CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

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gwhastie

CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby gwhastie » 15 Mar 2009, 12:14

My home PC crashed recently and I lost all my web links including the one to the CAWPBA. When rebuilding it, I Googled CAWPBA plus the full name and couldn't find a link.

Because I knew what I was looking for, I only found it by going through several other Wooden Boat sites and searching for it. It may be an idea for the Secratary of the CAWPBA to send an email directly to Google to ensure direct links are put into their search engine. It may be that potential club members or contributors to the CAWPBA site are being lost because the site is hard to find. Regards Gary Hastie.

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Greg
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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby Greg » 15 Mar 2009, 13:09

Gary
Unusual that a full name search couldn't give you a link, it works OK for me on several search engines.
I agree with the emailing various search engines, which I did do, to a degree, without much success. I used to rely on their web crawlers etc, but they don't seem to be as effective as they were. Maybe it's just the size of the internet now. I am flat out even getting other sites to change their links to the correct address via direct email, let alone these big search engines. needless to say, I am working on it.
Greg

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bootlegger
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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby bootlegger » 15 Mar 2009, 18:32

Greg one of my friends had the same problem. I tried to find the site for them and had to get on to it through the hydro clubs links. Dave

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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby Alan » 15 Mar 2009, 22:34

Garry, Greg,
just did a test myself, opened google typed in cawpba and up it popped. So then I tried the full name, and found it hard to get a direct hit even when I went back to using "cawpba", I then found that at some stage I was looking only in Australia. Strange that it works best when it's looking around the world :?:
Alan.

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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby Greg » 16 Mar 2009, 08:37

Alan
The better response from "the world" is probably due to the ".com" web address.
I have resubmitted to a few of the bigger search engines, so let's see how we go.
Greg

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bugger
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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby bugger » 23 Mar 2009, 12:59

Greg, (Was going to just email you, but thought if anyone else maintains a website for car clubs, etc, it might be handy info)
I do a fair bit of work in search engine optimisation. Here are some things that I can suggest that will make huge difference:

- Google gives a great deal of importance to the content of the homepage of a site. Improving the content here will make a big difference. The intro page may be costing you greatly with the search engines due to the lack of "real" text content.

- I see the list of "keywords/meta tags" at the bottom of the homepage. Google is all over this technique and won't fall for it. It would be better to replace this with the welcome spiel you use on the inside homepage.

- In my view, the biggest issue is... There are 3 intro pages/clicks before you get to the site menu. The best option is to combine all these pages into one homepage. If you imagine google "crawling" the site, we currently have an 2 extra clicks in the crawl before you get to the actual content. The problem is that the more steps google takes deeper into the site from the homepage, the less priority it gives to that content.

- When you get a result in Google for CAWPBA it returns the text "Website last updated on...." This is the first text that it can find on the page... so it is not recognising the first heading "Australian Classic Powerboat Association" Could be due to use of Heading 4 for the "Website last updated text". This is another big contributor.

- Title tags are really important. So top window of the browser you will see the words New Page 1. This should be replaced with something like: "Australian Classic Wooden Powerboat Association - Wooden Boats, Timber Motorboats, Nostalgia and Restorations."

- Then each page within the site should have the title tags updated to reflect the content of that page. ie: Reader's Boats page should have title tag like: "Images and information on reader's wooden powerboats"

- Ok one more... don't want to sound like i'm being too harsh.... Links are the single most important thing for improving ranking. Content gets you on the list, links get you on the top of the list. The way google ranks your site is for every other site that links to your site you get points. ie, NSWHC.org links to CAWPBA.com. We get a point :-) For every link that you provide to another site, you lose points. :-( So since NSWHC and CAWPBA link to eachother its neutral. :-|
We have a links page full of links to other peoples sites. And its a handy thing for our members, but if we can get them to link back to us... we can reduce the negative points. Fortunately there isn't a huge competition for wooden boat internet sites... so we aren't on page 65 of the listings... but it all adds up.

I really appreciate the work you do in maintaining the site Greg so don't want to pick on it... but if you need anything above explained better i'm happy to help. Or just call me.

cheers

Andrew.
Last edited by bugger on 24 Mar 2009, 08:30, edited 1 time in total.

Nick

Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby Nick » 23 Mar 2009, 21:03

wow great insight Andrew thats excellent info
so your not just a pretty face

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Greg
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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby Greg » 23 Mar 2009, 21:27

Andrew
Thanks for that excellent info. I will have to ring you. Things like the "New Page 1" and others, I don't even know where they're created from!
It used to be so easy. I used to write all the HTML using a great Aussie program called Liquid FX. Then you'd wack in a few meta tags and key words and away you went. The crawlers would pick you up in no time.
I will have a mess around with the front end of the site and see if I can come up with what I think and then send the code to you for comment, if that's OK.
Cheers
Greg

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bugger
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Re: CAWPBA Website difficult to locate

Postby bugger » 25 Mar 2009, 00:26

Yep, No worries Greg. Will be glad to help.


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