i googled '' home growing tobacco'' and didnt see F,T,T,

[Chicken]

how do we change this,????

to where, when someone, does a search as i just did,

to get this site, up in the top 5-10 listings,?????

i seen sites, i was familiar with ,, coffenails,,,,seedman,,,,,h,t,g,t,

e,t,c,

but no F.T.T.

how do we get in the top ratings,???

 

[FmGrowit]

Search engines can only find the words you enter into a search. They can't find general themes unless the words in the search are on the site as key words or tags. If you copy a sentence from a post at least 2 days old, it will come up in a search.

Most sites pay to have their sites come up on the first page of a search. This site generates $0.00 income and there is no financial incentive to pay for search engine optimization.

 

[deluxestogie]

The search engine results depend on the wording that you use, and the "keywords" inserted into each Web page. On FTT, the forum home page as well as the index pages use: name="keywords" content="Grow Tobacco,Whole Leaf Tobacco,Cigar Leaf,Roll your own,grow tobacco". Perhaps the phrase, "home tobacco growing" could be added.

On the pages that display posts, the "keywords" are generated by the tags that are applied to each thread.

If you want to examine this, use View | Source in the browser menu, then find (ctrl-f) "keywords", without the quotes. The results differ from page to page. Proper tagging of threads you create will help.

If you google "Sacred Cornplanter Tobacco", then click "Images" on the left, you will see several of the Cornplanter photos that I've posted on FTT. The same is true of many varietal photos. If, instead, you just look for the page hits, it's a different story. Apparently the search crawlers are better at identifying named photos than embedded text.

Bob

 

[Daniel]

It is the keywords that will cause your web page to be found in a web search. There are actually key word generators on the net. You could enter How to grow tobacco in the generator and it will spit out a very long list of keywords to use for that topic. Web crawlers search the keywords and then search the home page for content to verify that the keywords apply.

If I am correct the forum is not a home page. it is a page on Don's web site. It is likely this forum never gets searched by a spider in order to verify keywords. It is seen as a page that is searched to verify the keywords used on the home page at best.

 

[FmGrowit]

If I am correct the forum is not a home page. it is a page on Don's web site. It is likely this forum never gets searched by a spider in order to verify keywords. It is seen as a page that is searched to verify the keywords used on the home page at best.

Nope, the "page" on the whole leaf site is nothing more than a link. FTT has it's own domain name and it's even on it's own server completely unassociated with Whole Leaf Tobacco.com

If you do a search for "stringing tobacco" FTT comes up on the second page on google. The best way to build a sites search placement is on the merit of the site and not by trying to manipulate the search engines. I don't pay for SEO because I believe it is for the most part just a scam. The only thing different from the way people find the site now and the way they would find it if I hired a company to do a SEO is I'd have to pay for every keyword people click on that already exist in the search engines. That just doesn't make sense to me.

Cross linking is one of the better ways to get the search engines to rank the site higher in a search, but that takes a lot of time to do it legitimately.

 

[Daniel]

I know that when this group was just a couple of months old it actually came in ranked higher than How to Grow Tobacco in a google search. Paying for site optimization is not the only way to optimize a site. The point of my comments is that this group does not come up in a search for how to grow tobacco at all. Google has rules and they change them all the time. But to come up at zero is a fairly serious issue.

I had a web site of my own for many years and spent quite a bit of time on keywords, tags etc. As far as I understand it Google is interested in developing the net not someones web site. To them the perfect internet is that every web site in existence is linked to every other web site in existence. Due to this they gave special consideration to links. So people simply built massive link pages in their web sites and those with the most links won.

So google changed it and now looks for relevant links, relevant content etc. In fact you can be penalized for having massive numbers of links to irrelevant web pages. Relevant to your keywords that is.

As I understand it if the web crawlers reads the keywords and then checks the sites content and find they are not the same. It will simply drop your site. This is due to all the attempts to gain better ranking. I am not saying this group should be ranked at the top. But to not be ranked at all for the single most likely search phrase "How to grow tobacco" is a problem.

I searched "stringing tobacco" and found FTT on page 3. ranked 23 or 24th. But that is not a phrase that is likely to be searched for either.

FTT does not come up in a search for "How to grow tobacco, Home grown tobacco, growing tobacco" and even more surprisingly "Curing tobacco". IT does not even come up in a search of "trade tobacco". but fair trade tobacco.org does. This group comes up number one for Fair Trade Tobacco.

 

[Daniel]

here is the meta tags and keywords used on the highest ranking tobacco growing site in my search.

<TITLE>How To Grow Tobacco</TITLE><META NAME="description" CONTENT="How to grow and process
tobacco at home."><META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="tobacco, smoking, seeds, cigarettes, cigar, pipe, grow, your, own, home, grown, clone,
forum, virginia, havana, sell, sale, how, to">Funny that it contains "Sell" due to the fact you where kicked off of it over the issue of selling.

