I recently built a website for a friend. If I search for the company name, then the site itself shows 3rd, below threads from forums which link to it. (the site itself is the second link in my sig under 'my sites' - I'm hoping this thread won't go to #1 as a search result for it...) The site itself has a higher page ranking than the threads. The site also has 2 listings on DMOZ, and a few other stray sites link to it. Do I just need to wait for google to update a few more times (it has reindexed since the last update, though the google directory hasn't), or have I done something that I'm being penalised for? The only thing I can think of that I have changed is I originally had accessibility 'skip links' options with a class of hide, so I removed them just in case, but surely google wouldn't penalise a site for being accessible? Or is there something else?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated,
Dave

odds are your base authority level may not be that high if you only have links from a few sites. perhaps building more linkage data from a wide variety of sites will help improve your rankings

Thanks for the response, and yeah it does only have a page rank of 1, so...

If you have a business site, is there an acceptable way to implement link swaps? e.g. it would look a bit odd to dump stray links to a directory or other site on there, and a links page would also look odd. Is there an accepted way to do it?

Also is posting (useful posts of course) on blog sites which have a high pr a good way of increasing my base authority level? The link back is then on the name you post in, and you don't have to link to them.

I've just taken the link out of my signature to see if that helps. If anyone wants to look at the site please pm me or something and I'll send you a link.

>If you have a business site, is there an acceptable way to implement link swaps? e.g. it would look a bit odd to dump stray links to a directory or other site on there, and a links page would also look odd. Is there an accepted way to do it?

if you link to related useful resources or complimentary services it can add value to your site and not just detract from it.

>Also is posting (useful posts of course) on blog sites which have a high pr a good way of increasing my base authority level? The link back is then on the name you post in, and you don't have to link to them.

blog posts might be effective for yahoo and the like but you will need a bunch of them to do well on google if you are working in a competitive marketplace.

essentially my main concern is that when someone puts the company name into google, I want the company site to be first. So that's my primary objective. So I guess the keywords I really want to optimise for are the company name, which shouldn't be too competitive a marketplace.
Is there a free way to do this, or would I be better off running a small PPC campaign to get more page impressions?

Worth thinking about...

Bear in mind that a lot of forums, blogs, networking websites get a heavier weighting from google simply because they get updated so frequently that they get indexed by google more regularly than normal websites. So I think it would be a good idea to remove the link from your signature as you mentioned and to perhaps put a news feed or blog if appropriate to get google visiting more frequently.

<< Moderator Removed: Please setup a signature via your user profile >>

well it's for a friend. the blog is there but they haven't updated it... maybe I should jump on them a bit.

Ok thanks for the suggestion, we'll try it.

As a quick note it's probably a good idea to use Blogger.com as they're owned by google, I think it those blogs get a heavier weighting

well this is actually a blog script in php by a mate that I've adapted to be simply a news section, so...