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.