Hi Robin:
Larry:
I have a new website www.CAHomeBrokers.com that was just designed for me and I want to get it off to a good start. I was wondering what it would cost to have you take a look at it submit it for me?
Robin:
Larry, if you want to set up a consultation with me, send me an email and I’ll be glad to talk to you about it. But, you don’t need me to submit your site. Use pay inclusion! You’ll get your site in the indices much faster, and the benefits are great. You don’t have to submit every single page through pay inclusion — just the most important pages of your site. Then, you never have to submit those pages again, as long as you continue using pay inclusion. Once you begin a link building campaign, your site will be picked up by the other spiders for the engines and indexed that way as well as through links pointing to your site. I never use free add URL these days — not even to Google. I let Google find my pages itself through links.
I recommend using these pay inclusion programs: Inktomi’s, Fast’s, and Teoma’s/Ask Jeeves. You could submit your main page (and maybe one other one) to AltaVista’s pay inclusion program (which I don’t care for as much because it’s only for 6 months). If you’re in a hurry for visibility, use Yahoo!’s pay inclusion. If not, let Google find the site, which will get the site in Yahoo! free, at least at the present time.
Work HARD on building that link popularity by linking to/from important, authoritative sites in your topic area — very important.
The meta tags look like they need help! For example I think the keywords are way too many. I am sure you will quickly notice other things.
Robin:
I would get rid of all META tags (and comment tags) except for the description and keyword tags (and title tag, of course), and I would cut down those tags to where they focus on just that page. META tags aren’t very important these days, but we never want to forget the “basics,” because a few of the engines still do consider METAs.
I would also move that JavaScript to a separate .js file and reference it in the head section. That will get rid of a lot of that excess code that is pushing your important keyword containing text to the bottom of the page. (Your Web designer will be able to do this very easily.)
Your navigation on the left (and the mouseovers) is also pushing your body text further down on the page. You can move it to the right-hand side of the page, if you’d like. Mouseovers are cool and I really like them, but they do push body text down, which isn’t a good thing. Your goal is to get your keyword containing text as close to the top of the page as you can. The engines now have to go through all of those unimportant META tags and the navigation to get to your body text.
You’ve got some great text at the bottom of the page — GOOD. We’ve got to get it toward the top of the page for the engines to “find” it and consider it relevant for your keyword phrase!
Understand that you may not want to change the navigation, and that’s your choice. We rarely work on a page where EVERYTHING is just the way we want it to be from a search engine standpoint. So, we do what we can to get rid of things that we *can* change, and then make up for the rest by making sure that the body text is very focused on our important keyword phrase, by building a solid link popularity, etc.
Another very quick comment — your pictures at the top of the page are lovely. But, if you could find a picture that has a picture of a happy family in front of their new home, that can often help from a conversion standpoint. After all, when we see a picture of smiling and happy people, we picture ourselves in that picture in front of OUR new home, and it can be a very powerful “call to action.” 🙂
Hope this helps! It’s a great looking site!
Robin
Robin Nobles conducts live SEO workshops
(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) in locations across North
America. She also teaches online SEO training
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com). Localized SEO training is now
being offered through the Search Engine Academy.
(http://www.searchengineacademy.com) Sign up for SEO tips of the
day at mailto:seo-tip@aweber.com.
