Google Guidance

[jimmyservis]

Hi All!
My website went live on monday (www.protecttheplanet.co.uk) and i've submitted the sitemap, joined analytics, joined googlebase and adwords.
I need, like everyone to appear as high up on google as possible, but feel like i've got so much to do with meta stuff. Wheres best to start, and any other suggestions on moving on up? Im going to dedicate my weekend to trying to progress so any guidance would be good!
Does googlebase update automatically with the feed i submitted?

I want to be number one on google for Protect the Planet. I guess it takes time, but the other sites above are very outdated. Any guidance on achieving this would be great.

Thanks in advance

James

[icegems]

Hi James

It really does take time, patience and hard work but it can be done. I can recommend IBP search engine software - http://www.axandra.com/seo-tool/IBP....Dyn-SEO&p=0.80. It takes time and patience but following the steps in IBP you can get those number one listings. I spent yesterday optimising one of my new sites for keywords and you follow their recommendations and do the tweaks and keep on and on with it until you get the results - some can show up quite quickly some take longer but for a novice it talks you through the very basics especially in terms of getting your keywords and metatags as well as page content right for the search engines.

A big part of it though is link building - and whether you do that yourself using the IBP tools or pay someone else to do it, it is a big part of the process but again it is time consuming.

If you don't want to invest in IBP a good place to start is www.sitepronews.com and sign up for their daily newsletters - generally they are written for the average man on the street and aren't too full of technical speak.

Content is king so make sure you have lots of well written text, good product descriptions (that is really important) and your main search phrases within your category and product desciptions.

No matter what anyone says there really isn't any great mystery to SEO, it takes time, patience, hard work and above all common sense.

My main recommendation is to do something every single day to promote your site - get a twitter account and facebook account and post the URL to different products - it helps them get picked up by the search engines, look at book marking - a great little tool is add this - get others to recommend your site it takes some of the hard work away!

Have a real think about what you think people will search for to find your products - is it protect the planet or is it sustainable gifts and so on, then optimise around those phrases - use Google Adwords Keyword tool for that it shows you how many people are searching for each phrase - pick a few to optimise for at first and then optimise for a few more (this is where IBP comes into its own!).

Hope this helps a bit.

[Red Devil]

Hi James

SEO - Meta Title and Descriptions are the ones you need to concentrate on and Page Content. Make your keywords/phrases "relevant".

Submit your products to Googlebase as well. The feed will expire after 1 month if you manually upload it. If you place it on your site (in a folder) and point Googlebase at it, it will remain valid forever if you have the updates scheduled within Googlebase (but you will have to update it from time to time with new products). The premium BP packages also have a scheduler built in I understand but if you aren't on that package, do what I just suggested.

It takes time for your site to get established with the search engines but it will happen - be patient.

Here is a very good article (in plain English) I found this week about all this, funnily enough on the Worldpay site. Click on the "next" button at the bottom of each page to read further (it's not obvious - the paging that is).

http://www.rbsworldpay.com/onlinetrading/index.php?page=marketing

Furthermore, this guy is very good on advice on how to make your website convert visitors into buyers. Some very useful info on his site.

http://www.aerin.co.uk/

Finally, don't pay to submit your site to the search engines (you can do it for free yourself) and don't pay for a "guaranteed Page 1 on Google slot" as no one can guarantee that. Try to do your SEO yourself rather than pay someone £'s.

Good luck!