I'll take one of those! (reviews I mean)

[Arizona Web]

I need a review of our site, so let me get down to specifics. It has a PR6, and ranks number 2 in google for the following phrase: [allinanchor:arizona web design]. The programming is fine, although I use tables, the code is pretty clean and validates as XHTML. The structure of the text is good: h1, p, h2, p, h2,p etc. The internal link text is good. The titles for each page may need some fine tuning, but they all have specific key phrases that are related to the phrase that page is focusing on.

I have been working on link building this month and have done a pretty good job of it so far (my site went from a 5 to a 6 to a 7 then back to 6 in the past 3 PR updates). I just added a directory for related types of sites (web design, web development, marketing, hosting, directories, etc).

However, I rank 13 in the SERPs for the phrase "Arizona Web Design (http://www.mcpmedia.com)" and I'm not sure exactly why. Is it on page factors? Am I too keyword dense? What in specific can I do to improve my rankings?

Our site is http://www.mcpmedia.com

Oh yeah, and I'll take some advice on design and or usability if you got that too 8-|


Thanks!

[Arizona Web]

c'mon people, I don't bite... unless you are a sandwich. I need some SEO guidance!

[Dreamshop]

Well I was sort of waiting to see what others had to say because I have some similiar questions about a site I'm working on. It ranks number one for around 50 non-competitive and medium level keywords, but our primary keyword is still eluding us [we don't rank at all for this in Google].

I'm wondering if maybe shortening the length of your page titles might help. Or maybe picking at least one page to focus on just "arizona web design". I keep reading that you should only have three or four word page titles, but I've used longer ones before and been very successful getting high serps with them. But not always.


As far as design and usability goes I like your layout. It's fresh and easy to understand. It's not totally what I would do, but that boils down to personal design style.

[chachi]

Well, I did some poking around, on you and your competition. Sounds like the onpage factors are well taken care of. The first thing I did notice though is then anchor text you chose in your sig. Do all of your BL's use anchor text like that? I would think you are just diluting the keywords in your anchor text and to the page you are pointing at by including so many words in there.

Hmm, I just checked about 10 of your link: links in G....looks like your anchor text and the title attribute text you use is very diluted. I would try and get those links trimmed up and focused on "arizona web design" if that is what you are really after.

Nice looking site btw.

[Arizona Web]

good point.. I think I'll switch it up from time to time and reduce the words from here on out. My sigs are always pretty long, and hacing words like "and" and "by" in them certainly doens't help anybody with naything...

Any additional feedback on my site is still greatly appreciated- thanks all!

[Arizona Web]

[QUOTE=chachi]Well, I did some poking around, on you and your competition. Sounds like the onpage factors are well taken care of. The first thing I did notice though is then anchor text you chose in your sig. Do all of your BL's use anchor text like that? I would think you are just diluting the keywords in your anchor text and to the page you are pointing at by including so many words in there.

Hmm, I just checked about 10 of your link: links in G....looks like your anchor text and the title attribute text you use is very diluted. I would try and get those links trimmed up and focused on "arizona web design" if that is what you are really after.

Nice looking site btw.[/QUOTE]Jason, thank you thank you thank you! You have officially been the person to crack my SEO problem. I changed a bunch of back link text (the ones I have access to) and in a few short days jumped from 33 to 21 for my main key phrase. I am positive that they are directly correlated. Now I know what I have to do to finally crack the top 3 in the SERPs. I knew my problem was some specific bug in my strategy, but couldn't figure out what it was.

Thanks man! See you at the top of the SERPs mang!

[seo guy]

Sorry I didnt pipe in earlier Zona web, having absolute proximity in your links (anchor is exactly what you are targeting) is important, but also mix it up a little as well.

Possible anchors
arizona web design 50%
web design 25%
arizona website design 25%

That sort of thing, linking with logical constituents as well as the main kw shows that your not trying "too" hard for your kw. It makes sense from an SE point of view, if all your links were the same it would look suspicious

[Arizona Web]

That part I had, but like a dummy I was linking like this (the numbers are not even close to true, but just a representation of what I was doing)

arizona web site design and web development by MCP Media 20%
arizona web development and web site design by MCP Media 20%
web site design and web development by MCP Media 20%
phoenix web site design and web development by MCP Media 20%
MCP Media : phoenix web development and arizona web site design 20%

which in retrospect was not smart. Now they are not only different, but they are much more natural looking and targeted. The change had a somewhat immediate impact on my rankings...

and the obsessive compulsive SEO part of me is looking at the text above and wanting to put a URL wrapper around the whole text chunk... :confused: ...but now I know better. 8-|

[ABS659]

Good Point Morgan!!! Wow Your Pretty Good At Ths Stuff. (wink)

[Arizona Web]

Tell you what, I posted this 3 weeks ago. I was at 44 for Arizona web design. Today I am at 13. That advice on the link text was huge. I wish I had been more careful about that stuff when I first started submitting to directories! Thanks guys!