Given that my keywords are highly competitive, I am aiming to rank well in Yahoo, who gives some more importance to on-page stuff than off-page. I am #34 in Yahoo for "english to spanish translator" but I am confused about another page that ranks considerably higher than mine for (apparently) no very good reason. She's #25 and if I could know why, I would probably be able to climb a little bit in yahoo's serps.

Okay, she's spanish-translator.biz and I'm jb-translator.com. She's got 11 backlinks according to Yahoo, I have ten times more (108, and optimized for that kw for the most part). We have the same page title (I shortened mine to see if that was it, but no). My front page is way more optimized for that keyword than hers (the kw doesn't even appear once in her body text). At this point, I am starting to wonder:

- Is it only because her domain name is more kw rich than mine? Can that possibly be so determining? Or is it because of something else I'm overlooking? Any ideas to help me move up? Thanks a lot in advance.

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English to Spanish Translation Services
Jaime Bonet, Freelance English-Spanish translator

Having your keywords in the URL always helps.

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Target Market Advertising :: a-fun-site.com

Of course, but in this case it seems it is the only thing taken into account. With 10 times more incoming links, a body text way more optimized, an <H1> tag with the kw and tons of other things, I thought I should be better off than her. I can't do anything about the domain name at this point...

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English to Spanish Translation Services
Jaime Bonet, Freelance English-Spanish translator

But you can do something about your folder, image and page names, all of which are included in urls. For example, you call your image folder "images". You could call it spanish or translator or some other keyword. Same concept for page names and other folders.

A couple of other things to check. Is this showing up on the international versions of Yahoo or local versions? You appear to be located in France, but have a .com domain name. If these rankings are appearing in Yahoo for France, you should make sure you are hosted on a server that is physically located in France, particularly if your competitor is using a French domain suffix (.fr? not sure off the top of my head) . Have you analyzed your competitor's incoming links for more than numbers? Anchor text? Page rank (OK, I know we don't care about it....)? You might want to start a reciprocal link campaign targeting the competitor's incoming links - they have already demonstrated that they are willing to link.

Looking at your home page source, I have to scroll between one third and half way down the page past a bunch of irrelevant script, before I get to your bodytext. So does a spider. How does the code in your competitor's site compare? I think you are using Microsoft FrontPage, which is notorious for sticking tons of unnecessary code into pages. You might consider possibilities such as using less javascript or external script files (CSS rollovers are just as pretty, require less code, and can be implemented from an external file). You are also using tables, so might consider using the "table trick" to push your content ahead of the images and navigation in your left side column. Search this forum for table trick and you should find links to a description of how to do it, posted by our beloved and ever helpful (also ever changing) Jocelyn.

Hope this helps.

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LaryL
Toronto Real Estate
Home Renovations Repairs and Carpentry Toronto

Thank you so much for all that! I'll try to apply it little by little. Do you think it could be good to call one folder "spanish-translator" or should I do one single word at a time?

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English to Spanish Translation Services
Jaime Bonet, Freelance English-Spanish translator

Glad it helped. You can do it any way you please. Try to avoid having urls that are too long (like I do). Remember also that folder and page name combine i.e. jb.translator.com/spanish/translator.html
so there are many combinations, as well as opportunities to use singular and plural, English and spanish.

Be careful before changing page names of pages that have already been indexed. You may have to also learn about 301 permanent redirects if you want to forward any existing credit your pages have.

I looked again, and the simplest way to clean up some of your code would be to simply replace your image based rollovers with pure text links. Even if they are very plain until you learn a bit of CSS (see Listamatic and Accessify
for CSS navigation examples) I would also use more descriptive link names with keywords, i.e. translation subjects instead of subject areas, translation standards instead of commitments, translation pricing - I would try to use the spanish and english keywords in your links too.

Finally, part of this may be due to simply being a fairly new site. It appears you registered your domain in April 2004, while your competitor has been registered since 2002. There does seem to be some weight given to older sites in some engines and/or some discount to newer ones (Google's sandbox effect, for example). So just stay patient, keep cleaning your code, building more content and building more links, and you'll get there.

Good luck.

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LaryL
Toronto Real Estate
Home Renovations Repairs and Carpentry Toronto

Thank you so much again! I guess that if I changed the folder name where all my pages go (htdocs now) to a kw, I would need to use a redirect, right?

Regarding the JavaScript stuff, the truth is my keywords are very competitive (and there aren't really any less competitive options that would be interesting. Just two different very competitive keywords with a long and short version and I am hoping to target one of those two sets from my index page). What I mean is, I'm not very much concerned about my inner pages targetting other keywords (because it wouldn't be realistic to target a competitive keyword from one of my inner pages). At my index page I don't have any rollovers, so I think my index page should do fine for that, correct me if I'm wrong. I have two lines of JavaScript at the bottom of the page to track my visitors though. I have tried puttting them in a separate file following the instructions but then it ceased to work. But I think it should be ok because it's only two lines of code and at the bottom of the page, right?

I tried once to clean my code with an online tool called "FrontPage code cleaner", but the results weren't very impressive, my index page weight was only very slightly reduced afterwards. Any other suggestions to help me clean my code?

I've already been able to do a lot of the things you were suggesting. I think I'll take a look at the table trick stuff now. Cheers,

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English to Spanish Translation Services
Jaime Bonet, Freelance English-Spanish translator

In addition to what's been mentioned, here are my suggestions:

Use CSS absolute positioning to put your body copy first in the code-it can still show up on the page where ever you want. This can make a huge difference.

Change the alt text to something less wordy. You should use alt text that is applicable to the image but use KWs where it's appropriate.

If possible you may want to consider making your title just your KWs. Ex. "English to Spanish Translator" instead of "English to Spanish Translator: JB Spanish Translator" This will give it more weight.

Make your CSS & scripts external files so the spiders don't have to dig through them. It will give more relevance to the page content.

Make the changes and wait a while-especially with Yahoo & MSN. They update much more slowly than Google.

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also take a look at your page errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...anslator.com%2F

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I know, but that I really don't know how to solve. Some people said in the forum that even some SE's code doesn't validate so it wasn't a big deal... Do you think it can significantly damage my rankings? What could I do in order to correct my code? Any tutorials available?

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English to Spanish Translation Services
Jaime Bonet, Freelance English-Spanish translator