In my opinion that is a very poor set of keywords as well. Other than the content tag which is "

How to grow and process tobacco at home"

When the web crawler reads that it wants to find it again and again in the content of the site.
It also wants to find the keywords again and again on the site.

One of the most frequently used words on this site would obviously be Tobacco. Other frequently
used words would be. Grow, fertilize, harvest, select, tobacco seed, seed, etc.

You also then want to consider how likely it is that anyone would be searching for that word if they where interested in the
information this site provides. So how to grow tobacco at home, Tobacco seed, Tobacco growing, and some others would be
good examples of things people would frequently be searching for if wishing to grow tobacco.
it is these searches you want this site to rank high in.

As far as I can tell google does not even recognize this site has anything to do with any of those things. And it starts looking in the keywords.

 

[FmGrowit]

I'm really not too sure the whole point of this thread. If you are here, you don't need google to tell you where to find anything. If you know the site is here, it doesn't affect you that google doesn't see the site.

I'm burned out on hiring web developers, designers, managers ect. etc. to only be robbed. I've spent thousands of dollars to promote and improve the site.

When I was told to give a list of keywords to a SEO guy and then he told me I would be charged every time someone clicked on a link to my site, I knew the whole thing was crooked.

 

[FmGrowit]

I'm satisfied with the sites growth rate. Too much too quick is probably worse than too little growth. The information here is priceless and I'm sure my investment in the site will eventually pay off in sales of whole leaf. Most people who use tobacco have never even heard of whole leaf tobacco. Each time taxes are raised on tobacco, another round of people who are fed-up with the government will seek cheaper solutions. People are finding the site now and contrary to the reason the SEO guy gave me...it's not by accident.

There is nowhere else on the internet where you can find the kind of quality information on processing tobacco as there is here.

This manner of marketing reminds me of the way action figures were marketed in the 70's. The entire sales plan was to market action figures. The first thing that was created (other than the concept) was a Saturday morning cartoon. From there it went to comic books and then when they knew there was a market, the action figures were created and sold...usually making their debut just in time for Christmas.

The whole leaf marketing plan isn't nearly as sinister, in fact it was simply a matter of having a product that needed a market. Four years ago, nobody sold whole leaf cigarette tobacco. Today, I literally send it all over the world.

The site finds the people who are looking for it. FTT doesn't show up in completely unrelated searches like you see all of the time when you do a search for other stuff. I think this is a good thing and when people come to the site, I think they know they have found what they were looking for.

 

[Chicken]

true,^^^^^^

i was just doing a little boredom searching, to see if the '' search'' key was how some new members may have found this site,????

i agree thoughi

you either find it or you dont,

if you dont find it, it's your loss, for joining a less inferior site<

 

[Brown Thumb]

true,^^^^^^

i was just doing a little boredom searching, to see if the '' search'' key was how some new members may have found this site,????

i agree thoughi

you either find it or you dont,

if you dont find it, it's your loss, for joining a less inferior site<

Hell, If I can find it any moran Can.

 

[FmGrowit]

Hell, If I can find it any moran Can.

What were you searching for that led you to the site?

 

[SmokesAhoy]

This site comes up a lot on specific strains. We probably get a lot of new members that are more informed on the basics and looking to perfect things. That's cool.

 

[Chicken]

i truly dont know, what i was searching for when i come across it,

i konw it wasnt mentioned to me by someone,

 

[darren1979]

Don maybe you should do a little poll to see how people found this site. A few other forums i visit ask through a poll or a sticky thread asking members how they found the site. It just gives you a good over view.

 

[DonH]

I found this forum searching on buyin whole leaf. I didn't find it last fall when I was researching growing tobacco, so that's a problem. The fact that HTGT has Grow and Tobacco in its name.
Which I think is why they get more new posters from around the world. Of course those people would get more responses if they posted here.

 

[SmokesAhoy]

There are all kinds of software packages that tell you how a person came to the site, how long they stayed, if they returned, etc. I'm sure he has at least one.

Don maybe you should do a little poll to see how people found this site. A few other forums i visit ask through a poll or a sticky thread asking members how they found the site. It just gives you a good over view.

 

[darren1979]

Im sure google webmaster and analytics are set up, but it doesn't tell you word of mouth or friends referrals. For instants i found FTT when looking on HTGT and someone mentioned FTT had been shut by the feds which was a april fools joke (if i remember correctly) so i googled Fair Trade Tobacco and here i am

 

[FmGrowit]

I found FTT when looking on HTGT and someone mentioned FTT had been shut by the feds which was a april fools joke (if i remember correctly)

You're not supposed to bring that up. Some members think they still owe me for that.

It was an accident...(insert favorite Bruce Willis "Last Boy Scout" line here)

 

[johnlee1933]

You're not supposed to bring that up. Some members think they still owe me for that.

It was an accident...(insert favorite Bruce Willis "Last Boy Scout" line here)

We have long memories, sweetie.

J