Google doesn't like us?

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emagine

emagine

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Hi there...

Emagine Media are well-established web designers based in Waterford and although we code to the highest standards with accessibility always a priority, search engine optimisation is not something we've really concentrated on. In order to provide better service to our client and indeed produce a better product, I'm using our own website as a testbed for improving search engine rankings.

I've spent much time reading and understand the concepts, but Google is a bit of mystery to me. I did some work on our website content and code-wise about 3/4 weeks ago, installed google analytics and webmaster tools to help things along, but doesn't seem to have made a difference.

I've managed to get ourselves to number one on selected search phrases in MSN, we also rank reasonably high in Yahoo on the same search, but NOWHERE to be seen in Google. I've been using the keyword ranking tools on widexl.com for reference. Link here: http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/keyword-ranking.html

I'm beginning to think we are blacklisted or there is something inherently wrong with our site that Google just doesn't like? Maybe I'm just being impatient?

Our site is www.emagine.ie - would anyone have any suggestions?

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Regards,

Peter[/FONT]
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
Hmm... well webdesign is a heavily saturated search term ...

What search terms/keywords are you using ? ...


Links from good sites to yours ..
Good content / articles on your site that get linked to will help ... and so on ..
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
We're scoring high with 'Website Design Waterford' in MSN and Yahoo - but just surprised about a complete lack of any ranking whatsoever with Google.

Thanks...
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
Hmm... strange ..

is it just me or is your sitemap broken ?

And I guess one suggestion I can make is to get rid of your index.php?id=blah blah stuff ...

Replace it with human readable content ...

check out modrewrite for what you want :)
 
lostie

lostie

New Member
Dont worry you're certainly not being blacklisted anyway, google shows 72 pages of yours indexed. And you come up first for a search of "Emagine Media", so it looks to me that the only issues are poor optimisation. Presumably, one of the phrases you wish to target is "web design waterford", which actually appears to be a pretty compeditive term on google. The fact that other engines rank it high while google dont just go to prove google's unique algorithm. But being the market leaders, google is the search engine you need behind you most. Other than in the title bar, i cant see the phrase "web design waterford" mentioned anywhere else on your main page. The title tag may be enough for the other search engines, but google requires a bit more work. Perhaps incorporating this into the introductory text and even making it a header above the text, taking steps like that are sure to help your ranking in google. Hope that helps :)
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
Thanks Lostie...

We are launching a new site soon with revised content. Part of the strategy on the new site is to make it more content and keyword rich. If I have picked up anything is all my SEO research over the last months is that content key.

I was worried that we had a problem, perhaps the CMS we were using was limiting crawling through site?

Another quick question, how often should Google crawl our site.... meaning if I make changes to content, how long does it generally take to see results?

Thanks again guys for your input!
 
lostie

lostie

New Member
Also, i wouldnt start each page's title with "Website Design Waterford, Emagine Media - Designers for Web, Print and Multimedia", this might be ok for homepage but not on every other one, it makes the title too long and thus it will carry less weight with google. Go for an original title on each page, e.g. "Image Library - Emagine Media" instead of "Website Design Waterford, Emagine Media - Designers for Web, Print and Multimedia :: Image Library" which is too long anyway.
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
@ Lostie - great, that is exactly the find of feedback I'm looking for. These days with content management systems, it's all very easy to be lazy and slot in site-wide meta tags. I'll have to spend a bit more time and imagination and go through each page.

@ Forbairt - we are using a php script to generate the sitemap for Google Sitemaps. Maybe this is a bad idea, Google Webmaster tools verfies the sitemap without errors. http://www.emagine.ie/gsitemap.php
 
lostie

lostie

New Member
generally the more you update your pages, they quicker they will be cached (you can check when a page is last cached by doing a google search for cache:www. yoururl.com, or using the google toolbar) so if you update it every few days or so it shouldnt take more than a week or 2 to get cached again. Conversely if you fail to update a page for a long time it could be months before its cached again.
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
Thanks for your help guys, I knew I had work to do but also had this horrible feeling that there was a problem. I'm going to shoot now, but all other all suggestions are gratefully accepted.

Cheers from Waterford!
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
Back again @ Forbairt...

Excellent suggestion about the Pretty URLs... had a look at that and I think it would help, but we are going to change the CMS soon, probably Expression Engine, and will have to relook at the entire situation.

BTW... what is the best practice for moving/changing URLS? When we upload our new site and CMS, all old addresses will be invalid. Do I need to create a 301 redirect file each of the old pages?

Right, I'm outta here, talk to you guys later!
 
L

louie

New Member
Ok there,

It seems your website needs a Little bit more work to get somewhere in Google, especially in the "web design" search category.

Page title changes at the end of the phrase, should be at the start as google only shows a certain numbers of chars from the original title.

SE loves text, which your pages seems to lack of it.
The home page (probably the most important) has Little or no text whatsoever. Be more descriptive about yourself and try getting your keywords in between the lines.

Every phrase that you are trying to optimise for, should have its own page with its own description :
e.g. "web design" & "web development" might mean the same thing for some people, but in reality they don't, so if you want to get found for any of them, don't keep them together.
 
emagine

emagine

New Member
Back again... load of great info there folks! I've made a list already of what I need to do and I think the gut of it comes down to good keyword rich content! I didn't expect a magic answer and I really appreciate all your input.

@ David Behan - I made a similar stats list and updating it each week, but I haven't been brave enough to post it all online!!! Some good tips in there and will take it all on board.
 
R

RedCardinal

New Member
lostie said:
generally the more you update your pages, they quicker they will be cached (you can check when a page is last cached by doing a google search for cache:www. yoururl.com, or using the google toolbar) so if you update it every few days or so it shouldnt take more than a week or 2 to get cached again. Conversely if you fail to update a page for a long time it could be months before its cached again.
Click to expand...
Not quite as simple as that I'm afraid. The authority and pagerank of a site/resource also comes into play. I have some pages that I haven't updated in 6 months and yet they are crawled every 48 hours or so. I have other pages from 3 months ago that I change more frequently but Google might not crawl them but once a week. Why? Because the former pages have substantial backlinks profiles and Pagerank ~= more authority and importance.

If you have less authority and Pagerank then you might be waiting some time for Google to pick up changes.
 
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