Taken over the google top 10 for brand terms but main site not top

Well I am all over my keywords now on google now some of the backlinks and reviews are kicking in I hold 8 out of the 10 places on google.com and .co.uk for:
the black rat winchester
black rat winchester
black rat restaurant

Now I know they are not big terms but that does not matter they are my key brand terms for this site. The only problem is the main site is now no 3 or 4 as sub pages are showing on the search. Now all the pages seem to have 0 or unranked PageRank but this blogger account is from a bigger domain and then a review site and then the host site. Now my view is the domain with the keyword should come first but I guess bigger and older sites are still more important.

I have made a couple of changes and will watch next week to see if I can get the restaurants site to be first on the list. But anyway I am pleased with my results as I have not worked too hard to get those words. I am working to get into restaurant winchester and the more generic terms that I am low in.

As they say there are always about 80% more non brand terms you can get search traffic for than brand terms (will quote the report when remember it)

Wordpress tip - Set page order for Pages on blog

If you have Pages in your wordpress.com site, not blog posts but the static pages, you should set the page order for them.

This is a little tab at the bottom on the right of the edit page. But default this is '0' Zero so they sort alphabetically. This can be fine, but as I found when I set one of these pages to be the homepage of a blog, as the site uses it for their main site and do not blog much yet. I found that if I change the name away from 'About the restaurant' the first page is no longer the first link in the menu.

I could not think of a better A word to start with and had added restaurant to my usual 'About us' title for SEO but now I find that because the site title is not the first words in the title it does not come up first in Google.

In google it ranks the words closest to the start of the title or header more, so you want your company name first on the homepage. But this should not be first on your other pages they should have page title and then site title. As then you get blocked the other way because all your titles can look the same to google as they all start the same. On Wordpress they do have the page title followed by the site title which Blogger does not, but I can not change it for the home page.

All this brought me back to searching 'the black rat restaurant' in Google and the site now comes 3rd for what is really it's own url! now it is not so bad because it is a victim of my own success as the first places are this blog and another site with a review of the restaurant. But the site could be loosing traffic as people may not click from these 2 sites through to the main one.

This is when I noticed the page order option and by setting the order of all the top level pages I can have the homepage first in the list but name it 'The Black Rat' rather that about and then I get first in the google listings I hope ;) I'll look next week and see.

My only thought now to further fix it is dropping the 'The' as that is a stop word even being part of the actual name. Think I'll test and see...

When technology moves on in the Mobile world

When technology moves on and you can't find old spares it is very annoying and looks like everyone is after your money for something better than you need.

It feels like only yesterday that shops could not get enough mobile phone accessories, but now click the fingers and they are all gone. I must admit the cheap headphones and cases never were made well or had long shelf life but lots of people wanted them. Now it seems we have moved to the next level and making bluetooth headsets is a little harder.

I only noticed this change in my local world when my audio connection to the digital world vanished one night last week. I swear i know where i put my phone headset but now the fairies, washing machine, or small son has made off with them. My newish nokia n73 and commute to work are now devoid of interest and full of other peoples noise. My itunes is full of great podcasts and the radio is passing me by too. So i thought they'll turn up i'll just get a cheap set while i wait but no, the shops are now empty.

Why did they stop selling? I guess the market has moved or the chinese workshops are spending there time learning and stocking new christmas gadgets.

--
on mobile

Second: Hit the directories

Next it was off to take the search results and generate back links on any restaurant directory I could find.

All offer slightly different listings so I thought I would show our listing where it is live. Some sites review the posts so you have to wait a few days. Some like Google Local even call or send you a card to your address to prove it is real.
I'll write some more about getting listed and what results the sites gave soon.

http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en-gb&gl=gb
- Found this page by a random route on the google.com/local homepage but not listed if you just search from the main site.
- The other way I found on to the map is by creating your own maps in google and then the results come up in web searches, which is nice.

www.information-britain.co.uk

http://www.touristnetuk.com/SO/hants-n/food/winchester.htm

www.virtualtourist.com - add a forum post and review
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/ed00c/49efa/2/

wikitravel.org - wikipedia's travel site, not many there which is good.
http://wikitravel.org/en/Winchester_%28England%29#Eat

http://www.foodfever.com/owner/207131/

http://www.touchsouthampton.com/business/list/bid/3930622

http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/getlisted.html

http://www.restaurant-guide.com/uk+list-your-restaurant.htm

http://www.thomsondirectories.com/internet_advertising/addamendlisting.asp

www.upmystreet.com uses www.thomsonlocal.com results
http://www.upmystreet.com/findmynearest/add-listing/l/so23+9qf.html?fmnLoc=so23+9qf&fmnCatTerm=the+black+rat

http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/ed00c/49efa/2/

http://www.dine-online.co.uk/review-your-favourite-restaurant.htm
http://www.dine-online.co.uk/the-black-rat-restaurant.htm

