Am I doing something wrong on my site?

[nparkin0]

Hi all,

I have had my first attempt at building a website and have read up a fair bit on SEO but I do not know if I am doing some thing wrong. My site (although incomplete) has been live for about a month now.

I am getting traffic from search engines like google but I am not seeing my site ranked at all in the first 100 or so pages.

The main pages are not complete which is probably the main reason, but I was just wondering whether there is anything I can do to improve the pages that are live at the moment.

The pages I would like help with are studentnetwork.info and studentnetwork.info/studentloans.html. Perhaps someone who knows what they are doing could look at the source code of something.

ANy suggestions for improvement and how to get better search engine rankings would be good. I am ultimately looking to be on page 1 of Google for certain keywords I have researched. They are quite competative but I am going to give it a try.

Thanks for looking.

[south]

Initial impressions:

Create alt tags fro the banner/other images.
Add more quality original unique content.
Lose the double ads on the home page.
Create a robots.txt file. Upload it.

It can be as simple as:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

You did submit them to the search engines? And authenticated them?

Be patient. it takes item to get indexed. 1 month is very short

Yahoo/Altavista/etc is typically the first of the big three you'll get into, msn/live/bing/whatever is next, google is last.

Your site states it is "created by students for students" - Have some of those students link to your site. This can be the single best way to get ranked of all.

[katherine]

Some link juice would help too.
You have a lot of adsense too. Don't overdo it.

[nparkin0]

Thanks South and Sdsinc.

One adsense units is not meant to be there, I must have forgotten to take it out.

I will be taking on board what both of you have said and hopefully making the changes.

To answer South's question about submission to SE's - I have done that. I have done the 'site:studentnetwork.info" search in each of the main ones and there are pages in all. I started with getting 1-3 uniques per day according from my stats, but now I seem to be getting 50-70, with about 85% SE traffic. So the pages must be indexed somewhere.

Oh one question, my stats say that there are 251 / 479 hits from Google Images in the past 7 days. I don't really understand what this is from because last month I didnt get anything from this source? Any ideas how I can find out?

Thanks for your time by the way I appriciate your help.

Nick.