A friend of mine (member here) runs my website and is doing me a huge favor by helping me try to SEO my website. I keep having people tell me that they cant find me on google/yahoo etc.

(I'm paraphrasing here)...He's done what he knows how do do so far. We need someone who is an seo webmaster that could maybe help us out with some more in depth problem solving. I'm willing to pay for the service, or trade out some detailing work

6/23/2013 9:03:30 PM

What is this website of which you speak?

feel free to post the domain in such a way that it doesn't make a clickable link

6/23/2013 9:15:22 PM

about the only thing you can do to "optimize" your site is to have a good design with correct coding and being linked by other sites

search engines have super secret algorithms that they use to determine the "best" site...there's only so much space available on the first page of google hits, so even if there was something simple a person could do to get there, everyone would do it and we'd be back where we are (relying on good design/structure/code and karma from organic linking)

also: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

6/23/2013 9:19:25 PM

Just tell us the keywords you want and we'll all post in this thread laced with deworming agent.

6/23/2013 10:45:42 PM

a fool and his money are soon parted. Good luck wasting your time trying to fool google.

6/23/2013 11:06:19 PM

First, this guy helping you out is probably an idiot.

Second, people say they can't find you on google? If they know what they're looking for, why are they googling?

Third, 100% of the content of your site is in an iframe, meaning it won't be indexed properly by most search engines. So fix that or hire someone who can.

6/24/2013 8:36:49 AM

The guy is not an idiot.

What I'm talking about is the fact that when people search "Auto Detailing Raleigh, NC" my website does not come up. They actually have to search my name on google to get my information.

6/24/2013 8:47:39 AM

Quote :

"The guy is not an idiot."

Quote :

"when people search "Auto Detailing Raleigh, NC" my website does not come up."

Could be because the words "Auto" and "Detailing" don't appear anywhere on your home page. You don't even tell me you're in Raleigh. You don't tell me anything, really.

Your SEO wizard should at least put some relevant info in the page meta tags.

6/24/2013 9:24:33 AM

^He's not an SEO wizard, he's just the guy that helped me with the site. I'm *looking* for someone who knows more about SEO than both of us.

6/24/2013 9:37:18 AM

Real talk

Read this: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Follow the recommendations and don't pay anyone anything to "optimize" your site.

6/24/2013 10:02:16 AM

it looks like you're actually using wordpress, but on http://test.showroomshinenc.com/ (which is being used in an iframe)

pop that out and install: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

that should help you identify/organize/develop relevant meta and content

6/24/2013 10:08:08 AM

showroomshinenc.com (including the base domain, www, and test) gives me a 403

Anyway, has the guy who developed your site made sure to put scripts near the end (and make them async where possible) and stylesheets near the beginning, optimize image sizes, and enable gzip (via mod_deflate or similar methods), to make your pages load faster and incidentally help your Google search ranking a little bit?
I mean the major issues identified earlier in the thread need to be dealt with before you'll show up at all, but the little changes I just mentioned are also important: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

Depending on how much you control your server (like if it's a VPS or dedicated rather than shared hosting), you could even install mod_pagespeed to automate the trickier aspects of keeping your site fast.

You can use the Chrome or Firefox extension to track your progress, or you can just do it directly here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
(currently Google gives you a 99 out of 100 for your 403 Forbidden page lol)

6/24/2013 10:35:04 PM

Yeah the hosting site decided to delete my site yesterday instead of actually replacing the test with the real thing like my webmaster requested.

Fail.

6/25/2013 7:14:51 AM

hope ya had a backup

6/26/2013 12:16:30 AM

I host the site.

I did have a backup and since I had to restore it anyways I just built a new database and website directory and then pulled everything over and updated wordpress accordingly.

The iframe redirect is gone now, test.showroomshine.com no longer exists. Website looks like it's back to standard format now.

Any other advice about the SEO stuff? I've never really messed with it much.

