Search ranking suggestions

[strangeworld]

Hey Para, another thing I noticed about this site which you could change to help its rankings is the homepage links... I see two in use so far:

http://www.salviasource.org/
http://www.salviasource.org/index.php

If its at all possible you change all links to
http://www.salviasource.org/

This is for the same reasion as my other post about multiple URLs for a single page... this is especially true for the homepage, as that is likely to be one of your strongest assets. Again, the engines are getting way better at figuring this stuff out, but it is still quite important to get cleared up, to make the most of what you've got.

Another thing that can help is even ALT text in banners linking to you. We've already covered the value of anchor text, and this has a similar effect (though to a lesser degree). You'll notice that a lot of the myspace banner / image hosts type places that provide free image hosting will have ALT text in the copy/pastable code snippets they hand out to all the users... that ALT text will usually be about their core service such as:

Code:

<a href="http://www.salviasource.org/"><img src="http://www.salviasource.org/images/somebanner.gif" alt="Salvia Forum - Grow Salvia Trees!"></a>

Probably one of THE most crucial aspects these days is the TITLE tag of each page. A good ACCURATE title tag combined with a bunch of similar and related anchor text coming in from incoming links is one of the strongest ways to get that page to rank better.

I'll continue to add ranking tips in this forum thread as I think of them.

[strangeworld]

Oh another thing which appears to be missing from your pages is the use of H1 tags for your topic titles - dunno how easy it is for you to change the forum template like that, but thats highly recommended practice too.

The idea is to use a single H1 tag for each page, ideally exactly the same as your page TITLE tag. (Of course the H1 tag can be CSS styled to look however you want, eg if you don't want it to drastically change the visual appearance of the topic title thats totally doable).

All of these things contribute to showing the engines without a doubt what each page is about, and if things are that clear, and a few links are pointing that way, pages rise through the results...

[strangeworld]

One handy tool that folks use to get a *rough* idea of the most popular search terms for a given topic is this tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/

(sometimes its very slow, just try and reload it if it times out)

You can just throw in any old term eg the word "salvia" and hit Go to show the search keywords used over the last month in the overture network. Of course by far most people search with goog these days, but it still gives an overview estimate of what people are looking for... then you might consider creating pages to target those specific terms, and draw in the visitors searching for the appropriate terms...

[Synchronium]

Ah, someone else who's into SEO.

I've been optimising my site continuously for the past year, using those "industry standard" methods, as well as many of my own little modifications.

I'm now #1 in google for a suprisingly large amount of pretty varied long-tail keywords, and a number of shorter ones, like "cheap salvia" (#1 from where I'm sitting). My site's in my sig, if you can pick any tips up from the way it's coded.

Also, the forums at DigitalPoint are a massive help.

[strangeworld]

Yeah theres lots of things which can be done - shame the engines are much better at stopping easy manipulation of their results these days! I only got into making websites around 2000, but just little hobby free sites and stuff hehe. Apparently in the mid-late 90's it was insanely easy to get stuff ranking for gold keywords. Even in 2001 it was so much easier to get sites ranking well. Ah well, its a different story today, so we have to do what we can

Hey I like that drag and drop shopping cart on coffeesh0p! Very slick. Did you code that yourself, or did you find it as a opensource code snippet somewhere?

Oooh I see you have a fancy myspace page too - if you wanted you could probably add at least a several hundred more friends by searching for those people interested in appropriate subjects and get a traffic boost from that too, and more visitors again by commenting on their pages. No SEO value from myspace links anymore, but still a pretty easy source of targeted traffic (if you've got a bit of time to burn!).

[Paradoxic]

Thanks again for all this info, its a HUGE help, really. I will read through all of this again this weekend and really start putting the site out there. Heres some Genius+

That forum is good Synchronium, I just might use that. I found this forum too, but I havent really looked into it: http://www.webmasterworld.com/category12.htm
Have you guys heard of it?

