There is a huge debate on this and it seems that no one really knows the right answer.
How do you improve your google rankings?

I`m not saying your doing anything right or wrong but you can read on to see my own own personal observations.
And try to change a few things, as I did.


It’s best you first read the following 2 contradicating articles here:

The Google Blog Post about the Robots exclusion file.
Barry Schwarz concluded from a Vanessa Fox reaction in Google Groups.

My Thoughts:

I have been managing a smart car website smartsrus.com now for about 3 years (it has recently had a new design applied over it).
And there has always been an old splash page with 2 links 1 linking to the first website developed by the owner and the other linking to my design.

If you take a look at the original site you will see hundreds of tables and a site that has been put together with dreamweaver and with little knowledge on the web.
If you compare this with my site which is strict xhtml and uses CSS to style the entire site. You would presume that google would crawl this and index the site using snippets… (But it doesn’t seem to work that effectively??)

I’ve read from a number of sources that google and other key search engines ignore the meta description and keyword tags and this is why I have always left these fields blank.
However the original site has these included and they have always been able to come above my site site in rankings even though my pages appear to be getting more hits?

Strange, anyway after doing some more investigation and comparing the old with the new smartsrus website I found that the meta tags had higher rankings over snippets even if there were more snippets of the same keyword.

So I changed my design to include unique keywords and descriptions for each page and am happy to say that the smartsrus site is now soaring above its competitors and above the original site.

Snippets:

Don’t get me wrong snippets still work great do a search for “graham bolton zombie” and you will see even though I don`t have any meta descriptions or keywords the link pops up. Just add the meta tags to help improve your sites listing ;)

The Test: 

Over the next couple of days I will be promoting www.bluestudios.co.uk.
I will try to get it to achieve the highest rankings on google as a web design agency in Cambridge, it will be closed for the winter with a new site advertised for Spring 2008…
Although if I get chance I might make a fun site.

Find out in the next 2-3 months how I get on and if I get any interests :)