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Boosting Web Site Traffic and More Accurate Searches

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
I belong to a club and about 12 months ago I did their website for them for nowt - just my contribution to the club.

The site get approx 600 visit per month

The site is very much London based and for people in London however when you do a search for our club and tick on google UK SITES it doesn't show up at all - what does show up are UK sites that link to us.

I'm guessing the problem is because we use a hosting company based in the USA (because it works out about £3 a month for 1gb of web space and 40gb of transfer per month)

Anyway to host in the USA but let google know we're a UK based website?

Would changes to the MetaTags help?

We have a .COM address would getting a .co.uk version of the same name also help?

Also generally how do we boost our rankings?

Our site is based on PHP Nuke with lots of useful information in the forum but guess it's not getting indexed. There is a single HTML welcome page at the main URL with certain keywords but it would be nice if it could also index the forums.

Any ideas and suggestions? PM me if you want the URL if this would help.

Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    A few suggestions, which you may already have covered (although these may be quite dated!):
    Do you have a robots.txt file? This tells the search engines where and where not to look.
    Do the meta tags correspond to the page title, image tags and actual content on your pages? Relevence is important in getting your listing. Be careful when using certain keywords - if it seems like you're just reeling them off in your content to match your meta tags, search engines may class your site as "spam" (or the search engine equivalent).

    Most importantly, are you actually submitting the site to the search engines? Sorry if it's a daft question to ask, only you make no mention of it. Listing your sites in directories e.g. dmoz.org will also help.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Mac Sami wrote:
    A few suggestions, which you may already have covered (although these may be quite dated!):
    Do you have a robots.txt file? This tells the search engines where and where not to look.
    Do the meta tags correspond to the page title, image tags and actual content on your pages? Relevence is important in getting your listing. Be careful when using certain keywords - if it seems like you're just reeling them off in your content to match your meta tags, search engines may class your site as "spam" (or the search engine equivalent).

    Most importantly, are you actually submitting the site to the search engines? Sorry if it's a daft question to ask, only you make no mention of it. Listing your sites in directories e.g. dmoz.org will also help.


    Well one new thing I tried just 2 days ago was creating a GoogleSite Map - left a crawling program running for 12 hours and was still indexing the site - anyway I've uploaded a site map and will see if this helps.

    Since the site uses PHP Nuke Google stops at the welcome page and doesn't really go into the forums, etc.

    Although I've notice this particular forum is well up there on Google, guess it's Google Friendly coding.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Anyway I found exactly what I was looking for - brillaint little PHP script

    http://sitemapper.waraxe.us/

    converts PHP Nuke Links into HTML - search engine friendly links
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Anyway I found exactly what I was looking for - brillaint little PHP script

    http://sitemapper.waraxe.us/

    converts PHP Nuke Links into HTML - search engine friendly links

    Aye, I had to do this a few years back. Took me a fair bit of researching to find out why my site wasn't doing well on Google - things changed very rapidly after I started using Apache's mod_rewrite. It's all quite well known about these days though :).
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