Out of ideas..

[Greyth]

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to the SE world, but for awhile now (since about Dec or so last year) I've been watching, reading, and lurking around in forums trying to get one of my sites ranked well for its search terms in Google.

From what I've read, in theory my site should be destroying most of its competitors (not all) for the terms I'm targetting, but in reality it just isn't ranking that way.

We are being beaten by pages that: are pr0, do not even have the terms in the title, have very few back links, and that are all around just not all that good. Don't get me wrong, we don't rank that badly on most of our phrases, but we just seem to be lacking the extra push to get any of them into the top position, or even the top 3.

I don't understand it and at this point I've run out of ideas. So today I decided to quit lurking and see if someone here knows of some element that I am missing, havn't done correctly, or that I've just plain missed.

A good example: "genesis phantom bcd"
at this time, we rank #13

Our website: http://lakenorforkscuba.com

Please take a look and let me know what you think. I've been racking my brain and pulling out my hair over this for over six months now... At this point, I'm willing to hire, pay, beg, bribe... whatever it takes to get some good results.



-thx

[dazzlindonna]

Some things to consider:

1. You have a fair amount of backlinks - but not from a lot of different sites. Try getting backlinks from various sources.

2. How many backlinks do you have that include the anchor text of genesis phantom bcd? (or whichever keywords you are trying for).

[Pyrrhonist]

Hey Greyth,

your post sounds to me more like a site review than anything else. If you want to go ahead and give us a bit of a list of what you've tried, i'm going to move this thread into the site reviews forum and let's see if we can't get your problems fixed :D

[Greyth]

Dazzlindonna - Thanks for taking a look. For the anchor text, I've been mostly reliant on internal links for specific keywords while just trying to get a pr boost from my externals... I'll certainly try getting more links with that specific phrase and see what happens.

SEO_Bob - Not sure how, but I missed the site review section. Thanks for moving the post and not just deleting.

[Greyth]

Ok,

For what I've tried:

on site -

keywords in titles
keywords in incoming links
increased internal links as possible within the boundaries of good taste
anchored text sections
kws in H tags
kws in alt tags
reduced overall page size
increased kw density in pages
at one point I tried removing any "extra" text on the pages like categories and links to other parts of the site.. no luck so I switched it back
interlinked products with similiar products
increased the number of pages on the site that had the terms (via articles and reviews). This worked at first, but it seemed like the more I added, the less effect it had.

Off site -
mainly just tried to get as many links as possible to the main catalog page.

From what Dazzlindonna said, this looks like my weakest point.


I do have a question and this probably has a lot to do with why this has been neglected. I don't know what kind of numbers I should be looking at/shooting for here.

I know it would have to vary depending on different factors such as competition of kw, pr of pages etc... but can anyone give me even a ball park estimate of how many links per keyword it would take to get these pages ranked at least into the top 3?

[dazzlindonna]

Using your example of "genesis phantom bcd", you wouldn't need much to shoot to the top. You are only competing with 830 results. A few inbounds (possibly 2 or 3 even) with that as anchor text (making sure that the page it points to clearly identifies that phrase on the page and in the title) and you can probably do a happy dance. Don't know if the other phrases you are shooting for are similar in scope or not, but if so, your work should be fairly easy. Give it a good month's worth of work, and you could be doing well.

[Greyth]

Cool.

Thanks again Dazzlindonna. You know I'm really going to hate myself if that is all that is missing.. but I do hope you are right.

I chose that phrase in particular because it falls near the middle of the range of competition for my kw set, so most of the phrases should fall around that range as well. There are of course bigger fish to catch, but at this point I'm perfectly content starting with the small fry.