publicity help needed

STEVE BURNS

STEVE BURNS

Club Member
With the AGM coming up is there anyone willing to step up to the plate to help promote the Clubs image

On trawling through various search engines the club comes quite near the top of various word searches but in some areas we are way down the list and as such a lot of enthusiasts are not aware of the club

To improve the potential of attracting possible new members we need to address this situation and to also get our club more coverage in the national motoring press

So come on guys it is your club and we need a bit of help here
 
I do wonder if the zclub title is a little to anonymous and does not encompass the Nissan / Datsun link.

MikeB
 
Just to reinforce this I just tried searching for Nissan Clubs and Datsun Clubs and guess what the ZClub doe not appear anywhere. Probably a good reason why people join other clubs and not ours.

Mike B
 
We need to get this Club to come first when doing a search on the likes of Goggle. Russ, Jack do you have any ideas how this might be achieved?

Mike B
 
Google Adwords are a rip off. To stay top of the google charts just for a handful of things we spend around £10k a month at work and with the credit crunch that's getting real tight. There are ways of bumping it up the list but i'm not really a "web" guy. I design for print and am learning more and more about web design as I go but you'll have to draw a red box 'round Russ for more web-techy help.
 
I suppose we could try to improve the META tags in the web coding, but I'm not sure how good they really are.

A quick google of "Nissan Club" brings ZXOC in at number 14 :)
I must check our meta tags and see what we got in there
 
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content ="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name ="description" content = "Nissan ZX owners club for all performance four cylinder nissans" />
<!--<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;URL=http://www.zxoc.co.uk/forum/sitenews.asp" /> -->
<meta name="keywords" content="Nissan, bluebird, silvia, sunny, turbo, T12, T72, S12, B13 N13, CA18ET, CA18DET, CA18, CA20, Nissan sunny, Nissan sunny zx, Nissan sunny ZX, Nissan sunny ZX 16V Nissan twin cam zx, Nissan twin cam, 1.6 twin cam ZX, 1.8 twin cam ZX, sunny N13, Sunny B12, sunny Coupe, sunny Hatch, Sunny hatchback, Nissan Bluebird ZX, Nissan bluebird ZX turbo, Nissan bluebird 1.8 ZX, Nissan Bluebird 1.8 ZX turbo, bluebird turbo, Bluebird T12, bluebird T72, CA18DET, CA16DE, CA18DE, CA20E, CA20S, CA18S, CA16S, E15ET, E15S, E16S, SR20DE, SR20DET, Nissan silvia, Nissan silvia zx, Nissan silvia zx turbo, rwd Nissan silvia, silvia turbo, silvia zx, Silvia S12, Nissan cherry, Nissan cherry zx turbo, Nissan cherry zx, Nissan cherry turbo, cherry E15ET, cherry turbo, Cherry N12, N12, N13, B12, B11, N10, T12, T72, S12, U11, M10, K10, ZXOC, Nissan ZX, Nissan Forum, Sunny Forum, Bluebird Forum, Silvia forum, Cherry Forum, ZX owners club, Nissan ZX owners club, UK Sunny Forum, UK B12 Forum, UK silvia forum, UK Cherry Forum, UK N12 forum, UK T72 Forum, UK T12 forum, UK S12 Forum, 1980 nissans, Nissan ZX forum, Sunny zx Forum, Bluebird zx Forum, Silvia zx forum, Cherry zx Forum," /> <meta name ="copyright" content="copyright C 2007 ZXOC All Rights Reserved." />

<title>Nissan ZX Owner's Club</title>
</head>

I guess you just need to batter the keywords with everything you can think of.

This is from the index.html file of ZXOC homepage.
 
Yep I was right, totally out of my depth on this one. Definitely needs looking into though.
 
How can they copyright a list of names that in all reality belong to Nissan??? Or is it just the order in which they have listed them?

Mike B
 
As far as I understand it, getting good search engine ratings is a black art with moving goalposts. I'm impressed that the ZXOC have such an extensive Meta Tag list - what is ours like?

I understand changing content regularly helps, relevant content which uses the key words, non-duplication etc. Oddly, I had this e-mail land today which is very relevant to how optimisation could be approached:

Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of sites to get right though are database driven websites. Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.
1. Pages with duplicate content - not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.
 2. Pages with duplicate page titles - the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.
3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions - again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.
4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.
5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. (I don't know what this means, but seeing as we are a .net site it may be relevant to poor search engine positioning...?)Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.
6. Too many query strings - this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don't do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!
7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places - this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.
 8. Not using user language to generate automated pages - if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO - if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= - keyword research can assist with this.
9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn't allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.
10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase "blue widgets".
These are just 10 of the most common potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.
 
