Search engine help

Hi i have designed my fathers company website www.amtin.co.uk and are having trouble getting the keywords Steel Fabrication linked to the first page on the main search engines.
I have tried everything i can think of (which isnt much :-)) to get a higher listing but still having trouble and i was hoping for any tips to get a higher page ranking with that key word.
Also would appreciate any comments on what you think my site is like on design looks.

thanks

Icepick

Wow Icepick, there is so much I see right off the top.
You first need a descriptive <title> in your head tag! That's #1

Keywords: People do not search for steel. They search for steel fabrication in suffolk. So that should be your keyword phrase. Do keyword phrases instead of individual words. Pick the three most popular keyword phrases you think people will use to find you, then use those phrases throughout your text as well. In titles, buttons, all over the place. Certainly be careful not to "look" like you are keyword stuffing.

You have not implemented any h1, h2, h3 etc tags which search engines love. Your design is in tables. You should be hand coding your site using XHMTL/CSS so that the Search engines do not need to sift through needless code. You business name is a graphic. Unreadable to SE's. Your buttons are images, again unreadable to SE's.

You need alt tags on all images..

Links.. you need to list yourself in every directory that you can find that has a decent page rank of at least 3 or 4. You also need to find people that will link to you. They may result in you needing to add a links page so you can reciprocate the favor.

There's probably more but that's what I can give you off the top of my head. Surely enough to keep you busy for at least a week!

Jebach, I take considerable offense to your remark. You obviously are new here and have not realized that we DO offer free advice that is up to date and knowledgable. We are happy to pass on what we know.

As you should.

Anyway, I agree with everything else Lchad said!

Wow thats a lot of problems and like i said i still consider myself pretty new to this stuff.

Ok first question.
isnt this a descriptive head title?

<title>Steel fabrication east anglia. Suffolk based steel fabrication company for east anglia and surrounding areas. Balustrades, fire escapes, stair cases, mild steel</title>

second question
not sure what you mean when you say (You have not implemented any h1, h2, h3 etc tags which search engines love. Your design is in tables. You should be hand coding your site using XHMTL/CSS so that the Search engines do not need to sift through needless code.)

and finally what are alt tags is that like a description you give to images?

thanks for all the help so far.

The title is wayyyyy too long. Be short and get the most important keywords in there. Eight to nine words max.

Tables are not meant for site layouts. They're for holding tabular data. CSS and XHTML together can produce a site in much cleaner code that search engines can read better. Look at the source on my site for an example: http://ryanfait.com

H1-6 tags are headers. Use one h1 tag as close to the top of your source as possible. Then make use of the other headers (h1-h6). You don't need to go all the way down to the sixth, but h2 is rather important.

Yes, alt tags are for browsers that don't display images, and SE's also like them.

hmmm, maybe you should start by learning XHTML/CSS. Believe me it is not all that hard to learn. Try checking out the Beginner Resources and check out W3Schools for more XHTML/CSS help!

Hi I had a peep at the website and just wanted to say very good work and wish you best of luck in the future.

My advice is to have more content for your site. Create a description for the "We offer our customers:" part and the "Past projects have included:", ideally in a separate page. Create also a "link partners" page where you put all the links from link exchange. You can create articles too for one-way links that are very important for your site.

I would stay away from link exchange but more content is good advice.

Just curious, why avoid link exchange? And yeah, I agree with more content.

Good quality link exchange can be valuable, don't disregard it but do be careful about who you link to.

Pete.

Yeah, perhaps Keniki meant that way...

Yes Be extremely carefull with link exchange. I get about 300 link exchange requests a year of which maybe two would be worthwhile. Linking out to bad neighbourhoods will do yourself more damage than good. A few links with some relevant sites in your industry can be good though.

Always check on your link partners, don't be surprised to see what looked like a geniune site is really a subdomain to a viagra site or worse. Also don't be surprised to see there content change once you've exchanged links. Also look whether they block the reciprocal link in robots.txt or the page is cloaked showing a different version to the search engine without any outboud urls. They may reduce weight of link by using rel=nofolllow.

If you don't really know what your doing with link exchange it can do more damage than good. Thats why I don't recommend it