My sites code

I am very new to this cat and mouse game. I have designed two web sites and am not sure if I am doing things right. I am self taught and have done quite a bit of searching for the right way to do things. I will not cheat the game of SEO seeing that it will only reflect poorly on all of us in the long run, but the temptation to take short cuts is so easy.

When I first put up my web site www.helppetshome.com I ranked number 4 for a couple of keywords. Then I dicovered Overture and my key words were not as popular as I had thought. Recently I made some major changes to my meta tags and content and am hoping it will get me somewhere but I am still hazzy about all this SEO stuff.

I was wondering if one of you gods of SEO can look at my source code and give it a quick glimps. (just don't laugh it is my first shot at setting up and building a web site).

Anyway I could ask you guy's (and gal's) 50 pages of questions but I will leave that to another time.

Thanks for listening

this is certainly not good practice:

<!--Dog and Cat Pet collars that save animals lives-->
<!--dog,Dogs,Dog collars,cat,Cats,Cat collars,pet,Pets,Pet collars,ID tags,animals,collar,free email-->
<!--The future of dog and cat collars. Let us supply your pet with a collar that can help save your animals life-->

I would personally cut down on the amount of met tags you have, unless you really need them. maby some else can help too.

Tom

www.2bscene.net

Do you think that would be considered spamming?

Yes definitely.

You shouldn't need it anyway.

The main thing that comes across very clear to me is that you are not using your title and met description very effectively.

Try and hone in on what your target audience is - are people really going to search for "Dog and Cat Pet collars that save animals lives" - maybe they will be it seems excrutiatingly long for someone to type in.

you should try and push for dog collar id's, cat collar id tags etc. Short and simple something that you would look for if you were searching the web for something.

Make sure to include your keyphrases within your meta description and keywords.

There is still a good bit to learn, but if you can grasp that basic theory, you are one step closer to successful online marketing campaigns!

Thanks I will see what I can do. I did a keyword search at Overture and all the words I picked had the greatest number of hits. Time to refine again. It is not as easy a game as you would think. I guess "build it and they will come" is the farthest thing from the truth here.

no its not easy at all - and "build it and they will come" certainly didnt take the web into account.

But on that note it can be fairly easy if you know who your target market is.

Most business is done through word of mouth, so if you can generate enough hits to brand your company and get your name around you will end up generating business anyway.

The internet is just another form of marketing! Except, it also has to be marketed!!!!

When it comes to titles does each word or key phrase have to be sperated with a comma?
Also does the key phrase "dog collar" have to be what is typed in by the person doing the search to get to my site or can they get the same results by typing in dog or collar? My site is content rich with both words.

You don't need the commas in your title. But they won't hurt you either.

You might want to place the words, "dog collar", "cat collar", and "pet collar" a little closer to the top of the page.

Also, your homepage has way too many external links (links to other pages). I would move them to a seperate page on your website (such as a links page) and place a link to this page from your homepage.

Also, you should try and set-up a links page and trade links with other webmasters who are in the pet industry or offer pet products or collars. Google likes websites with lots of external links coming to it.

Also, I try and have about 4%-7% of my text on the page as keywords. This is my personal preference, other webmasters will have different percentages. Just don't go higher than 9%. You can visit this webpage to tell you what your keyword percentage is for your webpage, such as "dog collars": http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/spider/spider.cgi?lang=

Also on your navigation menu to the left of your page, you might want to place an ALT tag within your Collar link and use a keyword in it.
(for example put this tag -- ALT="Collars").

It looks as if you have alot of Meta tags. I would remove all of them except for the keyword and description meta tags. The search engines have to read through these meta tags to get to the beef of the page, so if you have a bunch of garbage, it is not going to help you.

I hope this helps you.

Thanks, That is some great info. So you are saying to remove all the meta that was gennerated except for the title, keywords and description? Also does one word from a key phrase count if it is typed in when doing a search?

Yes, all the other meta tags look like garbage to me (the author's name etc.).

You might also try changing your top line "Many pets are already wearing this amazing collar!!" and have something like "Looking for a dog, cat, or pet collar?" That isn't the best example, but throw some keywords up there near the top of the page.

And yes, one word counts if it is typed in for a search unless they put the words in quotes (not done all that often by normal people).

Thanks so much, I can see that I am going to learn quite a bit from his forum.