Deverill Posted February 25, 2004 Posted February 25, 2004 Hey gang. I've been watching one of my client sites since the so called "Florida" update to Google and wanted some opinions if anyone has them to offer. I have a site - http://www.grandslamkw.com - which used to be about 37 on Google for the term "Key West Fishing". Now it is over 400! I have watched it since the big upsetting change in the algorithms and it has slowly crept from 500+ to 427 or 208 depending on if you use quotes in your search or not. I have added more relevant content, cleaned it up, gotten the Google Page Rank from 4/10 to 5/10 and even cleaned up some of the Alt tags that could have been considered spamming just in case. My problem is that using Google, no one will ever see my client's site and go fishing. No fishing - no money. No money - no web designer (that's me!) If anyone has something to try then I'm all ears. I've been watching it creep around but not do anything significant and 200+ is still way too far down. By the way, another thing I noticed just for fun. In the Google Directory section it is still showing this site as what looks like a PR of 3/10 with a very old page title. Another fun thing I noticed is that another site of mine ranks 0/10 with **** and 4/10 with www.**** Not sure if that helps anyone but I thought it interesting nonetheless. Thanks gang! Quote
TCH-Dick Posted February 25, 2004 Posted February 25, 2004 I'm sure it doesn't help that the sites in the first few listings for "Key West Fishing", don't play fair. The first one has hidden text at the top of the page, the second one has tiny unreadable text at the botttom of the page. And they are not the only ones. Try this http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html Quote
sts Posted February 25, 2004 Posted February 25, 2004 I wish I knew the answers It seems the top 5 competitors don't have this exact phrase "Key West Fishing" in meta tags or their keyword density is lower than yours. Amazing! Quote
surefire Posted February 25, 2004 Posted February 25, 2004 (Assume verything below is preceeded by 'In my opinion' since this is more opinion that expert advice) <meta name="description" content="Welcome to the best Key West fishing charter boat. Your fishing guide is Captain Craig Jiovani and he has years of experience in the waters surrounding Key West studying the patterns and behaviors of the various species of sport fish and sharks here.">Description should be one sentence with your keyphrases. "Experience Key West fishing at it's very best." <title> Key West fishing is the best Florida Keya fishing! </title> You mispelled Keys... which could play a BIG role in ranking! H1 tags shouldn't come second... Your H1 tag can and should be higher than the h3 tags you have. I would recommend either replacing tables with css-p (which is a major overhaul and not necessary) or using a simple style="float: right" attribute to put your main title first, but still have it positioned as is... or use a table trick that may not validate, but it puts your content in a better order ><table width="500" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td colspan="2"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td rowspan="2">H1 stuff</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Left Stuff</td> </tr> </table> I got that trick from "Speed Up Your Site"... I don't use it myself but you might find it useful. No h2? You have lots of h3 tags, but no h2? I don't know if that's a big deal or not... but strange. Too many links? I think you have too many links on your page. You want links coming in and only a few going out. Link text Home Grand Slam Rates Our Recent Catches Meet Your Captain About The Boat Key West Fishing Reports Captain Craig's 1969 GTO Contact Us! Map - You want to be here Other Web Sites Site Map Why notHome Sport Fishing Rates Recent Fish Caught Meet Your Fishing Captain About the Fishing Boat Key West Fishing Reports Captain Craig's 1969 GTO (remove) Contact Us! Map - You want to be here Other Web Sites Site Map Finally... Have you tried AdWords... Overture? I would expect that your client could afford to pay for clicks. Quote
Deverill Posted February 25, 2004 Author Posted February 25, 2004 See, it's not just me. Those top sites seem like bad choices when I look at them... but then again, I didn't get asked to write Google's algo. Jack, Thanks so much for the time you have taken to look at my site. I obviously have been looking at it too much to see everything and you have some very good observations. I appreciate the effort and will get it cleaned up as soon as possible. I have actually already been playing with the CSS-P layout for the site. I don't think it will be that difficult to do considering the page info and it seems to be best for SEO since you can put meat before layout details. The browsers seem better able to handle it now than when I looked the first time at doing that too. Again, thanks for all the comments folks! I love my family! :hug: Quote
sts Posted March 3, 2004 Posted March 3, 2004 Jim, Try <title> Key West fishing – Florida or Key West fishing, Florida because present title is kind of spammy. "Is" and "the" are stop words. ["best" is spam word ] Did you try <keywords> Key,West,fishing? SEO expert might disagree, but it seems to me description without keywords is better for Google, well at least I would suggest to get rid of one of Key West fishings in <description> Quote
Deverill Posted March 3, 2004 Author Posted March 3, 2004 Thanks for the ideas! I don't know what I was thinking when I made the title! Quote
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