meta tags

[JacquieCC]

Hi,
I knwo everyone has told me to patient and the site will come up in the
ratings with patience - however I have been online since Beg. May and I still
don't appear even if I put the compnay name in. I was going to put meta tags
and keywords on the top of each page - however I have a dwt as a menu so
where do I put the meta tags and keywords for each main page?
My website is www.mountain-toursltd.com
thanks in advance for any advice
JacquieCC

 

[Murray]

You are #1 on Google when I search "mountain-toursltd". To get a better
score with your company name, you will have to do quite a bit of work to the
way the page is built - you will need to recast the content into sematically
meaningful markup for the search engines.

Meta tags are not going to help you with this.

 

[Jon Spivey]

Hi Jacquie,

Unless your company name is so well known that you'd aim to get your traffic
from people searching for your company I wouldn't worry too much about where
you show up for your name. On a quick look I think you'd be better
optimising your site for the town Livigno which seems to be what people
would search for. Once you've got ranked for that then maybe widen the net
to include more generic phrases such as mountain holidays, ski holidays
etc. The most popular phrases for Livigno are
Livigno Italy
Livigno ski
Livigno Hotels.
Livigno Piste Map
Livigno Snow report
Livigno Weather

So you might optimise your pages for these phrases, ie include them in the
page title, the page url your h1, h2, h3 tags and body copy. Of course
there's competition on the phrases but nothing too daunting - if you had a
strong effort for the above I think you'd stand a fair chance of getting a
good ranking that's going to deliver good targetted traffic

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

In addition, having content that changes every so often, say each month,
gives you an opportunity to re-submit your site to the search engines for
increased rating (too often though is a strike against you).

Search engines are using meta tags less and less. Google doesn't rely on
them at all. Google, and others, use more advanced algorithms now to
determine your content. They will even go so far as to measure the number of
relevent words on your site compared to things such as text boxes on forms
to see if the ratio is good enough to indicate a useful page. Google also
ranks you on how many people link to you. They are more of a social search
engine in that their criteria is influenced based on how many reputable (and
that's a key here, reputable) sites link to you. They also take into account
the age of the domain name as newer domains could be fly-by-night
businesses.

I've heard that some of the best ways to truly get in the rankings is to
advertise. The theory is that when a search engine crawels a site that has
your advertisement on it, it will capture your ad as a link into your site
and increase your rating. I would recommend Yahoo advertising over Google.
In my experiments it's been far cheaper than Google and seems to generate a
similar amount of traffic.

 

[Jon Spivey]

Which keywords (or market sector if you don't want to give anything away)
have you found Yahoo to give similar traffic to Google at lower cost?

Jon