When I type in z club on google it's at the top of the page & goes straight to the home page, so what is wrong with that? or type in big sam & you get Sam Alladice or Big Sam.
 
Mr.F said:
As far as I understand it, getting good search engine ratings is a black art with moving goalposts. I'm impressed that the ZXOC have such an extensive Meta Tag list - what is ours like?
Click to expand...

<meta name="keywords" content="z club,z-car,nissan,datsun,z,zx,datsun 240z,datsun 260z,datsun 280z,datsun 280zx,nissan 300zx,nissan z31,nissan z32,nissan 350z,nissan z33,350z gt4,nissan 300zxtt,car, cars, vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />

<meta name="description" content="240Z 260Z 280Z 280Zx 300ZX 350Z - The Z Club of Great Britain catering for all Datsun/Nissan Z cars. Forums, gallery, articles. S30 240z, 260z, 280z, 280zx, 300zx Z31 Z32, 350z Z33." />

So not massively extensive. The trouble with meta tagging is that it's something you tend to do when you first build the site and so that would probably explain a whole lot as to why ours haven't been updated and/or are more detailed. It's not a complex job to update them but is fiddly and so I'd leave it to webmeister Russ to faff with. I know that another way of generating better search engine results is through 'clickbacks'. This is essentially when you have a URL (webpage) assigned to your signature (esp. on other sites) so let's say I am a member of a few forum based sites... If I have a signature strip with a few keywords and the website address for here it counts as what's called clickbacks if anyone clicks them. So if anyone here used their sig strip on another site and had a link to this site it would generate said clickbacks. Mike is bang on with it being a dark art though. There are a core bunch of geeks who are controlling the whole damn thing! (Just like Paul Daniels controls the National Lottery using magic, little wizard bas*ard)
 
We could start by seeing if we can get a link from the Practical Classics website. There are already 5 other clubs on there under Your Cars, can't see why they would say no. I don't mind emailing them as long as I am not treading on anyones toes... Also Classic Car Weekly, Retro Cars and any others you can think of. The more traffic we get the higher our ranking will be.

PS: www.datsun.co.uk is for sale for £150 +VAT we could buy it and redirect it to the ZClub, its the kind of URL most people would try on the off chance to see what is out there...
 
Relevant reciprocal linking is apparently valuable (until Google change their "rules" again).
 
Google need to keep moving the goal posts to keep ahead of the blaggers.

The only sure way of appearing on the front page of Google is to pay them a load of dosh for a sponsored link. Otherwise it is a case of how long the site has been live, traffic, links from other sites, and of course what you search on. eg: Search in Google under Datsun 280zx Club... we are top of first page. Search under Datsun Club... we are page 5.

I would suggest we need to get other Datsun/Nissan owners, general Jap car fans and Classic car fans, who don't know what a Z is, to visit our site. A lot of people will never have seen a Z on the road, so Z Club will not mean anything to them. We must re-educate :thumbs:
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Mr Ex said:
When I type in z club on goggle it's at the top of the page & goes straight to the home page, so what is wrong with that? or type in big sam & you get Sam Alladice or Big Sam.
Click to expand...

Yes very good :rolleyes:. But imagine you didn't know that the Z Club existed, I for one would not immediately think ZClub to put into a search engine. Its just to try and point new people to the scene in the our direction.

Mike B
 
MaximG said:
Yes very good :rolleyes:. But imagine you didn't know that the Z Club existed, I for one would not immediately think ZClub to put into a search engine. Its just to try and point new people to the scene in the our direction.

Mike B
Click to expand...

If people really wanted to find the Z club either as an owner or looking to buy they will check out ALL the sites.
 
Mr.F said:
5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. (I don't know what this means, but seeing as we are a .net site it may be relevant to poor search engine positioning...?)Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.
Click to expand...

So is our '.net' hindering us slightly then?

If you check out these sites, they all are similar to each other. Some kind of host site for links, but with NO tie to the domain name! :conf2:

http://www.zclub.co.uk/

http://www.zclub.org/

http://www.classiczregister.org/

With the exception of this one, that links to a company of a similar name. (I really want a Zedbug now! :D)

http://www.zedclub.co.uk/

So are these other domain names aquireable at all? I was particularly thinking of zclub.co.uk. Keeping zclub.net, and linking them. Would that push us up the search engines?

It's probably not possible at all. I have little knowledge of this kind of thing, but thought it worth asking. :confused:
 
It would definitely be worth having the .co.uk. Russ could probably hook up hosting for a good deal too (or I know a guy too).
 
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