Also hopefully in a week or two I can get Salvia Lab out as well so it would be nice to get them both put out there at the same time.

[strangeworld]

Yup webmasterworld is pretty much the granddaddy of the website owners forums. Thats where I got started learning stuff right from the get go.

Digitalpoint and earnersforum are another couple of biggies - though i've only really used digitalpoint out of those two. In all honesty I've probably spent far too much of my "work" time reading forums and blogs about building traffic, and affiliate related stuff, instead of actually doing any work

Still they're great places to get a bunch of free info from successful site owners (as long as you manage to filter out all the crap from the legions of clueless folks out there!)

Cheers

[Synchronium]

Hey I like that drag and drop shopping cart on coffeesh0p! Very slick. Did you code that yourself, or did you find it as a opensource code snippet somewhere?

No, coded all of it from scratch, pretty much. I'm sure I nicked a few lines here 'n' there, and probably some from other sites I've written before. Actually the basket (and autocomplete search function) was my very first venture into object orientated javascript.

I'm thinking at some point of setting up an ethneogen webmasters forum, or at least a forum for SEO + Ethneogens...

[strangeworld]

Nice work, I thought it must have been mainly custom. Does it degrade smoothly for ye olde (or just plain odd) browsers? (not that many people should be surfing without javascript these days!)

[Synchronium]

There're three "tiers" as it were...

One is fully compatible: JS turned on, and running the latest firefox or IE.
One is not compatible: JS turned on, but not running the latest versions.
One is without javascript: JS turned off, content displayed with noscript tags.

If you're interested, the compatible mode's "add to basket" links work with href="javascript:oBasket.add( 'id' );", and noncompatible mode just has a link to /basket/add/id/, which adds the product to the basket and displays the contents, much like most sites still do today. Another interesting note is, the same url (/basket/add/id/) is used by the basket's AJAX controls as well, but also appends a timestamp into it, to prevent caching. Depending on whether or not the timestamp is there, it differentiates between non-compatible human visitors and the basket itself adding things via AJAX, and returns either HTML or an XML response accordingly. 

Definitly my pride and joy!


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Edit: Actually, Paradoxic, while we're on the subject of alt text to increase ranking, could you change the alt text of my banner on your front page to "Salvia Divinorum and Cannabis Seeds", please? Right now it just says "Coffee sh0p".

Thanks a lot.

[strangeworld]

Yeah man for sure - its definitely very nice. I like stuff that is stylish, WORKS and is super easy to use. Too many web apps get developed by coders who just don't *get* usability... and that really sucks for users. But this seems lightweight, *functional*, and stylish. 2 Thumbs up! I find it quite frustrating sometimes as I've never learned to code, but often have an abundance of ideas for websites (and website features), and if I want something created I have to try and convey my ideas to a coding friend or someone, and hope it works out like I plan

[Synchronium]

Learning to code was the best thing I ever did. If I hadn't, Coffeesh0p wouldn't exist.


Oh, and back on topic of search engine rankings, if you overtake me from position 13 for the term salvia out of 5.5mil other results, I'll be pissed. 

[Paradoxic]

I too would say learning web coding was the best thing I ever learned. I started off with Java (not Javascript) but moved to PHP when I realized it was easier and much more rewarding.

I think I already took you over in Google, for search term 'salvia' Salvia Souce comes up 32 and your a few sites after that  Last time I checked Salvia Source was in the 80's.

[Synchronium]

[totaly pissed...]

In the uk, I'm, no. 13! Working on conquering "cannabis seeds" in yhe next few months too...I#ll report bck tomorrow...

[strangeworld]

Alriiiight the "salvia" race is on!

A bit of healthy competition might help you guys break through the ranks

Synchronium, I see you at #11 for "salvia" in google.co.uk (all web, not just UK results only), and 8th for "salvia" with "pages from the UK" selected.

And 21st in google.com (all results).