Does anyone know how to get their name higher up on the google listing. I have my website, but it only comes up when I type in my business name. If I type in the city I live and cake (which is in my description) a bunch of other stuff comes up. I got to page 11 before giving up the search for my website under city and cake.

Hope this makes sense.

Any ideas?

It takes time to move up in google listings.

Things that matter:

1. proper keywords in your meta-data.

2. links to you from related sites, preferably well ranked sites.

3. consistent addition of new original content.

After those 3 basic things, you need to worry about site design. There are crucial elements to how you build your website that make it easy for google's spiders to read and index your website.

Read up on CSS and user accessibility.

There is really alot more information than can be covered here that you need to consider to give your site the best possible chance in the search engine rankings.

A big part of what search engines look for is what you put as your title - in the blue bar of the home page. Yahoo especially looks for that.

The only way to move higher up on google (to me) appears to be to buy google ad words. I can't get myself to come up on google, no matter what I do, but I come up on yahoo on the first page.

I'm also interested to see if anyone else has suggestions or ideas.

i'm not sure, but i think you have to pay for higher ranking when you want your name to come up in the top 10 or so... not sure again about the specifics, but i think that has something to do with it. sorry i couldn't be of more help

Thank you for the fast and great replies!

good to know about the blog thing!!

Thanks for this information. I do not know much about Google (I use another search engine), so anything that I can learn about it is always appreciated.

Theresa

thats great to know, thanks for the updated info!

If you trade links with others in the industry (i.e. you have a link to a photographer's website on your site, and he has a link to your website on his site), then it could come up. My website is crossed-referenced on a number of other wedding vendors sites, so if they are optimized, your name will come up in the search, also. I always ask callers, "How did you find me?" to see what advertising is working and that's how I found out. They were searching for wedding chapels or chocolate fountains and my name came up in the listing, because a link to a wedding chapel is in my website.

Great information indydebi. Time to network even more.....

Wow. . .a lot of good info. I thought that you had to pay to be ranked up higher. GOOD THREAD!