getting my website seen

ok, i know this isnt exactly techno production but if anyone knows about this it could come in handy for a fair few of us perhaps...

My mum has a business called 'truck africa' and she has had her website for 6-7 years now. TA specialise is long haul africa overland camping safaris... we are registered with all the search engines, but only come up if people type in 'truck africa'. When i try typing 'africa safaris' or 'africa overland' or somthing (which obviously someone who hasnt heard of us will do) we come up as about number 500 which sucks ass!

I really want to get mums search results at the top, but dont want it to cost her a fortune as sales are dwindling because everyone thinks africa is too dangerous at the mo..
Anybody know anything about this subject??

cheers in adavance

A lot depends on the search engine these days - some are going on a pay per click basis and others give you a higher ranking if you have more links from other sites than a competitor.
The basic stuff to get right is your description and meta tags. I think I've got some emails about this from a newsletter I subscribe to. I'll try find some useful info and forwrd it on to ya.

I can tell you exactly why - the homepage at http://www.truckafrica.com/ uses an image map for it's navigation (which is this case is really unnecassary), and search engines can't follow image maps. That is the root of the problem, the engines cannot see beyond that page.

If you email me, I'll rebuild the page for you for nish so that it's compatable, it'll take about ten minutes.

email me at dan@customwebsite.co.uk

wow, huge thanks to Dan and patrick or helping me out with this...another great example of people on here being so damn nice!