Hi Folks,

 

I've just uploaded my first ever hand-coded website (made with a little help with the tiny bit of PHP), and wondering if anyone here would be willing to look at it, and give me some feedback - both general and specifically regarding how to get it to show up on the first few pages of a google search?

 

www.creativecounsellingdevon.co.uk

 

Kind regards,

 

Robin.

Before we can do that, you need to think about and choose the keywords you want to target.

 

Counselling Devon

Creative Counselling Devon

Relationship Counselling Devon

 

The list goes on. Rule of thumb is not to try to target more than 3 phrases per page, and they need to be relevant to the page. If you don't have a page dedicated to relationship counselling, you need to think about adding one.

 

Some basics for you.

 

Change the welcome to something more aimed at that particular page. Aka "welcome to creative counselling, based in devon" (for example). Change the alt text of your logo to your company/domain name. Make sure all alt tags are relevant, but helpful (to visitors and google).

 

Change the alt text on your picture - "me" doesnt really tell anybody an awful lot about anything.

 

From a design POV, I would change the picture of you, to a more positive one (smiling?)

 

Good luck

Also, I'd be interested in which aspects of the website are PHP? Perhaps the menu? I remember when I made my first PHP include for a menu, I seriously thought I was a programmer.

Thanks for the tips.

 

Lewwy, the head, header and footer are included using php, from files stored in a "views" folder. I'm wondering if doing things this way affects SEO? Does it mean that the HTML is not available for indexing in the same way as if it was part of a basic HTML file, such as index.html?

 

Regards,

 

Robin.

Hi Folks,

 

I've just uploaded my first ever hand-coded website (made with a little help with the tiny bit of PHP), and wondering if anyone here would be willing to look at it, and give me some feedback - both general and specifically regarding how to get it to show up on the first few pages of a google search?

 

www.creativecounsellingdevon.co.uk

 

Kind regards,

 

Robin.

 

May be you could add up a little more content describing your profession and how do you deliver each type of the service. Not from the SEO perspective, but from marketing perspective you may consider that. And you should use SEO friendly URLs, that is avoid index.php in the Urls. You can do this by rewriting your URL. You may use softwares for this as things get simple that way.

You don't really need to rewrite your urls, they're fine as they are. They're only useful when you have a URL that has loads of variables in.

 

Using includes is fine and perfect practice anyway. They are presented as HTML when the website is loaded. Read about client side and server side scripting.

 

Ill have a proper look at your website tomorrow and let you know what to do

Great! All help much appreciated. I guess SEO is an essential skill to develop, since however good one's other skills are, if the site doesn't show up on search engines, then it's not much use, for most purposes.

I'm wondering if doing things this way affects SEO? Does it mean that the HTML is not available for indexing in the same way as if it was part of a basic HTML file, such as index.html?

 

Not at all, just imagine Google as a user visiting your page, the page is rendered in its entirety, then Google eats all that information up. So dynamic items, whether it be content, menus, headers or footers are all indexed.

 

Problems might arise if the content is not only dynamic, but random (or often changing), for example one of my websites generates a random quote on the homepage, Google won't index all of them, just the one it see's when it looks at your page.

I've made a few changes to www.creativecounsellingdevon.com, but it's still not doing well on google. For some reason, when I look at "content keywords" on google webmaster tools, the only impotant word that comes up is "counselling." I want the following words to be seen as important by the 'bots: "counselling, Devon, stress, anxiety, relationship difficulties, Exeter, Plymouth, Totnes, Newton Abbot."

 

I've tweaked the meta tags, alt tags, and titles, but so far, little improvement....

 

More help?

 

Robin.

Oops, I meant www.creativecounsellingdevon.co.uk

Then, like I said, your best bet to target all of these places is to have dedicated pages.

 

You could have say 1 page dedicated to each location, and cover all aspects of what you do on each page.

 

/counselling-devon

/counselling-exeter

/counselling-plymouth

 

And so on.

 

Make sure the content is varies each time, the way the sentences are structured etc, as Google will penalise you if it's duplicate content.

 

It's unlikely that you will rank well for all of your locations just off the strength of your homepage.

You dont seem to be making use of the h1 tag, And I am not an expert in SEO but is it not a mistake to use welcome to my website and text simular this at the top of your website, I know some SEO tools advice you against this.

 

also there is an hierarchy to which order tags should be on the page

 

1) h1 tag only towards the top

2) h2 tags should then follow breaking the page up into sections helping the search engines find out more about you page

3) h3 tags

 

I am sure someone can improve my reply but i would use the h1 tag

Thanks Elite, I'll make use of H1 tags, probably by styling them the fit the layout.

 

Lewwy, I'm a bit daunted by the prospect of making any major structural changes - this is my first website, and to get it to where I have required learning HTML and CSS from scratch. It's been a labour of love which has taken many many hours of work and learning. The thought of going almost back to scratch is a bit overwhelming, so ideally, for this site, I'd like to work with the basic structure I've got and do some "tweaking" rather than re-building.

 

For future projects, I will certainly incorporate some of the structural advice I've received here.

 

Kind regards,

 

Robin.