small guy trying to beat the big one

[cocktailshaker]

Hi all,

First of all: thanks seoguy for sharing a lot of information about the seo thingie :) I really enjoy experimenting with the tips you and the people on this forum give and will share my experiences as well.

Maybe you could shine a little light on my site and what I've done so far to get a decent ranking. I've got a Dutch cocktailsite and my main target are the Dutch google results. However, I have no problem with a global topranking as well :)

For about 6 months I've been #1 for keyword 'cocktails' within the Dutch pages and now I have a top 10 position on the international results as well. My site isn't commercial and I was proud of my ranking. However, as you can see via this link:

google results for cocktails - dutch pages (http://www.google.com/search?hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cocktails&btnG=Zoeken&lr=lang_nl)

I've lost my #1 position to the big guy above me. Loving the seo game, I wasn't angered by this, but I took immediate action and cleaned up the homepage, optimized links and anchor text, optimized meta tags and title tag and scored some extra backlinks. But I feel I have to do a little more to get back to #1. (Strange enough the #1 site is an all English site, showing up at pole position within Dutch results)

If you want to help out a small guy fighting the big one, I would be very pleased!

Some background info and questions:
The big guy has recently put a light entrance page in front of the (Flash) site. Could it be that if he doesn't update this page in the future he'll drop back? (as I read that updating your pages from time to time ensures a better ranking)

Am I fighting a lost fight? (as he's scoring much more backlinks, considering his english content vs my Dutch content)

This is my cocktail site (http://www.cocktailz.nl)

Thanks in advance for your insight!

Tim

[morgan]

Between #1 and #2 there can be a world of difference however because of your similarity as far as backlnks go I would wager you could trump him just by adding a few more to your index page but also try to get some to your internal pages. Not being able to read your content makes things a little tricky but not so much.

Because you have a text rich site I would suggest saving your original version (The one that ranks now) and start experimenting with new versions by changing 1 element at a time. From my recent observations I have been finding that lower density sites are doign well in google (As can be seen by #1 not having the kw in the page at all.

dont change your title as it is good I think just play by adding one instance of cocktails or taking one away that sort of thing, this in combination with increasing your backlinks will pop you up for sure.

Something that someone recently reported having success with recently was having a link on each page of their site back to their homepage high in the code but instead of having it say just your keyword the link says "Keyword Home" 0r "Keyword homepage" that sort of thing, the idea is that perhaps google doesnt want you using your own internal pages to trump the serps so if you make it a keyword (Generally an illogical choice) then your trying to hard, but if its kw+home then its a logical occurence. I havent finished testing this yet but feel free, worst comes to worst you can always revert back to the good ranking version right?

Also you comment about your competitor being able to get more backlinks as he's an english site, I dissagree I think you can get more backlinks from english sites because your not direct competiton with them (Or not that they know of) What I would do is build an english cocktail resources page and pick only relevant cocktail websites in english. Explain to them that your both in the cocktail trade but not competing because of the different language thing and they would probably jump at the chance to swap links. Dont get your link to say "cocktails" because I think with good SEO already you dont want to overdo it, get like "Dutch cocktails" things like that

Great Job on the site and the rankings though! And welcome to the forum

[cocktailshaker]

Thanks for commenting! I will keep on experimenting, but will wait untill the next big update, as I have already made a lot of changes (my cocktails are in a database and I have dynamically filled the meta tags). Also I have made some light-weight articles, which should get me more visitors through other keywords. Furthermore I've made all of my pages lighter, to increase keyword density and to save space. I want to see the effect of those changes before going any further.

But I was wondering: I have a index.html, which includes the index.php. In that index.html there's some extra meta information, some extra keywords and links (I don't know if this is a legal way, if not: feel free to tell me, so I can change this). Strange enough, Google doesn't seem to pick this up. It only displays the content of the index.php version and also the size of that page and not that of index.html. This seems very strange to me, but maybe you know why this is the case?

Furthermore I 'de-spaced' the index.php. I figured a space is a character and thus extra space/lost keyword density. Is this a good thought or am I just making the html look weird :)

Thanks in advance!