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Help My Page Rank!
This is a discussion on Help My Page Rank!, within the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) section. This forum and the thread "Help My Page Rank!" are both part of the Managing Your Website category.
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| Help My Page Rank! |
  Feb 15 2008, 03:05 PM
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#1
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 Squeezing  Posts: 50 Joined: 15-February 08 From: California  |
 Hi guys, http://www.coastercrazy.com is my baby. I run it on a dedicated server colocated here in California and we recently switched domain name from weeweeslap.com to coastercrazy.com We didn't do any good on page rank on the old domain name either. I know the first rule will be to change to a php forum so I use the URL rewrite, but that's reallynot an option now for me. I was hoping to get some pointers into how I can improve my page ranks. Thank you for your help! -Oscar -------------------- |
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Feb 15 2008, 03:10 PM
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#2
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 Squeeze Machine Posts: 574 Joined: 13-February 08 From: Scotland, UK |
What you could do to improve your code-to-content ratio is remove all that inline JavaScript and put it in an external JavaScript file. I also suggest that you stop using tables and start using valid code. And a major factor is probably because you are not using <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc... tags.
-------------------- Thanks,
Marc |
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Feb 15 2008, 04:19 PM
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#3
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 Master of the Universe  Posts: 1,298 Joined: 15-February 08 From: London, England |
Rethink your page titles, add h1 titles, get some decent links coming into your website.
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Feb 15 2008, 04:28 PM
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#4
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 Squeezing Posts: 82 Joined: 14-February 08 From: inside the outside |
QUOTE (Sleaklight @ Feb 15 2008, 08:05 PM)  we recently switched domain name from weeweeslap.com that made me spit beer out of my nose... as marc has said using semantic markup correctly<h1><h2> etc, will help you gain better on site seo. this basically means: use the right tags in the right place. also update your page titles to be more meaningful and get some backlinks going that will be a good start -------------------- |
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Mar 20 2008, 10:08 AM
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#5
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Fresh Squeezed Posts: 11 Joined: 20-March 08 |
H1 tag is important as well as bold tag
-------------------- Search Engine Optimization Company - http://www.seohawk.com
http://blog.seohawk.com - SEO Blog Offshore SEO Company - http://seoindia.bsolutions5.com |
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Mar 20 2008, 11:13 AM
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#6
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 Rapid Squeezer Posts: 171 Joined: 15-February 08 From: US of A |
QUOTE (website-seo @ Mar 20 2008, 10:08 AM) H1 tag is important as well as bold tag Not nearly as important as ditching those horrible tables, the 100 lines of javascript, and making the site XHTML/CSS Valid Strict. Although after that is done then yes H1 - h3 tag's used properly and boldening the text properly is very important. Another bad thing on your site is your using image links... ewww If you have to use image links then you really need to have a text version somewhere where it can be spidered easily. -------------------- Currently Available for work: - XTHML, CSS, Flash, Actionscript, PHP, ASP, Ajax -
interested in movies? Read some of my reviews on my blog |
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Mar 20 2008, 11:18 AM
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#7
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 Co-Founder  Posts: 2,664 Joined: 13-February 08 From: On the forum! |
Alright, well you are going to hate me after reading this post, but if you listen to what I say you will be able to rank highly in search engines.
