Why am I not Ranking at all for keyword?

[Ecotourdirectory]

Can anybody help out here, I'm trying to optimise my site (www.ecotourdirectory.com) for the search term 'ecotour'.

If you do either a allinurl, allintext, allintitle, allinanchor my site shows in the top 5.

However for some reason I do not show in the top 100 on a plain search for the term ecotour. My homepage is a PR5 and I have plently of links pointing to my site with this keyword in it.

Does anybody have any sugesstions about what I'm doing wrong?

[Jason Tor]

Your site looks like it is optimized more for "Ecotour Directory" then "Ecotour".

here is the search result for Ecotour Directory you are #2:
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...tour+Directory

Your domain is ecotourdirectory.com, your title tag starts with Ecotour Directory, the first link on your site is "About EcoTour Directory" and the second and third word on your site is EcoTour Directory. I don't think Google is giving "Ecotour" alone any relevance.

You may want to change your title tag to:
<title>Ecotour - A Human edited directory of listings on ecotours and operators around the world</title>

And the first link to:
EcoTour Information

And the beginning of your content to:
EcoTour is a directory that offers an independent listing of ecotour operators....

Of course this may not work either, so don't just take my advice, wait to see if someone more knowledgeable can give you a better suggestion.
Hope this helps.

-Jason Tor

[Ecotourdirectory]

Its certainly worth a try. Cheers.

Somebody else has suggested that I may be experiencing some kind of ranking delay that occurs for newer sites.

Does anybody else have any suggestions?

[minstrel]

Google reports 16,600 entries for ecotour directory but 50,800 for just ecotour.

It's almost always easier to rank for 2- or 3- o 4-word phrases than for single words. That's not really as much of a handicap as you might think: I think that increasingly this matches search behavior by "consumers".

If the searcher enters ecotour and get 50,800 pages listed, many of which will not satisfy the actual search requirements, the next step will often be to take Google's advice and add additional words to narrow down and better specify the search. In the present example, just adding california to ecotour drops the number of pages listed to 14,900.

On the other hand, if your site is in fact a directory, you want to have that word in your optimization strategy. The phrase ecotour directory will give you some search engine visibility for the single word ecotour as well as the phrase - it's just that with the single word you are going into competition with more pages.

(On a side note: I really don't know the answer to this question, but do many people even search for the word ecotour? Before you go to the trouble of optimizing for any search term, make sure it's one people will actually use.)

[Ecotourdirectory]

Its certainly a good point your making about whether peope search for the term 'ecotours'. I did find that many people do seach for terms such as 'ecotours canada', ecotours brazil' etc.

I have optimised pages for each of the countires listed in the directory with little success so far. I think I'm going to have to improve the content on each of the pages.

Looks as though I should rethink my keyord strategy.

Thanks for taking a look minstrel.