I've started a new business here in Sweden, set up a website etc. I have an .se domain name, registered with google and put their code in the header, and have a more than liberal sprinkling of text containing the key words likely to be used when searching for the site.
But if I search on google.se, select only swedish pages, and use the most common word used to find my products, I don't appear until something like page 8. And to add insult to injury, my site is listed after many many sites that really don't have much to do with the chosen search terms. Another strange thing is, if you use the same search word on the regular google.com, I come in at page 3. It seems strange that I come so low down when searching for swedish only.
>> Any pointers anyone?
>>
Yes yes and yes. Google treats everything as if it is spam for quite a long time. It is the way that the robots now 'read' the web. I have had two new sites within the last year or so and the latest was a nightmare to be seen by Google. It took more than Twelve weeks. Soon after launch we were 'seen' by all/most of the other search engines. much patience is required, but it will come. It is sooo frustrating.
Thanks mate. The various bots seem to be making the hits ok. Idid another search yesterday, and on regular google I've made it to the first page. But for some reason I'm still down on page 8 of the swedish one. Seems to be the wrong way around. The server is based in England, which may be a factor, but according to google they tend to look for the country suffix first when deciding country. I also have 2 other web addresses that point to it, one is a .co.uk and the other a .com, so maybe google is using those as well and elevating it on the regular search, even though it doesn't show those suffixes on the search. They're not specific to my site, just old domain names that I already own and figured I might as well point them somewhere.
I have friends who used such a company for their web-based business. Despite being an industrious and inquisitive couple they never did find out what the company did to optimise their website.
However the £50,000 a year they paid resulted in a business at the top of the Google searches, £1,000,000 a year profit and 60% year on year growth. There may have been an element of "emporer's new clothes" but they were happy!!
>> However the £50 000 a year they paid resulted in a business at the top
>> of the Google searches.
I know a Sixteen year old lad, Son of a colleague who is pretty smart at it. I wouldn't pay a grand a week for that service, but if it works for them, then who am I.
One domain that took twelve plus weeks to be 'seen' properly by Google is made up of just a number of letters plus .co.uk. Despite the fact that I and many colleagues 'Googled' those letters.co.uk they always came up with an outfit with the same combination, but .org and put them first!!!
Google are a law unto themselves and like the big 'T' supermarket are getting too big for their boots. Just my tuppence worth.
There are a few tricks to getting to a good place on Google. The trouble with many SEO companies is that they simply talk twaddle IMHO. They charge extortionate fees for not that much. We have had them complain about our urls and all kinds of things that quite frankly are not relevant to Google.
Unfortunately you will appreciate I can't share too much on the subject of how to optimise a site. However, you may have noticed that now that Car4play has got into Google's sights we are now pretty well number one for "car4play" - well you would hope that would be the case! But this has taken the best part of 3 weeks to do that. For "motoring forum" we were on page 3 before the weekend and now are about halfway down page 2.
We haven't pushed the Google thing too hard; just good content (from all of you!) and patience for the time being.
>> Just tried "motoring forum" again and we're up to third!!!
>>
>> Somebody's doing something right.
Well at least for "motoring forum"! It seems to vary between this and about 5th in the list. I have a screen shot of us at the top but that didn't last for long.
Google visits us very frequently now. We do need to build on the kind of things searchable to really attract more traffic - car reviews and that kind of thing.
Get a blog. Google finds them faster than any other form of new website. Also use ping.fm or twitterfeed with twitter & facebook to promote your site with social networks. Facebook fan pages and business pages are also good ways for people to find you. The more your site gets passed around the more people will link to it so it will start to rise naturally if 'competitors' are less relevant.
Just been doing a bit of stuff on social media campaigns and how to get your site found and it boils down to going where the people are already eg facebook, myspace etc and starting the promotion there. Much faster than building a site then hoping people will find it. Also google likes sites that appear to have been done by humans and that have regularly updated content.
If you can make good video content then getting a youtube channel is another fast way of being found.
Also with google moving towards personalised searches it is going to be harder to use SEO tricks anyway as search results will start to depend on other things a person searches for and which items they choose to follow.
The thing to be aware of is that 'Google' has been in the habit of changing the search and index algorithms every so often. This can result in in your ranking position changing (significantly) from being on the front page to 'nowhere'! When this last happened there was an outcry on some of the Google fora?.
I would also guess that if you have paid for a one off SEO fee it all needs doing again! (more money).
The 'country specific Googles' all appear to work from different sub-databases that do not update at the same time.
Be careful about using tricks that can result in you becoming blacklisted eg over seeding with relevant words, white letter on white background or similar. At one time the best thing was to have as many cross links as possible.
PS things may have changed now , my experiences are from about 2 years ago.