[mugwump]

Okay, I give up. How is the best way to be consistantly scearched by Google? It only hits our site very infrequently, with some old bogus link still lingering after 4 months while the current pages are rarely shown.

The layout is in tables with a lot of text down the page, the meta data has the correct description and title, and I manually submit the site to them frequently.

Is there a trick to this?

[registered_user]

Google likes pages that are linked to from other sites. So if you have lots of people linking to you, then Google may not spider you so often, but it will rank you higher. It's reverse (or inverse, I can't remember) popularity indexing.

There are a few tricks you can try.

One, create a page on your site with lots of links to other pages, and good descriptons. Submit that page to google and google's spiders will follow the links on that page. Get friends with domains to do this on their domains as well that point to your site. If you own several domains, you've got a good start. That link page doesn't have to be pretty, and you don't need to put a link to it anywhere on your site. Since it's only links, google won't think much of it as a page, but it will think a lot of what it links to.

Always use the "alt" tag. For bullets and such just use alt="" Google likes that information. Don't over do it, but alt="MacNN logo" is better than alt="logo"

Keep your meta tags brief. If I search for 57 Chevy and your meta tag says "57 chevy, cars, classics, blah, blah, blah" you are not a good match. Google (and other search engines) are looking for a dead on match, not a match plus lots of other stuff.

Good luck. It's not an exact science, so there is luck involved, but every little bit helps.