Am i missing something with my SEO?

[Shariku Onikage]

My workHate site has been going for a while now (since last February) and i've been working on it a little most days since its creation. According to my analystics, in that time i've only had a thousand unique visiors. This is despite having SEO set up since day one.

Though most of my traffic has come from links set up through the tvtropes website i see that most of my google search results usually come from random keywords that i haven't really set and i'm beginning to wonder if i've done something basic wrong somewhere which is preventing stuff from coming through properly. For the record i'm using wordpress with the comicpress theme and the All in one SEO plugin that comes with it.

To test if my site's doing SEO well, i created an article called 'Pretend to be a Body Snatcher day', included that phrase as a keyword in the SEO plugin and got it published on me workHate. To compare i also posted the link on these forums in an effort to promote the article i was writing about (one person replied...) and waited about two weeks. Please note that before my article there were no other pages that brought about a direct result with the phrase 'pretend to be a body snatcher day' in it. The closest was a page that off handedly mentioned 'pretend to be a body snatcher'.

Now i figured, if i got me understanding about SEO down, that with this set up as above i could go ahead and type in 'pretend to be a body snatcher day' into google (without any quotes) and expect to see the unique phrase rising straight to the top of the list. Doing so however nets me this:

Google results

The Steve Pavlina forum post shows up right at the top, but my article is at the bottom of page four.

While i could understand my page being at the far recesses of the SERPs for a phrase like 'body snatchers' i figured the unique keyword phrase above would have netted my page being at least on page one and hopefully in the top two.

What am i missing here? Either in my understanding of SEO or something i may have missed out in the creation of the article. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[Curtis2011]

There are two basic elements to determine how highly your page ranks in Google, they are how "relevant" your specific page is to the keyword, and how "valuable" your page and total website are.

In gaining relevancy the most important things are:

• Make one page per keyword you want to rank for. Don't try to rank for multiple big-traffic keywords with a single page.
  
• Include your keyword in your <title> and <h1> tags on that page.
  
• Include your keyword in the file name, such as "keyword-01.html" for page one and "keyword-02.html" for page two.
  
• There needs to be a decent amount of written material on the page that is at least somewhat related to the keyword. A good amount of words is 500 or more per page

All of those things are the main ways that Google determines how "relevant" your page is to a Google search result. Chances are very high that if your page does not include its keywords in the <h1> or <title> tags, or the file-name, then it will never rank highly for that keyword.

I suspect that your problem stems from the next issue, Google's "value" of your website.

This is determined slightly through how many pages there are total on your website, but much more so by how many inbound links you have and even more importantly, the importance of your inbound links.

Basically, the more high-value inbound links you have, the higher "value" your website has, so the higher it will rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Your problem is that your site is small and has very few high-quality inbound links, so it has a low value in Google's algorithm.

Because of this, a different website that has a higher value than yours can rank higher than you for a keyword, even if their site is less "relevant" to that keyword than yours. The reason they rank higher is because their website has a higher "total" value than yours.


The reason that Steve's website ranks highly for so many keywords is because he has literally tens of thousands of valuable inbound links. Because of his website's insane algorithmic value from these links, even a simple post in his forums can rank on the #1 spot in Google if there is no major competition for its primary keyword.

Hope that helps.


In short:

1) Make more written content that is keyword-focused.
2) Get more inbound links.

That is really all there is to SEO. There are many other factors but those are the biggies.


Final note: I noticed that your website uses the .co.uk extension. In general this is a poor choice unless you are only trying to get people from the UK to visit your website. Google has mentioned in various places that if you use a country-specific extension, that the extension helps your website rank higher for people who search from that country, but ranks lower for people who search from other countries. Since the USA is the main source of internet traffic for most websites that are not country-specific, I suggest to never use a country-specific code if you are trying to get regular search engine traffic from all countries, especially the USA.

A general rule of thumb is to use the "country-neutral" domain extensions. The most popular ones are .com, .org, and .net. I have noticed that .info is getting a bit more popular as well.

[Shariku Onikage]

Thanks. That's pretty much exactly what i needed to know. Time to find more ways to get links out there.

[Ryan OLoughlin]

Yes. Building backlinks can be tedious, but simple. You can publish articles with your keyword on article directories like ezines. Do more forum commenting and blog commenting. Things like that. In general, the more inbound links you have, the more "votes" of confidence google give your site and you'll be on your way. Slowly but surely.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Ryan OLoughlin

Yes. Building backlinks can be tedious, but simple. You can publish articles with your keyword on article directories like ezines. Do more forum commenting and blog commenting. Things like that. In general, the more inbound links you have, the more "votes" of confidence google give your site and you'll be on your way. Slowly but surely.

One of the easiest ways to get an inbound link is simply to email website owners and ask them if they would like to trade links.

[givejonadollar]

Great info Curtis.

The site I promote here I don't do that much with, but one of my other ones is very successful and what you say is correct.

[Crushable]

Do keyword research for post topics first. For example I am targeting the keyword career choices with this post. Its search over 8000 times a month and when I rank for it in 6 months to a year it will be a steady source of traffic. Career choices as a keyword I have in my

Title tag
Header tag
url
meta description

It is also mentioned within the content itself the keyword and related keywords need to be mentioned like career choice.

