Site not showing in SE after months

[lahddah]

Hello. I've tried a few times to submit this site to the search engines and still cannot see it in most of them - in others (yahoo) I can see it only if I enter very specific wording that 'normal' users wouldn't know to enter. I was wondering if some of you would be able to take a look at it and let me know how I can improve it's visibility in search engines. It has been live, I believe, since last September.

Thanks!

http://terrasysconsulting.com/index.htm

~ lahddah

 

[ChrisHunt]

I don't see any total show-stoppers, but here's a few suggestions...
[ul]
[li]Avoid using images to display text. Search engines love text, they can't understand anything else. Every bit of text you put in an image is text that a search engine isn't going to find. You can get the same effect with some simple CSS - it'll load quicker too![/li]
[li]Try to get some more inward links to your site, according to

http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

you've only got 2! Look for directories to submit to (starting with

http://dmoz.org

), exchange links with relevant sites, include your URL in your sig for online forums, etc.[/li]
[li]Include some real content in your site that goes beyond marketing-speak. Say, some free articles written about that business sector. It'll help in getting people to link to you if there's something substantial to link to - "I just read this great article on TerraSys..."
[li]Use proper markup - <h1> etc. for headings, <ul> for lists, etc. Engines seem to make more sense of this than tag soup.[/li]
[li]Use CSS for presentation instead of <font> tags - it may not help your SEO directly, but it makes your pages smaller & quicker to load; easier to maintain too.[/i]
[li]Try to get the content of each page as near to the top of the HTML source as possible - engines give greater weight to the start of each page. Move your javascript to a seperate file, consider using CSS for layout or being more sneaky with your table cells[/li]
[li]Use a proper DOCTYPE (see

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_doctype.asp

), not that strange HotMetalPro one, and use a validator (e.g.

http://validator.w3.org/

) to check against it. Rumours that engines favour valid pages are unsubstantiated (and frankly unlikely), but you reduce the chance of confusing their robots with erroneous code.[/li]
[/ul]
Enough to be going on with?

-- Chris Hunt

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

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[lahddah]

Very nice. Thank you Chris. I will try to address these issues soon. I did submit to dmoz.org as well as google and others about a month ago hoping that something would pick it up. Thank you for supplying helpfull links, too!



~ lahddah

 

[ChrisHunt]

It can take time to get listed in dmoz - it's dependent on volunteer editors. Taking the time to submit in the right category, with a suitable description, will make the editor's life easier and increase your chances of getting in. Some of those business categories get a lot of submissions though, so you may take a while to get to the front of the queue.

-- Chris Hunt

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

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk