I'm Not Getting It

Marketing
1

OK, so I thought I was beginning to understand SEO a little better, but my PR and Google SERP states otherwise.

So I’ve gone ahead and added a substantial number of links to my landing page, checked my site against my competitors and several other common tasks often used to increase one’s PR and SERP.

One thing that’s beyond me, however, is that my WordPress blog is clogging up the keywords section of my META section, adding new words whenever I submit a new blog posting and apparently, there is no way for me to control what’s being added in this portion.

Nevertheless, even though my site shows itself to be in much better standing than several ‘similar’ competitor sites, my site fails to show up before Page 3 on Google and my PR remains at 0. According to Bing, my site was cached on 10/13 and Google told me my site had been cached on 10/7.

I guess I’m kind of stupified here. I’ve been employing widely-accepted “good” (not ‘spammy’) practices of creating content, have gone to great lengths to make sure my sites code is clean and a number of other things, however, I still think my site should rank higher and be driving significantly more traffic.

Equally, I understand these things take time and patience, however, I would’ve expected this particular site to have picked up by now, since I’ve consistently been posting content, participating in forums and improving the quality “attractiveness” of my site for the potential user.

Can anyone help me or am I just left to suffer in purgatory? Any and all suggestions, comments are appreciated. Thank you in advance.

P.S. If you want to see the site referenced in this posting, the URL is attached to my signature.

2

Quality, not Quantity is the key (it’s even in my signature). Are all of those “substantial number” of links relevant to your site? from authoritative pages? using targeted keywords?

There ARE ways of getting control of this - you need to be using a good SEO plugin for your WordPress site - like Platinum SEO, All-in-One SEO, or Joost’s new WordPress SEO plugin. These let you dictate what goes in your meta. Frankly, you should be ditching the keywords meta tag entirely - it’s pointless these days.

The main issue is with your site though. Talk about spammy - it looks like you have read the “2002 Keyword Density Guide to SEO” manual. There are so many links, so many repeated references to your keywords, and no real structure to your content. The home-page is a huge pile of information without any clear idea of what your site is doing.

I’d be also looking to upgrade to the latest version of WP (from 2.9.1), get a cleaner template, remove as much of that cruft as you can (date archives) fix all your broken tags (they all show no posts).

Next, i’d forget about your PageRank score. Completely. For ever.

Lastly, concentrate on traffic, do more keyword research and find good, related, quality links, or write good, related quality articles that will naturally attract links.

3

As far as I know, Google has not done a PR update since April, so if you’re site is newer than that, you will still be at 0. And, while PR is a nice little number to look at, it doesn’t have a huge impact on your traffic. I’d rather have a higher SERP than a higher PR. Remember, PR is 1 of about 200 factors that go into your search engine ranking, so a low PR is no reason to panic (and there are plenty of low PR sites that are at the top of the rankings)

What kind of links are you building? What kind of links do your top competitors have? Those 2 things will play a huge role on where you rank. You could be building great links, but if the people in front of you have more great links than you do, you’ll just have to keep working and be patient (as frustrating as that may seem!)

4

How new is your blog? I ask because even though search engines recently cached it, Google for example does not do it’s page rank stuff at the same time… They only update ranks every few months. If this is a self hosted blog, have you gone to Google webmaster centeral?