Going after keywords

[TheLegionOfDoom]

O.K.   I have a question.....how do you guys target keywords without paying a service to take care of it?   Do you just use meta tags and hope the spiders and time do the job.  In my small nitch market I have a rival ghetto designed site that should be a pushover....IMO.  It has a higher page ranking but little to no useful information on it.  The whole site is 3 pages of adds, with very few useful links to events.....and thats what the site is based on.  This guy pulls $25.00 a month for spots on his page!

I guess I should have searched before letting this fly but I'm just gonna shot from the hip.


I Will post the link if you don't believe its ghetto......

[Zetan]

Meta tags are important for search engines. The time your site has been online also affects Page Rank, last week I noticed my site finally has a Page Rank of.... *drum roll* ..... 1, One.. greater than Zero, less than 2 
The ammount of links to external sites has an affect on Page Rank too.

So, this site you are competing with... is it better than you're site? Better content? Longer established?
I compete with nobody.. theres far to many sites to even try, I just concetrate on mine and sneak a peak at theirs from time to time.
Here are my Meta Tags just for an example.

Code Select Expand

<meta name="description" content="Metal, Alternative, Rock Radio. 128kbps and 64kbps Shoutcast Streams. Join us in the forums."LAB Radio" />
<meta name="keywords" content="lab radio, LAB, labradio, lab, radio, stream, online radio, shoutcast, shout, cast, metal, alternative, rock, death metal, heavy metal, classic Rock, grunge, indie, heavy, PHP, MySQL, bulletin, board, free, open, source, smf, simple, machines, forum" />

Which needs a little work still. The best place for advice on these kinds of questions are at
The Admin Zone.

Also check out:
http://extremetracking.com/open?login=zetan1
http://extremetracking.com/

Gives you an overview of refering links, search engine results that brought up your site in the results, browsers used... even the screen resolution of the computers that viewed your site.

[TheLegionOfDoom]

Thanks for the input Zetan....I am a member of the admin zone but I'm really not a fan of their work.....it's like pulling teeth at times to get a response over there.  My page rank is a 1 as well and I have hella lurkers on every day on thread has been viewed 17,405 times!  The only reason I have circled the wagons a little bit is because he claims to be the number one resource for this information and he has little to no information at all.  I'm gonna just proclaim myself the lord all mighty of this information and post it all around my site.  His 3 pages have been around for several years and to me it's really a joke.

Thanks again man

[Zetan]

To be honest... I lost interest in the Admin Zone a while ago, I asked for a site review and the guy reviewing.. being a self proclaimed "Expert" didn't have much to offer in the way of helpful advice. He rubbished the site and though I'm for a honest review... after taking a look at an "Experts" website and expecting to be wow'ed, I was totally bemused by the whole look and layout which was haphazard and hard to navigate.

I found some topics over there helpful, I find many of the staff are above themselves and stuck up (keeping it clean here )
What I will say about you're site from an honest outside view.. The blocks left and right need to be tidied up, the content centered and the images that are stretching the blocks, resized to fit in them.