Ok I totally missed this thread ...
My 2p from what little I've learnt, however be under no mistake, SEO is a black art for sure, no one outside of google really knows how they weight their results
Also I'm not an SEO expert so everything I say is only what the guys at work have explained to me.
Making the site 100% XHTML compliant just won't happen
My personal site is, but this site relies a lot on other peoples code. A lot of the time to get the functionality you need you can't be compliant. It's something I'll address though where I can in the future. Are there any particular pages you're thinking of? Send me a link and I'll see if there's something I can do
I'll tweak the meta tags in a bit see if it helps, wasn't aware that made it a single search phrase tbh, see what affect that has.
What helps is changeable content, that's linked to, which is why blog sites do well. We probably would benefit from more front page turn over. The days of spamming of keywords are long over lol, we have a client who sells garden gates and fences, no matter how much we tell him writing garden gates on his website a thousand times isn't helping he doesn't listen
We've made him page 3 google so far and that's just through forcing him to write stuff about gates lol. Also google is too smart to see a benefit in having lots of domains I think. I don't think using zclub.net is going to really hurt us. I can get us any (available) domains you like though to try it.
Ok the best way to get your site up google is definitely external links to us. This is the analogy we give to clients:
ZClub.net is a bucket of water. Other websites link to us, and that's like them having a hole in their bucket and pouring water into ours. The more water you have coming in the better.
Now say site X links to us, but it also links to a million other sites, with all those external links and all those holes in the site X bucket, there isn't much flow coming into ZClub.net. This prevents those annoying link sites from being much use these days.
So effectively the quality of the site that is linking to you has an affect on how worthwhile that link is. The front page webring has helped us a bit.
An about the cars thing, yeah I tried to make that once, in some interactive flash thingy, but it looked rubbish so I shelved it and got on with other work I had to do. We definitely need it, it's just finding someone with time to do it
I've attached a graph of the sites usage since the beginning of the year. Together we can see what we can do to improve it
Also here I've attached where our hits are coming from, bounce rates, etc etc. This is definitely something we can improve on (quite easily possibly), lets cast a bigger net and catch more of these lost internet souls
