Sorry, another SEO question.

[AtW]

You are targeting too generic terms, try to be more specific: "Process Engineer in Birmingham" or some other location.

Check backlink counts for those who rank above you - chances are they got good backlink profile and it would be hard to compete against them.

Use keywords on CV of software that you used or was required, that are less common (ie: not just Oracle but say Oracle Financials etc).

[Fred Bloggs]

You are targeting too generic terms, try to be more specific: "Process Engineer in Birmingham" or some other location.

Check backlink counts for those who rank above you - chances are they got good backlink profile and it would be hard to compete against them.

Use keywords on CV of software that you used or was required, that are less common (ie: not just Oracle but say Oracle Financials etc).

Thanks I see exactly what you mean. The problem I'm having with this is that I'm simply offering to be a plain vanilla "Process Engineer" and having taken on board all the advice here and in Googles own help sections I now can't see really how I can compete with all the jobs boards that populate Google searches. I have been pretty successful with Bing and Yahoo, but it seems almost nobody looks there compared with Google. I get very few calls at all, maybe once a month, but they usually start "I found your website on Google etc....". That's an achievement, because I can barely find myself on there! If I search for my name I'm in the top 3 places! But nobody else will do that search!

[northernladuk]

SEO is a massive area of web work, almost a job in itself.

First off - Content is king!! Lots of relavant content rules but does't get you on google straight away. Add articles, a forum if it's busy. Watch blantent copywrite though, google won't like and nor will the author.

You have to think about what keywords you want to appear for. You have to target some to be succesful, you can't have them all or your keyword density will be too thin to make a different. You will be more likely to be higher for Blue Widgets than you will for Blue or Widget. Be sensible. Try and go for a niche rather than fighting the bigboys.

You can of course target different pages with different keywords as long as it is relavant. If you sell widgets then optomise the home page for widget and then optimise the green widget page for 'Green Widgets'

When you know what keywords you want to target you have to smatter your site with these keywords. Many many different ways of this..

Have it in your title Tags
Can't remember what they are called but the other tags near the top. Not so useful nowadays but still stick them in.
Very useful is your keywords in Anchor text. That makes the link relavant to the content your giong to. So using Click here for Blue widgets and make the here the anchor link is useless. Make Blue Widgets the anchor link and you got a double bonus. Ur describing the content you are taking the user to. Google likes this.
Use the tag on mouse over on pictures Alt tag is it?
If your using CSS styles make the style names relavant.
If you have sub directories make the name of the directory relavant i.e. \\widgets.com\widget\bluewidget.htm.

Once you have done this run your page through a keyword density checker. Your keywords/phrase shoule be at that top. don't go too much above 20%.

DO NOT keyword stuff using Wdiget, Blue Wdiget, Green Widget etc. Google will spot over use of comma's and bad grammar.

I like to have a sitemap page as it is a perfect opportunitiy to have lots of good anchor texts to the pages and then when you are submitting your site to google or DMOZ submit this sitemap page not your home page. Lots of lovely anchor text links for the robots to chomp.

Have a header and footer to help the user (and robots) navigate right in to ur site. Don't have too many layers for it to have to dig down. If you have a image related menu structure put a text one in your footer with anchor text. Google bots prefer text links to grahical ones. use ALT tags on graphics ones for disable people.

You also need inbound links, if people generally like your site it will get linked to, lots of links could be an indication its not a bad site so google takes an interest. DO NOT link farm. The best links will come from sites with relavant content, Google will know!!. It's not a bad thing to have links from popular sites that are not related but if google sees a link from you to him and vice vera too many times it will penalise you. Have it in you sig or post in a couple of forums, offer link exchange with sites of similar interest.

Outbound links don't hurt, especially if they are related. Again this helps the user find information as you link to relavent stuff. Google will like you for this.

Try run the pages through some of the W3C checkers. I believe there in as emphasis on good structure and usability now.

Submit to DMOZ if you havn't. Can take ages to get on but alot of niche type search sites reap the results of DMOZ in to their own so more linking for you.
Submit to as many search directories as you can. Many need payment or return links but some will accept just a normal submisson.

If you have any time left to actually do some work after all that then good luck

[Fred Bloggs]

Thanks for that. I have done all that! The only things I'm short of is more content as I said above. The final thing that I need is a better domain name, like www.process-engineer-freelancer.com or something. I think I'll see what I can register and move my website to it rather than continue with my current non-keyword related domain name. It'll be worth a tenner to try it. Cheers.

[AtW]

I have been pretty successful with Bing and Yahoo, but it seems almost nobody looks there compared with Google.

Google is like 90% of searches in the UK, real monopoly.

Yahoo and Bing might be easier to rank as they don't weight in backlinks/anchor text as well as Google.

It would be hard for you to compete with job boards since they'd have a lot of relevant anchor text associated with their domain names, making them possibly authorities in eyes of Google's algorithms.

Go for long tail - avoid targeting generic words, it's much harder (read expensive) and conversion will be lower.

Make sure your chosen keywords are in title of a page - very important.

Dmoz will be most certainly waste of time - meaning that you won't get in there, if you could it would have helped certainly.

[Fred Bloggs]

Google is like 90% of searches in the UK, real monopoly.

Yahoo and Bing might be easier to rank as they don't weight in backlinks/anchor text as well as Google.

It would be hard for you to compete with job boards since they'd have a lot of relevant anchor text associated with their domain names, making them possibly authorities in eyes of Google's algorithms.

Go for long tail - avoid targeting generic words, it's much harder (read expensive) and conversion will be lower.

Make sure your chosen keywords are in title of a page - very important.

Dmoz will be most certainly waste of time - meaning that you won't get in there, if you could it would have helped certainly.

Thanks again for the tips. I've been in DMOZ directory about 6 or 7 years now for my present domain name. It seems Google is HEAVILY biased towards jobs boards. Not fair for us small guys that.

[minestrone]

Google is like 90% of searches in the UK, real monopoly.

I considered starting a thread in general the other day on "should google be broken up"

They are much bigger than Bell Labs ever were.

[Sysman]

I considered starting a thread in general the other day on "should google be broken up"

They are much bigger than Bell Labs ever were.

It's an interesting thought.

[xoggoth]

One day nations wil be a thing of the past and there will be a war for world domination between Google, Tesco and Walmart.

[Durbs]

Submit to DMOZ if you havn't. Can take ages to get on but alot of niche type search sites reap the results of DMOZ in to their own

Virtually every search engine out there uses the DMOZ directory (either directly or indirectly) within their results including Google themselves.