Paolo Posted December 8, 2004 Share Posted December 8, 2004 I don't know if this is advertising - please delete if appropriate...If you are not sure about your website, or if you don't have one at all and would like to know how to go about making one, there are two interesting things happening at Lay My Hat (this is a free advice site for rental owners which I run).One is a website review section - you just ask for your website to be reviewed by other owners, and you get feedback on how you might improve it in terms of design, writing and search engine performance. You can also add your ideas about other people's sites.The other is really interesting I think - an owner in Normandy was fishing quite unsubtly for someone to take pity on her and help her with a site. So now we're all building one for her as a sort of community project, contributing what we know to different stages of its development. It's going from the very beginning of site creation, which is asking the client what the site should say and to whom. And it will continue through to appearing online and perhaps pay-per-click advertising. Every step is discussed so you can see the thinking behind the decisions.You can take part in the project, or you can use it as a real-time guide to creating your own site from scratch.You can see both these projects here:http://www.laymyhat.com/forumPaolo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deby Posted December 8, 2004 Share Posted December 8, 2004 paoloFantastic. Very useful. Much quicker forum than here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peynau Posted December 9, 2004 Share Posted December 9, 2004 It certainly looks very useful.I recently (last week in fact) subscribed to a service that will "guarantee my website gets found on the first 2 pages of a google search". I confess to being a bit overwhelmed by the sales person but my reasoning is along the lines that if they do achieve this, it will be worth it, but I have a nagging feeling that these people saw me coming......I wish I'd seen your site before last weekcheersGary Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paolo Posted December 9, 2004 Author Share Posted December 9, 2004 Hi Gary,Lies, lies and damned lies!We talked a little about this in a recent thread here:http://www.livingfrance.com/instantforum/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=16&MessageID=46522&TopicPage=2Someone saying that they will "guarantee my website gets found on the first 2 pages of a google search" may as well guarantee you the pick of Hollywood's leading ladies for your next wife.There are hundreds of phrases for which your site will always be top of Google. Take any long string of words from your site, put them in double quotation marks, and paste into Google, and you will be number one. Unfortunately nobody in the history of the world will ever perform that search.There should be some reasonably useful phrases for which your site can get on the first two pages of Google - for example 'holiday house with pool in cotentin' may be possible if you optimise a page around that phrase. There won't be huge competition for this phrase, then again there will be very few searches performed using this phrase (the up side of this is that the more focused a phrase, the likelier the searcher is to want to book your house when they do find it, so whilst only a handful of people type the phrase into Google, maybe one or two will result in a booking enquiry).So if someone guarantees Google placement, ask for which specific phrases that would be.In any case I would never accept such an offer, even if it was free or money-back guaranteed. You CAN cheat the search engines, by using short-term tricks, but they will catch up to you and penalise you, dropping your site to page 1,000 of their search results. It's not worth it!Paolo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mpprh Posted December 9, 2004 Share Posted December 9, 2004 HiAnd Google may not even find the name of your site if the name is too well known.I idly tapped in "lay my hat" and discovered that the top ? references are to the song lyrics !Peter(keyword = languedoc) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paolo Posted December 10, 2004 Author Share Posted December 10, 2004 I don't know if we'll ever beat Paul Young! Try laymyhat instead...Paolo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buntina Posted December 10, 2004 Share Posted December 10, 2004 >"guarantee my website gets found on the first 2 pages of a google search"Typicaly this is using adwords and charging you an increased price - as mentioned before 'ask for the key terms they will get your site listed for' - ask for examplesI have been in SEO for 6 years and still do not guarantee placement - although we always get what we are after Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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