The above is "on page seo". Off page seo is simply links from other sites.

Check to see what links your competitors have then match them.
Get links from article marketing and blog commenting.

I disagree with Curtis on a small point, you do want to go after multiple keywords, but only if they are related and are not heavily searched for. Typically I go for keywords that are searched for at least 1,200 times a month, then with the same page go after "sister" keywords that are searched 400-800 times. This make the page highly relevant to search engines, and will also bring you more traffic.

Lastly, googles algorithm accounts hundered of things. From my experience, domain age and links hold the heaviest weight. So your site is starting to get some age to it and that is a big advantage. Get busy link building!

[Showtime]

I dunno, in my experience SEO doesn't increase traffic like crazy.

What you really wanna do is create a buzz around your content.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Showtime

I dunno, in my experience SEO doesn't increase traffic like crazy.

What you really wanna do is create a buzz around your content.

A lot of times once you properly optimize your pages, it can take up to several months for your pages to slowly "crawl" to the higher rankings in Google.

I made almost all of my pages optimized for "acupuncture chart(s)" many months ago, but only recently have they reached the front page of Google for that keyword (yay!).

So, sometimes it just takes some patience added into doing the right type of SEO.

[cdavis]

I haven't really noticed too many gains from optimizing articles online, they pass little to no link juice and I think you mentioned forum spam which is a huge no-no.

When optimizing on-page text for certain keywords I'll usually just jam a phrase or two in there somewhere so that it's approximately 1-2% of the body but on-page SEO is a really weak way to rank if you have no off-page seo to begin with, or if you are relying on forum spam to do the trick. You need inbound links from high pr sites that are relevant to yours PLUS the keyword you are looking to rank in the SERPS for in the link text they use.

Finding ways to control the text people use to backlink to me has proven to be the best strategy for me as far as SEO goes (my primary SEO strategy is reciprocal link trading from websites that are relevant to mine and medium to high pr) Please no one lecture me on link trades, I haven't really noticed that big of a difference in the serps between one-ways and reciprocals although it would be nice if I had all one-ways.

To find the sites I trade with I use Zeus, it's by far the best thing that ever happened to me, my b/f introduced it to me a while ago after he had used it to optimize a website he was working on and to say it did leaps and bounds for my SEO efforts is an understatement. I just look up the PR for any site I send a link request to using linkscape at seomoz just to make sure it is RELEVANT (very important my friend) to my website and contains no more than 20-30 outbound links. Linkscape also has a tool that supposably gives you the PR of a webpage, eh, I don't know if I believe it...it's seomoz, not google, but their pr ranking system does seem to be legit.

There's some other link trading software you can use but I like Zeus *ducks eggs thrown by some SEO's* and you can get it customized for your page too.

[cdavis]

also keep in mind that the competitiveness of the keyword you are trying to rank for plus the strength of your competitor's websites can make a huge difference in the amount of time it takes to climb the serps. For example, if you are looking to rank your webpage for online casino (which I'd give my right arm to have an organic #1 spot on google for), you are going to have a much tougher time than someone looking to rank for, oh I don't know, monarch butterflies or something like that.

Oh, I forgot, try to get into dmoz if you can, it will take a million years if you can even get in (unless you fake an editor application to get in and sneakily add yours that way), but I have seen some poorly optimized and generally suck'ish webpages that beat pr 6's with great seo just because of a stupid link from dmoz. it is such a corrupt joke of a directory but it is one of the best links you can have in google's eyes.

[cdavis]

aahhh, I keep thinking of things to tell you lol, if you must go the article route please use ezinearticles, they host up to 1-2 live links in your author bio (not the article body, DO NOT put links in the article body they are worthless and I don't think they will even let you do them anymore).

a guy who is a big competitor of mine does this all the time and I've looked up some of his stupid pages on ezine that have a pr5, yep, that's right, a pr5 linking to his page from ezine with link text he controls. Most article websites won't transfer that amount of link juice to you though, for some reason ezine seems to be one of the best.

it's all about SEO don't let anyone tell you different, ranking high in google for a keyword = cold hard cash

[ginkgo]

It reminds me of Donald Trump asking a team why they lost. No matter how great 2 teams do, one will win and one will lose. No matter how bad the 2 teams do, one will win and one will lose.

So your question would be good if you had the only website on the internet. But you are competing with other websites that are also trying to be the best at SEO. So someone may be doing everything right but still not be able to win the New York marathon, since there are others that are better than them.

[cdavis]

I see what you're saying gingko but seo is such an untapped resource for so many people nowadays, many people don't even know what it is yet alone how to do it correctly. You also don't have to win or lose when it comes to SEO, you can be #3 and still make a bunch of money off a keyword depending on what it is and if you have a great website compared to your competitors or not (a poor website at #1 won't cut it).

With enough time, effort and knowledge someone could probably rank for the google keywords of all google keywords - "porn" - lol, another one I would love to rank for, but that's for another conversation.

Another overlooked SEO tactic is links from .edu and .gov's. Ok .gov isn't too easy but it can be done. I have a couple .edu links coming into my page and they are considered more valuable in google's eyes than just having a bunch of .com's coming into your site. Try and see if you can get a link from the college you went to. Not all links are created equal.