how to get in the top 10 list ?what am i doing wrong?

[aquila]

ok, i have a site called myminiaturepainting.com selected because my major keyword is miniature painting. it's only 2 months old but have been indexed by google. when i type in miniature painting in google i'm lost somewhere in page 13. when i look at the source code for some of the top ten sites, the word miniature painting is not even in their meta tags yet they are in the top 10 . there was even a page just full of external links to other painting sites yet it ranked number 3 the last time i looked.so what am i doing wrong and what do i need to do in order to get to the top 10. i have other minor keywords that i ranked in the top 10 but my major keyword is my domain name and is in my meta tag and description so why am i number 130 something for that specific keyword. any help is appreciated.

[AussieWebmaster]

the text links to the pages and sites impacts as well

[Marcia]

aquila, look at what Yahoo has indexed for your site, and check what's cached for the pages:

Yahoo Explorer site: search (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fmyminiaturepainting.com&bwm=p&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=seo-rd-se)

Just a few basics (aside from getting inbound links):

1) Sites don't have to totally validate, but there can't be any problematic coding errors. If the homepage isn't rendering right in the cache (which it isn't), run it through the W3C validator.

2) Change the links on the site to *not* point to index.html but to example.com/ including the forward slash.

3) You'll have to do something in .htaccess to make sure those erroneous URLs don't show the directory root files and that only one URL can be used to access the page.

3) Start adding text to the site so there's more bot food; it's a bit too sparse to establish relevance for any kind of keyword set. And you'll need to have more content for down the road when you submit to ODP, as well as for users (and search engines), anyway.

[Marcia]

To clarify a bit about text and keywords, on your articles main page, write some paragraphs of text there including keywords in anchor text linked to the individual articles. That's user friendly and invites clicks and pageviews. And do use variations of your main keyphrase and related phrases throughout the site. Not so it's keyword stuffed, but so that it establishes the topical theme and reads naturally.

Then, also use your words and phrases in the individual articles. For example, on the page about choosing brushes - I didn't spot the words that would be an indication of what the main topic of the site is. You could easily say something about choosing brushes for painting miniatures in the first paragraph. See how that works in? It gives you a variation of "miniature painting" and a nice long tail phrase that people are likely to search with.

You want to use H1 headings and also sprinkle some H2's here and there, which also increases readability.

[aquila]

hi marcia,

thanks for the tips and pointers. i completely understand your second post and will start implementing some changes although some of those articles pages are the ones ranking in the top 10 and they weren't even optimized. i will have to read up on h1 and h2 etc tags to find out how to use it.

what i didn't understand at all was your first post

1. you said to check my cahce pages. what am i looking for? is it the fact that it's not rendering right? i don't even understand what that means.

2. set links to not point to indext.html.. which links are those.

3. i'm completely lost here. sorry for being "obtuse" but i'm completely in foreign ground with this web design thingy although i'm trying very hard to understand it and have been doing some reading up on keyword research and basic site optimization. i realize now all this should have been done before my site even went live but i'm learning from my mistakes.

4. start adding more content. on the index page or just in general as i do have over 10 articles in my articles section and will be adding more soon. i did have more word on the index page but took it all out cos it seemed very long winded.

thank you for helping me out thouh :)i need all the help i can get from the looks of it lol.

[AussieWebmaster]

1. do a google search and they hold a cached version start by looking at how they see you....

2. point to the domain not domain.com/index.html

3. the htaccess file can stop spiders from pages or redirect to single content so no dupes

4. more content shows depth of site and gains authority

[aquila]

hi aussie webmaster

ok i went again to look, the first cache version, my page came up, the second entry of index/ my page didn't come up instead lots of little folders. is this the error and how to fix it.


2. how do i point to domain? do you mean that when i give a link out it should say myminiaturepainting.com and not myminiaturepainting.com/index.html?

[AussieWebmaster]

it is for the index page.... put a 301 redirect for the index to the domain in your htaccess page - do a search and they can walk you through

yes all links to your site should be for the domain and not domain.com/index.html

[aquila]

ok i'm finally beginning to see the light. i think i understnad some of it now

now i remember giving some links out to directories using myminiaturepainting.com/index.html because it kept saying myminiaturepainting.com couldn't be accessed. ok i will not do that anymore

as for .htaccess i will look up to find out how to do a redirect. thanks for your help aussie webmaster. most appreciated :) :)