EggRage.co.uk

This is part 2 of the ‘How To Get Your Site Indexed Series’ - You can find all the other parts here.

Last time we looked at an introduction to this case study and did our keyphrase research to start optimising our brand new site: BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk. Today, we’ll go through the initial page construction and start putting together a stategy for improving the site’s ranking.

Since last time, I actually already put together the index page of the site, and have had it live for about two weeks. Because of this, it’s already been indexed! Here’s an update of how it’s ranking so far for our selected key phrases, nothing to spectacular so far but then nothing has been done yet so it’s actually a pretty good starting point.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier (N/A)
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier (119)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (116)
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (N/A)

Coding Up The Header of Index Page

As I mentioned last time, we’re going to keep this very simple and not focus on the design of the page at all.

The first thing which I sat down to define was the meta content, I wanted to include as many of my keyphrases (and variations/combinations there of) as possible, without coming across too spammy.

Here’s the meta content used:

• Title: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Description: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier pictures, stories and information! Loads of great blue staffordshire bull terrier help and information.
• Keywords: blue staffordshire bull terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, staffies, staffy bull terriers, staffordshire bull terrier, blue staffordshire bull terrier, staffordshire, bull terrier

The title is 69 characters long, which is actually 4 characters over the recommended limit but as you can see in the screenshot above Google has indexed and does display the full title.

The description is 135 characters, which is about 15 characters below the recommended limit, I might add a little more to this later but for now it’s a good starting point.

There are on 8 keywords. So few places care about or even bother to look at meta keywords that if you want the ones who do pay attention to take any notice then you’d better be as un-spammy as possible.

The Rest of The Page

The rest of the page is quite simple, I got my partner Nikki to write up around 800 words on staffordshire bull terriers and I put all the paraphraphs in <p> tags, using appropriate headings and subheadings going down the page, starting with <h1> all they way down to <h6>. Thats it, litererally, and that got the site indexed though granted not highly - let’s move on to the changes for today.

Here’s the page as of the initial coding 2 weeks ago:

What’s Next?

Well my good friend Tony has had a lot of success putting Google Adsense on pages which he wants to be indexed quickly. This isn’t something that I’ve tried before but it makes sense if you think about it; Google want to give their advertisers exposure so it would only make sense to look on them more favourably. Either way, we’re going to give this a try so I’ve just inserted a couple of bits of adsense on the page.

Emphasising Words

You can use <em></em> and <strong></strong> tags to indicate which part of a page is important, or which part of it should be ‘emphasised’ to search engines. A lot of people go overboard with this and there’s more bold text than there is normal text! So don’t do that!

I’ve picked a couple of key phrases out of the page and put <strong></strong> tags on them.

Images

Google is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to searchers than a similar page without images.

I’ve added a couple of pictures of Herbie (my staffy) with appropriate alt attributes again relating to the subject of the page and the subject of the image. More on opimising alt attributes here.

The two images (as you can see) are the same, but they have different file names and alt attributes, so it doesn’t matter, they are different enough. They are different sizes for a reason, consider Google Image Search, where google takes images size into account; I’m providing a little diversity.

Outbound Linking

This is a hot topic of debate amongst some but I am a firm and strong believer that linking out to high quality websites (with high PR) strengthens your own. So I’m going to drop some links in to places like Wikipedia and the BBC.

Installing Stats

This again is questionable, but some believe that using Google Analytics again makes Google look more favourably on your site because you’re sending them free information. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but I’ve installed it anyway (alon with Webmaster Tools) so that we’ll be able to track the site’s stats, keyphrase related and otherwise.

And finally..

Inbound Linking

Over the next few days I’m going to start grabbing a couple of decent-PR links in to the site to hopefully pass over some pagerank and additional “juice” to the site.

And here’s the page now that we’re done with it for the day:

What Do You Think?

What else do you do personally when optimising the code on a brand new site, are there any things that I’ve forgotten or that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments below!

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