Hi All

I want to bump scoobynet up in the search engines. Anyone have lots of solid experience of this and can give me some tips, etc?

Cheers

Simon

I was under the impression that the spiders worked out the importance of your site (and therefore the ranking) by the amount of sites that link to it, and their rating. Therefore, the best thing to do would be to get a link off Prodrive's website ;)
KF.

Si

Have a look at this months .net and previous months come to think of it. They have a guy from one of the big search promotion companies who gives tips each month. Though I cant remember his URL :rolleyes:

Also use Wordtracker.com for keywords

You could always buy a few Realnames keywords from here.

They still have words such as Prodrive Motorsport left etc. (We sell them where I work for £300!!!!!)

DW

Hi All

Thanks for the advice / pointers, etc.

Hats off to Lee as he's done a fabulous job with the search engines.

Ideally, if someone searches for "Subaru" or "Impreza" we should be right up there. Google would be favourite no doubt, and that would also get yahoo, etc also.

But we're absolutely nowhere, which is a little odd. Obviously if you search for "scoobynet" we're OK, but I guess that's part of the problem with being called ScoobyNet and not something like Subaru Net! :)

If I changed the title of the site to something like "ScoobyNet - The Subaru Enthusiasts Community" or something would that help?

Thanks again

Simon

Hmmm, I just searched google for "Impreza" and I see what you mean...

Having the word Subaru or Impreza in the title would surely help. I think the quick and easy steps are to change the title of the www.scoobynet.co.uk page, and put a few words in the meta tags like Subaru, Impreza, Legacy, Forester, cars, performance, bbs (!), bulletin board, etc

The German Impreza club came out second link, and they are a relatively small site/community, so I don't think it's got anything to do with money.

LOL ! May surprise you to know I've done very little indeed wrt search engines.

One of my customers was writing a book about search engine optimisation and had it all clued. Unfortunately he passed away before Christmas. What little I heard from him made me believe that search engines are now a specialist fulltime job in the commercial world.

However in our world things are much easier, primarily since the number of sites is a lot smaller and "subaru impreza" is a highly specific search word.

I've never seen dynamic sites rated that highly on my travels - so perhaps a scoobynet static page of info would help ?

The other thing I've heard time and time again is that some engines (google?) will watch what people search for and then what they click on - they then hold that url in higher regard as the user thought it was related more than any computer could.

I dont think that scoobynet not appearing high in search engines is a problem - basically if someone is searching for subaru impreza then whatever sites they find have links to scoobynet.

Thanks Lee

Sorry to hear about your customer.

I think you're dead right. If we were running GetYourDVDHere.com i think you would need specialists on the case constantly, and working closely with the engines to make sure you're satisfying them.

I'm so surprised that you haven't done much for the search engines, as you get such high rankings (hats off still, as whatever you *have* done, must be right!!! :D).

Good idea about the static info page. I think that's the way forward. It will just mean turning the current www.scoobynet.co.uk page more of an info page rather than just a links page.

It is also true about the links from other sites, and you might be surprised to know that last time I checked we still got around 10% of our links from the link you've kindly put on the SIDC site, so thank you.

cheers

Simon

try www.searchenginewatch.com

Has all you need to know.

Cheers

Jer

try www.searchenginewatch.com

Has all you need to know.

Cheers

Jer

I found Scoobynet (a few years ago) by typing 'Subaru Impreza' into a search engine (probably yahoo! as it's the only one I use regularly). I wonder what's happened since. Cynics would say that you have to pay the search engine people to bump yourself up the list, but I certainly think 'Scooybnet -- the Subaru Impreza Bulletin Board' would be a good start.

HTH.

Select your TITLE with extreme care.
Use meaningful context free TITLEs. It is what the web will know your site or page as. It is worth a lot of effort. The title should contain your more important keywords. If someone seeks 'web development tips' and a search engine returns several pages, one of which is titled Web Development Tips, then they will visit probably that one first. Do not add superfluous text to the title.
Use <H1> ... </H1> near the top of your home page to repeat the title of the page.
Many sites use logos or imagemaps on their page, and offer little or no text explanation; but a logo does not mean anything to a search engine. Consider using the two, a logo and the header.
META Tags
Use META 'description' and 'keywords' with short (< 25 words) descriptions and sets of relevant keywords. Some engines, e.g. Alta Vista and Infoseek Guide, make use of the META tag in addition to analyzing the text of your web pages.
Description
Some, but not all, search engines will display anything you put in a
<META NAME=description CONTENT="put your description here">

element, so you should have such an element with a concise, accurate and usable description.
Keywords
Some, but again not all, search engines will give special priority to keywords contained in a
<META NAME=keywords CONTENT="keyword, another keyword, ...">

element; most of them, though, will penalize your site if you repeat the same keyword multiple times, so use a carefully chosen set of keywords and don't cheat.

These people have couple of apps that you can use for optimisation http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=FXZ-557E&FN=product.htm There is a free trial download available.

Cheers
Steve M

[edited to add I am not a professional , nor have any experience in promoting websites :-) ]

[Edited by stevem2k - 1/5/2002 6:38:58 PM]

Google seems to be in fashion. I am sure we could arrange for a few thousand of us to run a google search and pick Scoobynet everytime. Would this bump up the ratings?

Currently if you search subaru impreza bbs then Scoobynet comes out 19th! SIDC have got something right coming 2 and 3.

[Edited by john banks - 1/6/2002 2:28:20 PM]

Si/Lee

There is a lot of information out there about search engines. I will try and dig out some good URL's.

With regards the pages and optimisation, you could always add a splash page to the front of the www site. I.e. a page full of meta information, Headers, keywords etc that refreshes after say 2 seconds to the main homepage.

I will find out some more stuff for you when I get time.

DW

Edited cos I think you need a page of meta information and not meat information :rolleyes:

[Edited by Dream Weaver - 1/6/2002 10:55:20 PM]