www.freeindex.co.uk - This has a nice interface to add description of the business, using a fill in the blanks on existing sentences
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/addyourbusiness.htm?p=ca3

http://www.scoot.co.uk/assets/business/advertise.php

http://www.restaurantspy.com/node/65

First SEM: Preview post before site live

The first good think I did was right a preview about the restaurant opening in this blog on Blogger. That was good in two ways. First the owner of my borothers restaurant was not sure he wanted to pay for a site. We showed he needed one buy the fact that my one post got position 1 on Google for 'the black rat winchester' in a few days. This showed that no one was going to find them without my page and I even got personal emails of people trying to book dinner. So found that that works as a good example but I guess it was because we have an open market on the name. Everything else is for real rats or a black rat drink in america.

So even though I think The Black Rat is a bad name for a restaurant but for SEO it is kind of good as there is no real competition on the name. Unlike say "The Royal Hotel" or something common.

This ranked page still is the top referer after google. And when they had a website up I linked this ranked page. Even this related post will help the rankings, though it would be better on food not SEM activity.

Tracking the growth in site rank of a new blog/website

I have had the theblackrat.co.uk website live for I guess a month now. The work was done arround the 1 August but as it was never not live to the web I forget the exact day. I then started SEM work about 2 weeks ago. So I want to watch how much work I do effects the ranking and traffic of the site.

The site:
A worldpress.com free blog with extras paid for (CSS and own domain). Now it is a blog site but they are not going to use the blog for a while it is just about seven page straight website. I customised the css template a little.

Short falls:
The domain has to now www. but apart form I think that www. looks nice does not matter. I can not edit the template html and can not add any javascript (so nice google map embeded). Also anoying is no Google Analytics as they use it internally at WordPress so you get very basic stats. And can not edit or have any meta tags, which would be nice for the description tag.

My work:
I then worked my way through directories to get some back links and google ranking for my keywords. I took my first 5 terms ran the searches on google took all those sites and tried to get links. Also WebCEO software gave me some good links in Partners and also Google related: on sites of other winchester restautrants gave more links.

Are spiders taking over?

I have been wondering for a couple of weeks now if spiders are taking over my house in brighton, and have seen the same ones in other areas of the town.

They seem to be multiplying at a quick rate and are all over the trees outside and oftern inside.

Now though this week it looks like we have two larger ones that are either fully grown or more important.

One is hide up at the top of our washing line bracket and the other on a large pot plant.

They are thick brown bodies and spiky legs and they have very strong webs.

Me wonders if they will take over or the end of summer will kill them off or drive them inside.

apparently they are European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus) or Korsspindel.

The joys(ish) of TinyMCE - Rich Text Editor more controllable than last time I looked

I have been trying to find a RTE for a new site I am doing. I would have liked the WordPress/Blogger/Google one to compare but they do not seem to be avalible to download, and stripping javascript out of another site is never a fun job, for more than a couple of lines.

Last time I used it at timeout.com we had a few limits that we had to hack around, they seem to have cleanly added these thing in now. So I'll talk about what I found.

• Making images not have full urls
• You can valid your own set of tags and strip out ones you do not what.
• Add in predifined lists of links, images, css tags
• Overlay your own css, as would be in the site.
  

Making images not have full urls

You can valid your own set of tags and strip out ones you do not what.

For us default a tags "target" to "_blank"

Quote:

This example string tells TinyMCE to remove all elements that are not a "a, strong, div or br" element, convert "b" elements to "strong" elements, default "target" to "_blank" and keep the "href", "target" and "align" attributes of the elements.

tinyMCE.init({
...
valid_elements : "a[href|target=_blank],strong/b,div[align],br"
});

Add in predifined lists of links, images, css tags

Again to have an external js file that was full of links for the editor and could be built on the fly either from common site links or other data for that story (they have entered an actor so the list has links to all his related films) would have given some quick help and less errors.

Quote:

This option enables you to have an external list of links, which can be generated by a server side page and then inserted into the link dialog windows of TinyMCE. The links can be to internal site documents or external URLs.

Example of usage of the external_link_list_url option:

tinyMCE.init({
...
external_link_list_url : "myexternallist.js"
});

Example of a external link list file: (myexternallist.js)

var tinyMCELinkList = new Array(
// Name, URL
["Moxiecode", "http://www.moxiecode.com"],
["Freshmeat", "http://www.freshmeat.com"],
["Sourceforge", "http://www.sourceforge.com"]
);


Catching sumit or button comands for custom events.

This would have been good for our custom popups or to do some checking before submiting the form. Also could be used to block some buttons i.e fonts, to some access levels.

So all in all some good things, I just do no like the icons and layout. But you can do the buttons as javascript calls and the menu bar can be sent to another div for styling so should be possible to make it nice.