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Hi guys,

I have been asked by a number of you now, if there is anything you can do to help with our Meetup Group, so I thought I would put an idea out there. If you feel you could make a difference - great!

Remember this is your group, a Java/J2EE developers group, I want to get the LJMG at the top of every search engine, so if anyone types in Java or J2EE London, we appear as close to the top as possible. I don't know exactly if this type of thing can be done for free without having to spend £20 per click on buying adwords but thought you guys would know.

We have now got the page www.ljmg.co.uk, but if you look at it, you will see it is not much of a page and is just a signpost to the Meetup group. I would like to use this page to attract new members by getting it higher up in the Search Engines.

I'm open to idea's on anything else that you think would be suitable for the ljmg.co.uk page too. Any idea's, or if anyone would like to take it on as a project to play with new technologies just let me know.

Please feel free to discuss this topic on the Meetup board.

All the best,
Barry

ONE SUGGESTION SO FAR: Does anyone have any feedback?

Just my 2 cents,
You'd probably need to get some more of a website, with more pages and content, maybe Java related articles, stuff like that. Even reports of the meetings, stuff written by members, whatever. Quality content.
It's also good to get a lot of people to link to you, namely making it easy for list members to link to that website, maybe some nice graphics for that? Not that we need much in the way of making this easy, any of us can make a link :D That should do nicely to start.
Regards,
Irune

Another suggestion from a member:

Why don't you use meta tags on the page?

Example:


<meta name="description" content="Java London Group" >

<meta name="keywords" content="Java London Group blablabla">

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Thanks,

Leo

Some more great feedback:

Barry,

I know a fair bit about this.

There are several key steps, I am happy to help out:

(i) Getting the site content structured correctly, so that the right keywords are picked up by the search engines - there are several rules of thumb that I can let you know if needed.
(ii) Putting a 'sitemap' and a 'robots' file in place is also a good idea if possible (you can do this for the domain you own).
(iii) Getting good inbound links - the easiest way to do this would be to get members with websites (like me) to link to your site - ideally this would be a 'reciprocal' arrangement, so you would also
have a set of links to the sites of members.
(iv) Submit your site to the search engines - there are alot of them, but only a few real main players - I have lists.
(v) You can sign up with Google and use their 'webmaster tools, and also their various activity tracker analytics - I could also do this for you if you wanted.

Regards.

Andrew.

Some feedback on search engine optimisation. I'm not sure how much of this may still be relevant because the technology and the way search engines work changes all the time.

First thing if you are using Firefox (think there is a plugin for IE
too) install google toolbar at
http://www.google.com... . Google toolbar has got an interesting feature called "page rank". A page rank is google's way of ranking the popularity of a given website. I think "popularity" is based on how many websites are linking to yours. In case of Google search engine, page rank is an important factor (among others) in order to determine where your page comes up in search results.

Make sure other websites link to you (this is very important). For example if you use google to perform a search on Java and London and manages to get at least 1 of the sites with a page rank of 5 or more.
Your site should automatically be index by Google's search engine within a day or so and consequently your site should appear in search results. I noticed that JAVAWUG (http://www.jroller.co... ) got a page rank of 5 so if you can get them to link to http://www.ljmg.co.uk... that is a very good start. I'm not sure about this but people say that it's important how other websites link to yours in terms of the information provided in the <a href> tag. Sites linking to you should include your main keywords inside the title attribute of <a href>. For example <a href="http://www.ljmg.co.uk... title="London java J2EE Meet up group" />. These keywords should be consistent for all websites linking to you.


Website structure:
It is important and good webdesign practice to include meta tags on your website. Obviously search engines these days don't entirely rely on them in order to give you a good ranking but they are taken into consideration. However, meta tag stuffing and title stuffing such as adding hundreds of lines of keywords or repeating keywords several times will most certainly ban your website from major search engines.
See example below of a standard meta tag declaration you can use:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="description" content="Add a short description of the intention of the site." /> <meta name="keywords" content="JUG, Java user group, Java usergroup, Java" />

Look at other website to see what they are using.

Next thing on the list to do is that you should provide content on this page (http://www.ljmg.co.uk... . Instead of only having a link forwarding to the MeetUp page. Add information on this page related to what the group does, general information etc and make sure that the content on this page contain the keywords you want to have indexed. Search engines need more than just meta-tags and a hyperlink in order to give your page a good ranking.

You should always specify a page title using the <title> tag and I think putting at least one of your keywords in this title will help search engines in finding your page. Maybe you can do something like this <title>London Java Meet up Group</title>

Hope this helps.

Thanks
Erik