Can anyone be of any assistance?

[catchaBreath]

http://www.spa-nj.com

Just by visiting that site, do you find anything wrong that would hurt my searching? Do you suggest anything to help my searching?

Any and all answers/feedback are appreciated. I just don't understand why I'm not searching...

How long does it take to be ranked and enabled to be searched once google cache's you're new pages?

 

[ChrisHirst]

personally I think you've dropped into the trap of optimizing for the search engines and not your vistors. All the signs are there, what looks like formula % keyphrase in the content which reads a bit forced, over stuffed title for the home page.

what you need IMO is some more backlinks (good related ones) a copywriter, because you need to get a bit of emotion into your copy for this market, and some research with wordtracker.

And most importantly PATIENCE! the site has been indexed by google and yahoo so a bit of work should get some rankings.

also change your home page links to an absolute reference NOT to index.shtml.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

What do you mean, absolute reference? I changed the index.shtml to day-spa-in-new-jersey.shtml...

Also what's best to use when it comes to dashes, underscores or runningallwordstogether in the file names?

 

[catchaBreath]

OK I think I understand what 'absolute reference' is, I changed the link to my homepage, to spa-nj.com instead of index.shtml (or day-spa-in-new-jersey.shtml)

Check it:

http://www.spa-nj.com,

is that correct?

 

[ChrisHirst]

internal navigation for the home page should point to the domain name or to "/" to avoid splitting "link popularity" between external and internal links.

the SEs see domain.com and domain.com/index.htm as two different pages.

filenames matter little for SEO purposes the only benefit from using spammy looking names is if anyone links to a page using the URL only, and in that case hyphens are better because the SEs treat them as a space so;
day-spa-in-new-jersey.shtml will be seen as day spa in new jersey.shtml. but in all reality use a naming convention that works best for your file management NOT because you may get some minute ranking benefits.

just looking back through some of your other threads, you seem to be looking for a "quick fix". Any quick fixes out there will be ultimately a quick downfall also, The one essential tool in SEO is patience. If you ain't got that use PPC!



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

If day-spa-in-new-jersey.shtml is seen as day spa in new jersey.shtml, what does day_spa_in_new_jersey.shtml come up as?

From the research I've done on Google, I don't see a difference between using dayspainnewjersey.shtml, day-spa-in-new-jersey.shtml or day_spa_in_new_jersey.shtml

 

[catchaBreath]

Also, I've noticed from quite a few sites such as

http://www.betterbasketball.com,

they use keywords as their directory names.

For example:

http://www.betterbasketball.com/basketball-dribbling-video

Is this smart to do? They rank pretty well, so they are obviously doing something right...

 

[ChrisHunt]

Chris's advice is (as usual) sound. I would make one point - there's one keyword that you're not using at all: "Senseabilities". If a potential customer had heard about your spa and tried to search for it they'll find nothing. Everywhere you mention the word, you do it in an image - and Google doesn't read images.

Make sure that whenever you use images to represent text you use the [tt]alt[/tt] attribute to specify what the text says, for the benefit of blind readers as well as search engine spiders. You'll have to add [tt]title=""[/tt] to stop IE displaying the text in a tooltip.

You might also explore the possibilities of embedding fonts in your pages so you can eliminate the use of images-as-text altogether. See faq215-1525 and faq215-4042 for how.

It won't affect your SEO much, but it will make your pages load quicker if you slimmed the markup down a little. You seem to be using an inordinate number of nested tables to achieve what is really a fairly simple layout.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[ChrisHirst]

absolutely correct. The whole idea of using hyphenated page names, urls etc is very very much over-rated. as in my post there is only one instance where it will do slightly more than zero good.

and the first question, hyphens are parsed as spaces in pagenames/URLs because they are used as query modifiers in special searches.

underscores are treated as a character so;
hello-there and hello there vs hello_there


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

1. Slim down on markup
2. Use hyphens
3. Use less images

Anything else?

Once google cache's my new site, is that when it's suppost to start searching or what? My friend was under the impression that once you're cached, if you're not searching -- you never will, and must change the page.

help? lol

 

[ChrisHirst]

tons!
you have 21 pages indexed many with single word titles. As I said first off, It looks like a formula optimisation job. keyword title, H1 keyphrases, 6.789% keyword density etc.

