links onto it.

 

I would strongly encourage you to eliminate your welcome page (change index2 to index). I know this will change the visual... but it would be of great benefit.

 

Put Alt tags on all your images.

 

Put Meta tags (the once I speak of) on all pages.

 

You need to rethink your keywords.... for 'big' hints read (or re-read):

 

this

 

and this

 

... enough for now. Come back if you have questions or when you are ready for round 3

 

P.S. The comments above are in random order (i.e. not by 'importance', the last comment is actually the most important.

 

Good luck!