Hi Janet,
Welcome to the wonderful world of web marketing
In a nut shell, say someone searches on e.g., Google for "House Cleaning Blackpool", it rapidly searches it's index of PAGES (not sites) to find the most RELEVANT one for that search.
No-one knows EXACTLY how they rank these pages but it comes down to two things (very simplified). On-site and Off-site factors
1/ On-site. The stuff on the page. This means, domain name (url), titles, descriptions, internal links, headings (h1, H2 etc, just like a Microsoft word document),tags etc.
In the code of most sites are things called tags.
The important ones are the Title tag and the description tag because they tell people what the page is about. There is another called "keywords" but this is no longer used for ranking purposes.
These things are what Dave meant when he asked if you could access the code (so you could do titles, description etc ) so that the search engines know what your page is about.
2/ Off-site factors. by far the most important. These are what other sites say about your site (in computer speak).
Known as back links, these are when another site "links" to yours. The little blue writing is called "anchor text". If you have got a load of links pointing to your site with different versions of "Blackpool" and "cleaning" in them, the search engines will realise your page is all about those topics. There's a lot more to it but I'll leave it there for now.
So... Your Site.
Your site has what are known as dynamic pages. It means they don't really exist as they are made up as and when the searcher clicks on your site. It's like a shop window that displays different things. The only constant is the window and shop front itself. To compound it, YOLA uses things called frames, which are an old fashioned way of doing this.
This means that your "on-site" stuff is not going to be easy to do at all. You can do the titles and description but the rest will be difficult.
Off site, anyone can build links back to their site (regardless of how it is built or coded) and in reality, this is by far the most important aspect..
Here's something you can do right now to help (only slightly but as they say at Tesco, every little helps).
Go to the top of the page and click "profile". On the next page look for "Modify Profile" and click on "Forum Profile Information".
Scroll down to "Signature".
Paste this code into the signature box...
house cleaning blackpool[/url (then put another square closing bracket ( ] )after the "url".
I had to do it like this so you can get the right code. If not it will just show the finished link
If you want something other than house cleaning Blackpool, you can replace it with something else. Press "change profile". Bingo, you have got your first targeted incoming link. It will help the search engines find your pages naturally. Again, this is a huge topic and I'll leave it for now.
Do what Dave and Adam suggest about the text and the tags and you will be on the first rung.
Hope that helps for starters.
Garry