Write for people, strangely enough the SEs will lap it up as well, and rankings will follow. The principal should that you shouldn't see the optimisation as a visitor but any SEO should be able to look over the site and pick out your keyphrases. Focus without looking too focused.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Kjonnnn]

A novice here... but does using sooo many forms of New Jersey in the HEAD help or hurt? I've read that the closer the keywords and description match what is actually on the page, the better.

 

[ChrisHirst]

Kjonnnn, ideal is to target 2 phrases per page (3 at max). Trying to cram too much into the title will "dilute" the message.

meta description should match the page subject and is important for Yahoo (and Inktomi driven results) and possibly the new MSN (launching later in the year). they show the description in the SERPs

meta keywords should match the page but are not so important. Yahoo (Inktomi) does read meta keywords but doesn't weight them heavily for ranking.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

To both Chris's:

Do either of you have any sites that you've created that ranks well with certain keywords? I'd like to view some of these pages...

Also:

When Chris said, "Write for people, strangely enough the SEs will lap it up as well, and rankings will follow"...how would they lap it up if there isn't a set algorithm? I don't understand how they know what site to rank high and what site to rank low....

It was under my impression that the right use of keywords, matching the titles and the % the keywords are used (without over doing it) would be a big boost in ranking (aside from other things that must come together for this to happen..)

 

[ChrisHunt]

how would they lap it up if there isn't a set algorithm?

The point is that the SE algorithms are constantly changing. If you slant your writing towards the strictures of a particular algortithm, it'll only be of benefit until the algorithm changes. If the result of chasing those algorithms is to make the text stilted and awkward to people then you aren't doing yourself any favours.

So write the best copy you can, make sure you mention the keywords you're interested in, but don't obsess about hitting a particular %.

As to my own track record, the sites I list in my sig all rank fairly highly against the keywords I'm interested in (Google #1 for "mcgonagall", for example), though none of them, to be fair, are up against much commercial competition.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[ChrisHirst]

not a site I built but one I have worked on to get organic SE results for a variety of phrases. the most competitive one is "laptop rental" ( no quotes )
Google SERP, Yahoo SERP and MSN SERP

usually comes up in the first 3, top on google as I check it now (laptopbits.co.uk) For some reason best known to themselves (technically inept probably) Yahoo and MSN (both fed by Inktomi's Crawler currently) still show the .com even though it's 301'ed to the co.uk



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

Chris Hirst:

Overture says that it gets around 2,000 searches for "laptop rental", which is pretty good.

What was your strategy to search for this particular keyword?

Also, how are you even searching if you are using frames?

 

[ChrisHirst]

no strategy really, bit of research (overture and wordtracker), and they were already running PPC and that was an expensive and popular phrase (amongst others)

the way around frames is to use the <noframes> tag correctly rather than "Your browser does not etc" this also makes the site useable with screen readers, text only browsers etc,add on some self referencing frameset code and away you go. it just takes a lot more work than an unframed site but when you have to work with existing it sometimes has to be done!



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[catchaBreath]

Ok I'm not going to use ppc, but I want to search well mainly for the keyphrase "day spa in new jersey"...

I removed some of the keywords making the % from 9% on the mainpage, to 7% on the mainpage...

I also looked at my stats and it said google crawler came by this morning, and when it's cached-- how long should I wait to see results?

 

[ChrisHirst]

anywhere between 3 days and 3 weeks.

the competition is not great for that actual phrase 238 in Google (including 2 of yours) (only 275,000 results).

What you need is to forget % utterly and get some structure into your pages. on the above results the title maybe a header and a couple of times in the body would rank quite well.

One thing you need to do is work on branding (Chris went through that with the "sensabilities" logo) and your "buy line" "care for the body...comfort for the soul" get it in some text in a few pages around the site.

work on the way you use "new jersey day spa". punctuation and some words are effectively ignored by the engines for ranking use.
so "new jersey day spa", "here in new jersey, a day spa may" plus many more variations seem the same to the algo.

cramming the exact same phrase to get a % density can have a opposite effect to what you expect. Obvious over-optimisation is beginning to get hurt a little by google.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.