6/26/2013 1:57:45 PM

Quote :

"Any other advice about the SEO stuff? I've never really messed with it much."

as folks have said, there's not much to it past good meta/content and the validity that comes with organic linking...now that you've removed the iframe, anyway

as a place to start, though, i'd strongly recommend installing this plugin and using it to generate some valid meta, at the very least: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

6/26/2013 2:03:10 PM

content is king. google is cracking down on black hat seo. quagmire and ernie have given you great advice.

get wordpress and start a blog associated with your site. use the keywords in the blog to help you get indexed.

it doesnt happen over night.

6/26/2013 2:23:38 PM

submit a site map to google. get a link to your website out to as many reputable, crawl-able places as possible (yelp, yellow pages, etc). get people talking about it on social sites to always link to it

it's all about well-formatted content and reputable linkbacks, and a little bit of metadata

6/26/2013 2:38:17 PM

i've asked brandon for a blog post so that should be coming.

I'll setup the meta tags, appreciate everyone's help.

6/28/2013 9:18:55 AM

I strongly encourage you to get a Google account to tie to your website (separate from your personal/University GMail). Once you do that, install Google Analytics onto your WP site. It will let you gather traffic stats so you can see how people are finding your site and what content they're spending time looking at. Also, as you blog check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you keyword content aligns with your business.

Also, as for Meta tags, most are worthless these days. Do make sure you set the meta title and meta description for each page and post on your site though. The Meta Title will usually be used as the main line of text in Google search results and the description is usually used as the 160-character page description also included in the results.

Lastly, submit your Sitemap to as many places as possible. At last Google, Bing, and Yahoo. There are plugins in WordPress that will help you a lot of things automatically. I personally like "Wordpress SEO" by Joost de Valik. It's very handy for automating a lot of the current SEO best practices. Definitely check it out. Hopefully this helps.

7/11/2013 1:40:42 AM

Don't use "meta title" (as in <meta name="title" content="Title of Webpage">

just "title" (as in <title>Title of Webpage</title>

7/11/2013 2:46:03 AM

SEO is snake oil...but good website attention is important.

7/11/2013 11:37:34 AM

@ComputerGuy it's only snake oil when you work with snake oil salesmen.

SEO is crucial for local businesses who used to advertise in the Yellow Pages.

7/12/2013 11:25:47 PM

Proper SEO is apart of my business...but I focus on content, delivering it, and networking.

7/13/2013 12:09:05 AM

OK- I see where you're coming from. You definitely gotta create real content. Not canned, spinned bullshit.

I admit- there are lots of snake oil salesmen in my business. It makes my job a helluva lot easier. Low hanging fruit.

7/13/2013 1:15:02 AM

is it worth it to sign up for yext.com to help with SEO?

or perhaps Local Listing Ninja is better

I imagine it would take many hours to manually list your info on all the local search directories

[Edited on June 11, 2016 at 3:07 PM. Reason : .]

6/11/2016 2:51:21 PM

No- run from Yext. Are you a business owner? If so, I assume you're getting lots of calls from Yext.

The issue with Yext is that once you cancel their service, you can't access the claimed listings.

I suggest you either DIY (create a new email address just for claiming listings/citation building- you'll get shit tons of spam) or use a citation service that manually claims the listings and provides you will a spreadsheet and logins.

I recommend whitespark. Great people and very affordable.

You'll also need to claim your Google My Business listing, Yelp, Localeze, Acxiom/Infogroup, Factual...

6/12/2016 2:52:42 PM

Already in dozens of the local directories. Just trying to improve the ranking in google search results, mostly, and it's my understanding that getting listed in a bunch of the piddly directories helps your google result.

6/12/2016 4:14:38 PM

Quote :

" Just trying to improve the ranking in google search results, mostly, and it's my understanding that getting listed in a bunch of the piddly directories helps your google result."

Is your NAP (business name, address, phone) consistent and accurate? What industry are you in? Do you have a storefront where customers come to you or are you a service-area based business?

Local business listings are important, but you may want to think about sponsoring some community events (i.e. arts, schools, little league sports, etc.).

6/13/2016 6:13:58 PM