Second, think about your SEO! Suggestion 1) Better title tag for all pages. Suggestion 2) Headings with forums/threads. (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>...etc.) Titles are very important to search engines, so why not take advantage of this by setting a better page title? Within your <title> tag you should take advantage of placing keywords that you wish to rank highly for. When someone uses a search engine and types in a search query to find a business or service, the search engine tries to match that search with a number of areas on the website. For example, if I type in "roller coaster" the search engine will look at some key factors. 1. Your URL: You would obviously rank better if your domain was rollercoaster.com. The url used is relevant to the business. 2. Page Title: If my url is rollercoaster.com I want to make sure Roller Coaster is the first two words in the page title. Your page title can be a phrase or list of targeted keywords separated by comma. The page title is often times one of the first places Web spiders look to identify your content. Make your page title effective, relevant, and include the keywords that drive your business and you will do well in search engines. So, to recap.... * Domain name - If possible make your domain name include keywords that you wish to rank highly for in search engines. Now, this is not always possible, but it certainly helps with SEO. * Page titles - Include your business name, and keywords you want to rank highly for in search engines. * Page Headings (<h1>-<h6>) - Place your opening <h1> tag as close to the opening <body> tag as possible. Make sure your headings contain what you want to rank highly for in search engines. * Content - Gear your content around what you have on your page headings, and titles. Your title, headings and content should change on a page to page basis. You can view an example of all of the above here. http://www.scoringsleepstudy.com/ On this website the original domain name was... http://www.registeredsleepers.com/ Currently, that domain name just forwards to the new one. Notice the new domain name is geared toward the content on the site. Also notice the page title, headings, and content on the site are geared around the keywords that I wanted that site to rank highly for on Google. This is done on a page by page basis. The code is clean and the markup (XHTML) is separated from the presentation (CSS). Markup! All Google and your users care about is your content! We obviously want to make it as easy as possible for Google to know what our keywords are, and we should try our best to change these on a page by page basis. Your markup is a mess and really needs to be cleaned up. You really need a complete redo on the site as far as code goes, and content for that matter. You need to ditch the tables and cut down the code-to-content ratio. One of the most important things in SEO and in web design to me, is separating your presentation from your structure. Not only does this just make since, but it will also help your search engines rankings. Think about it, you have all of your page style in a separate document allowing Google to be able to read what it cares about....your CONTENT! Google won't have to search through your page to find the content through all of your inline style, but will be able to index and rank your page more highly. This will also help you, as you will be able to update your style sheet and the whole site changes....rather then going into each and every page copying and pasting the new table style/layout. Using valid XHTML/CSS and separating your presentation from your structure is vital to your success as a web designer/developer. The next thing is to make your headings (<h1>-<h6>) contain keywords you wish to rank highly for. Also, the more "READABLE" content you have....the better!!! Bold and italicize your keywords that way Google knows they are important to you. Remember, those page headings are very important! -------------------- Thanks,
Jacob |
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Mar 20 2008, 12:39 PM
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#8
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Squeezing Posts: 50 Joined: 15-February 08 From: California |
Ouch. I really need to redo the site from scratch. I can't do it and paying someone to port everything over to a code complient format sounds expensive. Skimming the site, what kind of $ do you think it would roughly cost to redo the whole site?
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Mar 20 2008, 03:47 PM
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#9
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Co-Founder Posts: 2,664 Joined: 13-February 08 From: On the forum! |
QUOTE (Sleaklight @ Mar 20 2008, 01:39 PM) Ouch. I really need to redo the site from scratch. I can't do it and paying someone to port everything over to a code complient format sounds expensive. Skimming the site, what kind of $ do you think it would roughly cost to redo the whole site? Sorry, I tried to be gentle. I don't know as if you need to redo it from scratch, but that would probably be the easiest. As far as price....hmmmm. Is this using some sort of CMS or is it all hand coded? Ummmm, I did not really take that good of a look around...are you running a forum? A custom built forum? I don't know depends on how the site is built. The forum assuming it has a good theming system should allow you to fix the code there and hopefully improve that side of things. As far as the main site goes, after you get the mock up designed and working it would just be copying and pasting the content into the site and removing all the embedded tables that are no longer being used. I would consider changing to PHP since you are probably going to redo your whole site. This would allow you to take even more advantage of SEO by getting more keyword friendly URL's. You could probably pay someone to convert your current design into a valid XHTML/CSS design for around $300ish? But that would still involve you going into each document and copying and pasting the content and removing the embedded tables. It's going to involve a lot of work, but if you want traffic and good search engines results that would be the way to go. You could do it yourself and it would cost you nothing but time! 
-------------------- Thanks,
Jacob |
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Mar 20 2008, 04:44 PM
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#10
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Squeezing Posts: 50 Joined: 15-February 08 From: California |
I used snitz forums and modified it extensively and used the header and footer of it throughout the site, everything you see on there is hand coded.
If I do a complete recode, I would go with vbulletin or ipb and use vbseo or the equivilent for ipb to get seo friendly urls and stuff. hmmm $300 to make my entire site xhtml compatible? lol, there is lots and lots and lots of files and conditional statements etc that would have to be edited and stuff. I don't think that's even possible with this webiste. I know it is, I know someone that tried, gave up and used vbulletin, I am pretty sure you know him too, it's the guys you quit from  As far as the thememing system in place. I can change themes but all it does is replace the variables. So there's no layout changes just changes the colors, and image files. But so far it's done the trick and have like 6 or 7 different styles. Anyway, the best route would be to redo the whole thing from scratch. It would need the forums, which I would provide, preferably vbulletin, upload/download file exchange system and post of the current data to the new system. A trivia system, photo gallery which only admins can upload and easily use. My moderators are not the brightest of the crowd but they do the work they do right. A home page, display latest forum topics, site news, coaster news, coaster updates latest trip reports and also the last 5 track files etc that are currently displayed and be editable so they can chose which are displayed. You can click customize home page link on my home page to see what I mean. poof, I am out of breath! There's more, meets up to extract data from x forum and display the latest threads of that forum on x page. Articles system, if using vbulletin I can add the articles mod and we're good on that. Video manager, something for us admins to upload videos and have people download, or stream them on the spot. hmmm I am sure there's more but can't quite remember and I gotta go, I'll be back soon!The biggest problem I see is porting the current data to the new system. All is on MS SQL server 
This post has been edited by Sleaklight: Mar 20 2008, 04:45 PM -------------------- |
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Mar 20 2008, 05:21 PM
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#11
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Master of the Universe Posts: 1,298 Joined: 15-February 08 From: London, England |
Something else which I don't think has been mentioned here is submitted your site map to search engines. This will make sure your site is properly crawled.
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Mar 20 2008, 11:04 PM
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#12
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Squeezing Posts: 50 Joined: 15-February 08 From: California |
QUOTE (Jason @ Mar 20 2008, 02:21 PM) Something else which I don't think has been mentioned here is submitted your site map to search engines. This will make sure your site is properly crawled. Something like this?: http://www.coastercrazy.com/sitemap.xml -------------------- |
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Mar 21 2008, 01:24 AM
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#13
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 Don deluzione  Posts: 1,174 Joined: 13-February 08 From: Canada eh? |
yeah, but without the error I guess
QUOTE XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.coastercrazy.com/sitemap.xml Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ^ -------------------- |
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Mar 21 2008, 10:05 AM
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#14
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Squeezing Posts: 50 Joined: 15-February 08 From: California |
ok I think I fixed that problem, I hope lol
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Mar 21 2008, 10:26 AM
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#15
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Rapid Squeezer Posts: 171 Joined: 15-February 08 From: US of A |
Site mapping is old-school but still very useful today... Sometimes if we want to jump ahead into the future we need to take a look at the past and see what can help us make that jump.
-------------------- Currently Available for work: - XTHML, CSS, Flash, Actionscript, PHP, ASP, Ajax -
interested in movies? Read some of my reviews on my blog |
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Apr 1 2008, 05:51 AM
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#16
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Fresh Squeezed Posts: 11 Joined: 20-March 08 |
Page Rank of your website has no relationship with actual rankings of your website.
 You need to decide whether you wish to increase your PAGE RANK or Actual search engine Rankings.
-------------------- Search Engine Optimization Company - http://www.seohawk.com
http://blog.seohawk.com - SEO Blog Offshore SEO Company - http://seoindia.bsolutions5.com |
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Apr 1 2008, 05:53 AM
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#17
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 Co-Founder Posts: 3,095 Joined: 13-February 08 From: Pink House in USA |
QUOTE (website-seo @ Apr 1 2008, 06:51 AM) Page Rank of your website has no relationship with actual rankings of your website. You need to decide whether you wish to increase your PAGE RANK or Actual search engine Rankings. Yeah Page Rank comes from quality bank links (from other sites). Google assigns that. -------------------- |
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Apr 1 2008, 06:00 AM
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#18
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Squeeze Machine Posts: 574 Joined: 13-February 08 From: Scotland, UK |
By the way, the sitemap is meant to be in this format:
CODE <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> < url> < loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> < lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> < changefreq>monthly</changefreq> < priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset> -------------------- Thanks,
Marc |
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Jul 3 2008, 11:17 AM
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#19
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Fresh Squeezed Posts: 11 Joined: 20-March 08 |
My advice is that u should care more about rankings of your individual keywords as ultimatly its the keyword ranking that is going to give u business and PR ranking has no relationship to that.
-------------------- Search Engine Optimization Company - http://www.seohawk.com
http://blog.seohawk.com - SEO Blog Offshore SEO Company - http://seoindia.bsolutions5.com |
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Jul 3 2008, 11:54 AM
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#20
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Squeeze Machine  Posts: 682 Joined: 15-February 0 |