The next phase of development of the copenworld site is now live. There is an all-new home page which will feature news about Daihatsu, the Copen and other motor industry news that may be of interest to Copen owners. Alongside this, there are new forums to discuss the news stories, and there are direct links to the discussions from the news articles. The home page also features some of the polls from the forums, and summarises the latest discussions. I've had to make some fairly fundamental changes to the site to make this all work, so there may well be some teething problems to iron out! Please let me know if you come across any problems or have any feedback.
Excellent work rushmere. I'd like to know how to get more publicity for the website? Is there some way to get yourself to the top of a google search for example? M.
Thanks for the positive comments I'm new to website creation, so I'm still trying to figure this out myself! I've been doing some research, and I've made some adjustments to the site to try and get it optimised better for google, and it does seem to be improving. For example, if you type in "Daihatsu Copen owners club" on google.co.uk, the site now usually appear on page 2 of the search results, which is a huge improvement on a week ago (I think it was on something like page 1,456,783)! I think links from other sites also help to improve the search ranking, so mentioning the site on other forums, and creating links back to the site, would also help. If anyone can offer any further advice on this, I'd be very grateful.
Mr P is going to get some information together for you - he managed to get my website up to first place on both Google and Yahoo for a while, so I guess he knows what he's on about!! I'm not for one moment suggesting you don't - I think you're making a stonking job of this site - but there might be something in the stuff he finds that comes in handy.
Knock knock, 'Mr P' here. You seem to be doing a lot of the ritgh things already. You've probably read http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Basically the trick I found to get the website we had to number one in Google and Yahoo was to make sure there was a large amount of relevant text on the first page, and subsequent pages. However, this text needs to be updated and changed (but made relevant) regularly otherwise it's viewed as stale and drops down the list. Repeated words to try and bump actually backfires, so putting 'copen copen copen' many times will get a blacklist. However a good amount of text mentioning 'Copen' in a sensible and relevant way is picked up as very relevant content. This in addition to putting all the relevant metatags, page heading / titles etc in the source code. Submitting the url to the various website ranking sites does help (and will cause you a massive amount of spam if you use the free website submission sites), however all is wasted if the above isn't sorted. Google trawls, rather than you submitting. Somehow you need to get other sites to like to you, so sneak a link in wherever you can. This is important as many links to our site is viewed as meaning your site must be relevant if many people are pointing at it. Hope I not teaching to suck eggs...
Aha! The famous 'Mr P'! We've heard so much about you, all good of course. You're certainly not "teaching me to suck eggs". I'm very new to all this website malarkey, so all tips are welcome. I'm sure I'll make many mistakes along the way, but it's all part of the fun. I hadn't seen the Google Webmaster guidelines you've linked to, so I'll read and digest that carefully. I've read quite a few articles about getting onto web searches, but I'm definitely still learning. I shall endeavour to follow your tips, and hopefully it will help to build the site. Thanks for your valuable advice!
