Getting ranked on google

[migroo]

Okay I have just finished my first website:The Madison Star-Mail and I am looking to get it ranked on Google.I used the meta tag but w3schools says most search engines don't use the meta content. My site is still not ranked very high and its not because the other sites are hard to out rank.Here is my <meta> code:

<meta name="description"content="The Official Madison Star-Mail Website." />  <meta name="keywords"content="Madison, Star-Mail, .com, NE, Official Website, Home page" />

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong and point me in the right direction?Thanks

[Synook]

Meta tags will help little in your quest for high rankings. The only way to do that is to write relevant content, and gets other sites to link to you. Also, remember that more general keywords will be harder to rank highly for.

[migroo]

Okay so things like advertising on other web pages will up my sites ranking? Sweet!

[Synook]

Uh, depends what you mean by "advertising"... for example, if I liked one of your pages, and linked to that page on a blog post of mine, then that page will get a higher page rank. However, paid advertising (e.g. through Google Adwords) does not count.Also, remember that the more relevant your site is to your keyword, the higher you are likely to rank. If your site is about motocycles, you will probably never rank high for just "motocycle".Also, patience! If you want to see how your site is being indexed, you can always sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account.

[dsonesuk]

you have to create at least three keywords primary, secondary etc that relates to each page, you then include these in the header tags primary in <h1></h1>, secondary in h2 and so on, as well as in the content, an links.Madison, Star-Mail, .com, NE, Official Website, Home page out of the keywords listed, the one striked through should be included more in the title than the keywords.example: keyword 'Madison'

<h1>Madison History</h1><p>The <a href="madison-star-mail.html">Madison Star-Mail</a> owners as of May 2009 are Greig and Niko Gronenthal. Greig is a 1990 graduate of Humphrey St. Francis School and Niko is a 1990 graduate of <a href="madison-high-school.html">Madison High School</a>. Niko moved to Madison when she was in the seventh grade and still lives here with her husband and kids.</p><p>The Madison Star-Mail will be celebrating 138 years of business this year. To celebrate, the crew at the Star-Mail is retyping archive files from the past wedding announcements, birth announcements and obituaries to help Madison families with their family heritage. As of now we will be working on the 2008 book. This process will take some time as we have to retype articles. The Star-Mail will be retyping older years to come. All articles on the web-site are in the Madison Star-Mail newspaper books.</p>

having 'madison' in header tags, page name, links all helps in pushing your ranking up, but avoid overdoing inserting the keywords in the articles.another good option is to insert about 10 links to other pages on the home page (usually placed at bottom, below footer) only, which willl have short description, and use header tag H2 or 3 as a link to that page. These header tags will use keywords from those pages.google webtools is a good tool to use, to tell google what pages to find, to redirect old google liste content pages, caches to new, and create sitemaps of your site. but you really need to identfy the keywords you plan to use within specific pages first.you can then use 'pingoat' to send reference to you site to over sixty services.

[thescientist]

also, a good use of header tags is also good. Instead of using meta tags, those "keywords" would be better served as header tags.edit: post copyright infringement

[dsonesuk]

what i said???

[migroo]

Okay. So I want links and rather than have all my keywords on the meta I want to have them in the page's actual content as well. Because Google looks at all of it. I will look into those tools you mentioned too. So things like:

<h2><i> Welcome to the Madison Star-Mail Official Web Site!</i></h2>

Will help with getting is ranked.

[dsonesuk]

keywords should be within in title tag, and description meta tag, and also keyword meta tags. remember these are what are listed in the google page, the title and the text from the description, after this this the more it find keywords within the page in header tags, links and text the more it will become indexed as having relevant content that the user is searching for.so recap, order of importance <title>title with keywords</title> <meta name="description" content="description for specific page with keywords" /> <meta name="keywords" content="enter all keywords here" /> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <!--tell spiders to index pages and follow links<h1>tags are given top priority, and should be main title of page you are on and contain primary keyword</h1><h2> to <h6> use for sub headings that contain secondary keywords<a>links that have the keywords within them</a>then keywords within content