Is there any free way to bump up Urbanohio within search results without actually typing in "urbanohio."  I'm asking mostly in regards to searches directly involving the cities: Cleveland, Cincy, Columbus, Dayton, etc.

 

To quote myself in the Cleveland Relocation Guide thread:

 

Why does urbanohio not come up when "Cleveland relocation guide," "...relocation help," "..relocation advice" or anything to that effect is typed into Google or Yahoo? 

 

I feel like we may be missing a lot of people, not to mention those who are getting bad or misinformed advice instead, etc.

 

So, What could be done for UO to actually be in the search results??

There is nothing we can do about the search results that I know of.  I'm sure if you searched through all of the pages we would be in there somewhere.  If there is something we can do to help, I'm all for it.

Google search "cleveland relocation assistance" - Urban Ohio is on the second page.

^

Now it's on the second page number 11.  No complaints here, that is a pretty good spot.

I do believe search engines order their results by the number of hits (or popularity) websites receive. Do you agree Rich or is there another system they use to display results? I know I've done "Queen City Square" numerous times and UrbanOhio is usually near the top which is understandable.

Popularity is atleast half of the equation.  We do get alot of hits from people searching queen city square.

I like the site that appears #2 for Queen City Square better :)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=queen+city+square&btnG=Google+Search

 

I like the site that appears #2 for Queen City Square better :)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=queen+city+square&btnG=Google+Search

 

 

Yeah pbase isnt too bad  ;)

I work on this type of stuff everyday.  Our clients spend a lot of money to make their websites "search-engine friendly" via search engine optimization or SEO, which varies from the serach engine marketing, or SEM, which is based largely upon how much one is willing to pay "per click" on a set of targeted keywords.

 

The organic, or non-paid, listings on Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc are all determined by a wide range of SEO criteria.  Google's (and any search engine's) main objective is to deliver sites that are the most relevant to the query performed.  Without going into too much detail, to be "search-engine friendly", a site should be, easily navigable, feature meta-tags that highlight the most pertinent topics within the website, a strong home/landing page that indexes all of the site's content, have information organized logically (think Wikipedia), link-building with other relevant sites, have limited flash pages/rich media (which can act as a wall to search engine spiders), and most of all high traffic.

 

There is obviously A LOT more that goes into it and varies by search engine, Google's constantly evolving search algorithm is somewhat of a closely-guarded secret and forms the basis for determining search rankings.

 

I don't know if any you know what Alexa is but it has UrbanOhio ranked as #224,223. Which is pretty good from my understanding.

UrbanCincy is ranked 1,064,655 on Alexa.

I don't know if any you know what Alexa is but it has UrbanOhio ranked as #224,223. Which is pretty good from my understanding.

 

Yes, I check our stats all the time.  Our Alexa stats are right on because I've added their code to our pages.