The secrets of search engine optimization?

I spent hours Saturday tinkering with the name, description and settings on one parcel and I never could get it to show up in the search. I know some are powered by ad money, some by traffic, but the "All" search goes by name and description correct? I tried asterix, exclamation points, spaces.....

I'm doing real well as far as my Riverboat, only because there are only two in the game that I know of

(I'm thinking you're not the only one who doesn't know the secret...)

It's very long but my best advice is to read this thread:

/142/fc/226678/1.html

It's been around awhile but it's still going. Based on what I learned from the thread I almost always end up within the top 5 in the new search.

It's best to read that other thread that Bradley posted.

But I'll add that in my experience, the search for your classified ad is updated immediately, but changes to your parcel in the new "all" search only updates after a couple days. So that's why you kept trying new things, and none of them worked. Nothing you did would have worked. Whatever is the last thing you tried is what will show up eventually.

Strange....seemed like my other parcel changes showed up immediately *confused*

It takes at least a day, if not another day or more, to index. I wish it were better than that, but that's what we are dealing with... probably to reduce the amount of hammering on the databases, it will produce a canned result that is updated once per day or two than on the fly.

So test keywords in a classified then if they work use them on a parcel?

Yes. Keywords on parcels are very important. Especially what the name of your store is. If you can change the name of your store to include the keywords of your objects it is highly recommended.

Thats what I was doing but it would not show up in search, I guess you have to wait several days between changes.

You would think so, but no, that won't work. Classifieds are sorted by amount paid, and not really by any type of relevance. "All" search uses a more complicated engine that has nothing to do with how much you paid. So you wouldn't gain any knowledge by testing it that way.

Avion is correct. I use to pay L$500/wk for my ad. Now I pay L$200/wk and there was no change whatsoever in relevance because I didn't change the keywords. I could probably go less, but I'll probably leave it where it is.

Personally I never use classifieds to find what I want because those paying a ton of money are not necessarily any good. I use "All (old)" almost continually.

The new search pretty much does away with that. I never use to use Classified either. I always used to use Location. With the new search, I now use classified and find it useful.

Certain categories lend themselves to classifieds better than others.

New products, services, special attractions, property and land rentals. The only one that is truly a mess is "shopping."

Which works very well for me...at least as far as a seller.

I went to the clothing store listed at the top of classifieds this morning, they had about 12-15 models. Not one customer or even a visitor.

Okay, but what did you think of the clothes? Stores cannot be full 24-7.

I don't shop based on popularity or what other people think, but what I like. And if stores are getting the kind of sales that allow them to pay hundreds of dollars per week for an ad, someone must like it. If they don't, the store (and the pricey ad) will eventually go away.

Which classifieds? Old or new?

If it's the new one I wish I could get online right now. I'd be very interested in seeing if it has to do with the traffic or a carefully worded ad with good keywords. Maybe it's both.

I also found that for the parcel to appear in "All (New)", the parcel size needs to be greater than 128sq/m. I tried smaller sizes, including exactly 128, but it would never appear, even after days of waiting.

That's fine as a shopper's opinion. But good, bad, or indifferent, a merchant deserves promimence for their ad if that's what LL claims they get for their money.

I personally don't see any reliable correlation between amounts paid and quality. Some businesses just have more money to put into advertising. And some of them even got that way because they have good products. And yes, there are going to be businesses that sell junk, and hope that big advertising will make up for it. But I can't tell the difference until I check them out; so I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.

You can maybe tell my bias because I run a relatively high priced classified ad in the rental business (always on page 1, usually in the top 8 on the sidebar ads). But I'm not trying to fool anybody with it. I take high pride in what I provide for my customers, and also happen to have a large advertising budget.

Bradley, the new classifieds are gone with the new update, unless that's a fluke on my end.

Really? Guess I'm making no sense here. I've been on so little since the newest update that I haven't had a reason to search.

Is there a reason they're gone? Something I've missed?

Hmm, thinking about it I couldn't even filter by classified in the new search yesterday.

To save you a LOT of time, note that the information about how to optimize for search (as opposed to just lots of complaining) starts on page 17, with Phil Deakins' post.

I assume that the Classifieds category is gone from the All search because the search application they are using is designed to rank on relevancy, and not on a single criteria, such as how much was paid. In other words, they can't make it fair. Classifieds are pay-for-placement ads, and they can't do it with the Google application.

The reason it takes a while for changes to be reflected in the new All search is because of the way it works. LL create an HTML page for every parcel of land (possibly only for those that are set to show in search), plus other HTML pages. The Google application crawls those pages every 12 hours, and indexes each word from the pages - not the pages themselves - together with some data about each of the words. It does store the pages, or pointers to them, but it's the index of words that is looked at when processing a query.