Poor Google ranking after 4 months

I run 3 websites. Two have reasonable ranking, but the latest one (SussexIDEAS . co . uk) does not. This one is the important one, as it is related to work.

Someone said it might be due to the javascript menu bar, but the other websites use the same menu.

I've tried various methods from the Google advice pages.

An expert eye may see something obvious that I'm missing.

Thanks

The javascript based menu is definitely going to hinder you. A css based drop down menu would be much more suitable. In the meantime consider the use of an html sitemap to allow the search bots to access all pages on your site, and get rid of the bunch of links in the <noscript> tag - looks very spammy and really not the best way to do things.

I can't see any h1 or h2 tags anywhere in the page.

Your homepage title doesn't really target any keywords.

There's no redirect from the non-www version to the www version (or vice versa) so you may experience some canonical issues.

Your link to 'home' goes to the /index.html page (granted shouldn't be an issue at the moment given that the search engines can't follow the link anyway) -- for future reference it's better to point it to the root without the filename.

I would like to suggest 2 things:
1. Change the title: There should be a clear reflection of your theme in your title.I could not see that in your site.

2. Work on Back Links: Nowadays the back links are the major factor of ranking in google.The back link power of your site is poor.Work on that.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've already submitted a sitemap.

The <noscript> links are for the Atomz search engine; apparently it needs them. Will this affect the ranking?

I've always used Xara menu. It doesn't seem to affect the other websites. Do you know of a decent CSS drop down menu software?

I've changed the title to "Sussex Domestic Energy Assessors (DEA) for Energy Performance Certiciates (EPC)". OK?

I don't know what a back link is.

Are h1 and h2 tags necessary? Will they improve the ranking? I thought they were just for type style.

What does this mean? There's no redirect from the non-www version to the www version (or vice versa) so you may experience some canonical issues.

I've changed the link to the Home page using the root.

Thanks again.

Sorry i had to edit this one, i had two windows opened at the same time, posted the answer at the wrong place, so sorry guys!

Backlinks are your site's link on various other sites, that is other sites linking to your sites! To do reasonably well in google, acquire as many backlinks as you can!

It needs them because of the javascript navigation. Fix that and you won't need to place the links in a <noscript> tag. Mind you, is your site really so large that it needs an internal search engine? All your pages are included in the drop down navigation, no?


It will be affecting these other sites. I'd bet you large sums of money that if you changed it on these sites as well, your inner pages would rank for a lot more keyphrases. As for a CSS menu, just search Google - there's hundreds of examples.


No, header tags are not for type style - that's what CSS is for. Header tags are for headings. H1 being the main heading, through H6 for the lowest level headings. You can then use CSS to vary the size of the text in the H tags - you don't need to stick to the default size.
Keywords used in heading tags are given more weight, provided that you don't keyword stuff them or write whole paragraphs in them. Just use them for their intended purpose.


Google sees www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com (without the www) as two seperate sites. Provided that everybody links to just the one version, then you won't have any problems. But you can't rely on this. Backlinks to your non preferred version would be wasted at best, and at worst is going to potentially cause problems by having two different sites with the exact same content. Use the .htaccess file (assuming you're using apache) to do a 301 redirect from one to the other.
NB, you can set your preferred version in Google's Webmaster Tools, and Google does seem to be getting better at determining whether or not it is actually the same site, but fixing the problem is by far the safest way to go.

hmmm... Commercial... anything that is related to $$$ is far more difficult... links, links, and more links.

Thanks very much Jagnet for the detailed response.

I'll get onto those suggestions. The biggest pain isfinding another drop down menu. I really like the one I've got, and there are loads of submenu items. But greater Google prominence is more important than style for this website I think.

By the way, I use a template that holds the menu. I don't suppose this causes a problem.

NO absolutely not... (according to search engines they can only access the mainpage because they cannot interpret Javascript)... but before you start changing your menu adding a set of static links at the bottom of the page(s) will do the same thing as replacing the javascript menu with a css one in alot less time.

If you focus the bottom links to the most important pages to be be ranked (rather than everyone) things will progress faster.

You definitely need more links...

OK thanks.

So I'll add some small graphics, each with a destination link, so as to maintain an attractive appearance. I'll put these on the template, so that they occur on every page.

I suppose the links inside the <noscript> tags don't count. Can I get rid of these once I add the above graphics with destination links? I suppose Atomz will use the new ones to search pages.

I've asked all of the members with websites to make a link to my website too. I'll ask them again.

I'm feeling more confident about this now.

OK I've done everything except redirect www. to non www.

I'll ask my ISP to do this.

Curiously, when I added green dashes to the template (and gave each one a link), they are not visible. I hope Google doesn't penalise me for that. Looks good without them.

I just have to resubmit the sitemap tomorrow.

I have so many clients that get into this mindset of "well this worked on my other sites, so it can't be the problem on this site."

There are so many factors that go into search engine results, that simply brushing evidence of a problem off like this can cause serious frustration as you look to solve the issue.

This is obviously the site with the most competition, so you will want to approach it with the mentality "I want this site to be 100% optimized" , not "85% will be ok because it has worked in the past."

Just keep building those links, and get that sitemap submitted and you should be moving in the right direction.

Thanks for the encouragement. I've submitted the sitemap. Now I just have to wait and see.

I'll give some feedback regarding the ranking.