Is Google reindexing now?

[tristam]

Google visits my site approx. once a week. It last came on the 16 April. I have had a look today at my postition and I have disappeared even though I have done a lot of work to improve my site in the last 3 months.

When it came by in October I went up to number 3 for a week then dropped to about 120th place until it came by in january when I went back up to 18th. Is this normal to maybe get a temporary position for a week?

There seems to be a lot of irrelevant stuff in front of me. Am I missing the point somewhere or does Google like to index irrelevant sites well?
If this is the case then why do we use Google?

Tristam

[leehack]

Perhaps you could provide a link to a page that you have optimised and let us know the phrase you have optimised for? We could take a look and provide some ideas on improvement.

[tristam]

http://www.thepenzone.co.uk/index.html

This page didn't have much content, as you can see I have now quite a lot of content which I have added since january.

the term Cross Pens was 11th or 12th place and is now 3rd page, I was hoping this might move up. Waterman Pen was second page and this has dropped loads. None of the pages with the products on seem to show even though I have added more content to them. Is it possible to add to much content?

I have also added a site map.

[RuralWeb]

Key word stuffing springs to mind

[tristam]

Is there a limit to the amount that I have. All i am doing is naming each product??

By getting to the first page even in 7th to 10th position would I expect to get more traffic? Has anyone else noticed a significant increase in traffic in these postions or do shoppers not look that far down?

[Duncan Rounding]

Stuffing relates to the number of keywords relative to the amount of content. The number of times the word 'pen' is used on that page may act against you because there is relatively little content in relation the number of times the word is used.

There's a lot of keyword density checkers around (many are not very good mind) This one for example says almost 10% of the words on that page are 'pen'. http://webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

A quote from that site:
...the recommended keyword density is from 3 to 7%, anything above this, say 10% density starts to look very much like keyword stuffing and it is likely that will not get unnoticed by search engines. A text with 10% keyword density can hardly make sense, if read by a human...

[peblaco]

By getting to the first page even in 7th to 10th position would I expect to get more traffic? Has anyone else noticed a significant increase in traffic in these postions or do shoppers not look that far down?

You should see an increase in traffic if you're on 7th/10th position for popular keywords, but I think the general concensus from what I've read is the majority of people look at the top 3-5 listings, less so further down.

If it's SEO you're going for then theres a couple of tips I can offer.
1) You could have <h1> and <h2> tags for your main site headings on the home page rather than font size 4:
<p><font color="#000080" size="4"><b>Welcome to the Pen Zone</b></font></p>
2) You could use a search engine friendly layout like a CSS layout with the content presented to the search engines before the sidebar. At the moment, Google is viewing your page code and the first bulk of content it reads is the whole of the left sidebar links and image codes.

[tristam]

1) You could have <h1> and <h2> tags for your main site headings on the home page rather than font size 4:
[CODE]<p><font color="#000080" size="4"><b>Welcome to the Pen Zone</b></font></p>

Sorry, not sure exactly how to implement this bit.

As for CSS layout I will try and read up on this.

[RuralWeb]

Looks like you have been given a 30 possition penalty for the changes you made. Undo them and get back your better ranking then move on from there with small changes. CSS design IMO makes little or no difference to rankings so don't bother with all that extra effort. Your product pages should be the ones you work on and keep you homepage for the most important or difficult keyword

This has all been discussed at great length over the years so before you decide on a plan have a read. Then write a plan and stick to it.

[peblaco]

CSS design IMO makes little or no difference to rankings so don't bother with all that extra effort.
Up for debate (or maybe it's been done before but I haven't noticed?) but I've seen several sites purely change from tables to css layout and noticed an improvement in search engine ranking which is quite interesting.

Though I think correct keywords, H1 tags and incoming links would be higher priorities.

[RuralWeb]

its minimal IMO when compared to other seo improvements. Its a cost/effort analysis at the end of the day. Some CSS based sites know of are almost invisible so its no magic bullet

[RuralWeb]

I forgot to say there are some threads about CSS design and seo if you want to do some searching. Lee and jont were the main posters if I remember correctly. Also if you decide that you want a CSS design doing then lee or jont are the best in the business so start there.

[tristam]

I didn't know about h1 tags but have just read http://www.yournew.com/h1_tags_seo.cfm It has a small bit about local style sheets. Is this an easy way to do it or best avoided?

Do I put all the main page content in the h1 tag or use h2 etc as I go down the page.

I also have a site map on each page which i think may be unnecessary and word stuffing.

[RuralWeb]

Slow down. Rushing could make things even worse especially by abusing h tags. Take a week out and read this forum using terms like seo, h tags, site maps, cgi navigation, clean code, analytics. You are asking questions that have been answered many times before so read and plan.

[jont]

Mal - what is your opinion about keyword links as shown at the bottom of the example page?

[tristam]

Thanks for the help. I realy need to sort this cus Adwords is a bit of a killer.

I will remove some of the keyword stuffing and read more of the forum on the above suggestions

I have noticed that SectionName already uses h1 tags and something else has h3 tags, not found the h2 tags yet.

Can you only use h1 tags for one thing on a website?

Also should I maybe get rid of the site navigation at the bottom of the page as this may add to the keyword stuffing.

How often does Google reindex?

[RuralWeb]

if you don't have time to search yourself then maybe you should contact a professional to do the work for you. All the answers are in the forum but i for one will not post them all again. I'm not fishing for work so don't contact me.