Need friendly advice (new user - please be gentle!)

[saltwaterpizza]

Hi. My name is Scott Niven and I discovered this forum yesterday while looking for ways to improve my web site's ranking in Google.

After reading comments on this board, I've decided that I've got a lot to learn about moving my page up in the rankings. However, I want to accomplish this without trickery or spamming, so I wanted to ask for advice. Here is my url:

http://www.scottniven.com/

So here are my basic questions:

1. I just recently changed all my links from virtual to url-specific: (i.e. ncsu_sports.html to http://www.scottniven.com/ncsu_sports.html) I did this because once users arrive at my site, my base url switches from www.scottniven.com to http://www4.ncsu.edu/~niven/. So I made the change to try to add more branding to my name url. Was this a wise move, or does Google get annoyed at this type of thing?

2. Are there any obvious mistakes I've made (especially on my index page), that would hamper or penalize my ranking?

3. I've seen many of you discuss PR2, PR4, etc. How does this system work? How can you determine what your PR is?

On Google, if someone searches on scott niven, my site is currently #3, but it is only behind 2 of my Amazon.com pages, so I'm not that concerned. However, my ambition is to make it so users searching on either scott or niven will see my page on the initial results page of their search.

Anyway, thanks for any help in advance. I apologize if these are all stupid newbie questions. After reading through many of the forums entries, however, I got the impression that this was a friendly group of people, so I decided to take a chance and make a first post.

Thanks again!

Scott

(take the XX's out of my instant messenger id's to contact me)


[Moved from Google forum to here. Please read this (http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7575) for further clarification. - Jill]

[Advisor]

Welcome Scott!

Most likely, the search engines are going to index your resulting page, and not your domain name since it redirects to the other site. Why have the redirect? If you want your domain name indexed, you'll have to remove the redirect most likely.

Jill

[Bernard]

Originally posted by saltwaterpizza
2. Are there any obvious mistakes I've made (especially on my index page), that would hamper or penalize my ranking?

Not a mistake, but you might consider changing your title tag to Scott Niven and your description tag to Scott Niven - Saltwaterpizza king (or something like that).

Originally posted by saltwaterpizza
3. I've seen many of you discuss PR2, PR4, etc. How does this system work? How can you determine what your PR is?

The Google Toolbar reports the PR (PageRank) of any web page you are viewing. Search Google for the free toolbar and install it. Your home page has a PR of 3 right now. Read about link building in these forums for ideas on how to build your PR by getting other sites to link to you.

Originally posted by saltwaterpizza
On Google, if someone searches on scott niven, my site is currently #3, but it is only behind 2 of my Amazon.com pages, so I'm not that concerned. However, my ambition is to make it so users searching on either scott or niven will see my page on the initial results page of their search.

The search term Scott has over 18 million results on Google. You are much better off trying to optimize for Scott Niven and forget about one word search terms. You might also add the word author to your home page (description & title tags) if you are an author of books (being sold on Amazon.com). People may tend to be more specific when searching for you specifically and your page is nowhere to be found when searching for author Scott Niven

Originally posted by saltwaterpizza
Anyway, thanks for any help in advance. I apologize if these are all stupid newbie questions. After reading through many of the forums entries, however, I got the impression that this was a friendly group of people, so I decided to take a chance and make a first post.

Welcome to the forums and it was a good decision to post. Looks like I'm not the only non-SEO professional around here anymore! Posting (possibly dumb) questions is the only way to learn.