Keyword rich home page #50 in google

[gigigib]

When I do a search for my main keywords (fragrance oil) in google, my site ranks # 50. The word "fragrance" is used 13 times, the word "oil" is used 12 times, and the phrase "fragrance oil" is used 8 times, so I don't understand why I'm not higher in the rankings. Any ideas?

[thindenim]

Try and get a few more links with the anchor text "fragrance oil".

Also you have canonical url problems, the link at the bottom of the page goes to http : //www.fmnscentedgifts.com/index.php?page=index_site, I would recommend changing that to your domain root and change the link text from "home" to "fragrance oil".

[Dubbya]

You've got a few issues that may be affecting your relevance and therefore, your results in the SERPs.

As thindenim suggested, try to get some more inbound links from related sites or directories. Yahoo! lists 384 inbound links but Google only lists 20. Shoot for sites with a PR4 or better but take what you can get without linking reciprocally.

Always use relevant keywords when given the opportunity to specify link text, be they internal links or if you're placing a listing in a directory or submitting an article.

Here's what I've found to be a few more contributing factors:

• You do not have a link to an XML sitemap on your home page.
• You do not have a sitemap.xml for Google (or a urllist.txt file for Yahoo!) in the root of your server.
• You don't currently have a robots.txt file in place in the root of your server.
• You've put your CSS stylesheet and some embedded JavaScripts at the very top of your page.
• You've used embedded JavaScripts.
• At 514 characters, your meta description is a MILE too long for it to be effective.
• You've used the same title, description and keywords for every page in your site.
• No relevant <h1>, <h2> headings, bolded text, hot links within page content.

Add a Sitemap:
Why? It's the easiest and fastest way to ensure that the SE's are aware of ALL of the pages you want in their indexes. Resubmit whenever you add or delete pages or content. This tells the SE's that you're updating your site with freshy goodness! Yahoo! has their own version, called a urllist.txt file but they'll happily accept the sitemap.xml file as well.

How to Submit Your Site Map to Google, Yahoo! and MSN

Google's Robots.txt FAQ:
How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?

Why use external JavaScripts?
HTML Tip: Reduce The Size Of Your HEAD

Write a great meta description:
Pay attention to the 160 character limit for Google and the 200 character limit for MSN. Keep your most targeted keywords and phrases at the beginning of the description. When it comes to meta descriptions, most often, less is more. The shorter it is, the more focused and targeted it'll be.
SEOmoz | Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Use unique titles and descriptions in every page.
This will allow you to focus your attack for each and every product and category. It's key in optimizing for findability.

Reverse engineer the search process:

Think about it like a person looking for orange potpourri. What are they going to type in to find what they want? "potpourri", "orange potpourri", "orange scented potpourri" or "orange spice potpourri". In terms of relevance to the most likely search phrase, a great page title would be "orange scented potpourri" and viola! There's your page title.

"Orange Scented Potpourri"

Look at your description in the same way. Give them what they want to know before they click.

Ask yourself if this is all the information a customer would need:
"Scented with orange spice fragrance oil, this 1 lb gift bag is now only $10.95 at ForgetMeNot scented gifts."

At just 108 characters, you've still got some room to play around and work in some more targeted keywords.

Put 'em together and wuddyagot?
Assuming that the SE's spider the page and don't trim it, it should look something like this:

Orange Scented Potpourri
Scented with orange spice fragrance oil, this 1 lb gift bag is now only $10.95 at ForgetMeNot scented gifts.
http://www.fmnscentedgifts.com/index.php?page=prod_details&prod_key=8619 28k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Headings and other on-page factors:
These are all simple things you can use to make a significant impact on how well you rank. You'll need to optimize them for each page.

In product pages, the <h1> heading should be the name of the product, or the manufacturer's make, model or part number, if that's how it's most likely to be found in a web search query. Category pages can simply use the category name itself. Again, focus is key.

Now, go get em!

.02

[gigigib]

WOW! Dubbya! What a wealth of information. Thanks so much..looks like I've got my work cut out for me! But I'm up to it!

And thank you thindenim for your advice.

[incrediblehelp]

Keyword density means very little in SEO.

[Dubbya]

You're welcome Gay,

BTW, if you haven't already, be sure to set up a Google Webmaster Tools Account, a Yahoo! SiteExplorer Account and another one at the MSN Live Webmaster Center. If you want to know how the SE's see your site, where they might be having problems indexing and why, don't pass these up.

Having an account at each of the "big three" will allow you to monitor where your efforts are doing the most good and where you might be falling short. As a free solution, Google analytics is absolutely indispensable if you want to find out how your site is performing, how people are finding you and where to focus your efforts.

Welcome to Webmaster Tools

Site Explorer

Live Search Webmaster Center

[scanmonkey]

Get a couple of high quality links a week with 'fragrance oil' as the anchor text. Deeplink and write a few articles about 'fragrance oil' and include them on your site. Google likes fresh content. Bookmarking the articles on some of the social sites will also help you get some traffic.

[gigigib]

Good Advice Scanmonkey. I've been trying to get creative and write some articles, but I think I've got "writer's block"! I'll work on it tho. But, I'm afraid that I don't know what Deeplink means.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by gigigib

When I do a search for my main keywords (fragrance oil) in google, my site ranks # 50. The word "fragrance" is used 13 times, the word "oil" is used 12 times, and the phrase "fragrance oil" is used 8 times, so I don't understand why I'm not higher in the rankings. Any ideas?

Using your logic, your competitor just needs to put those 2 words 14 and 13 times in their home page and they´re ranking higher than you. Obviously that wouldn't make much sense.

Before having an opinion on what your position should be in Google, perhaps it is better to first try to understand the logic that Google applies when ranking websites for a keyword.

Google looks at various factors, which include:

1) content
2) popularity
3) history

Based on these 3 factors you can put their logic in one simple sentence: "You need to know what you´re talking about, be known for it and be old enough, but not retired."

Besides these 3 factors right, SEO comes into play to make sure you´re not misrespresenting yourself to search engines. This basically means you need to make sure search engines can find all your pages and that, from an html point of view, you´re presenting your self the same way you´re presenting your self visually to a visitor.

Content you have to create your self. Often you'll hear you have to create good content. I could write a book about what good content is, but in my experience,... some people get it and some people don't. It's something you have to have a talent for. One idea you'll need to understand right away is that content is a lot more than just words.

Popularity is measured through links. Often you'll hear that links come automatically if you put great content on your site, but don't be fooled by that. It takes marketing to increase popularity. Content on its own doesn't guarantee you anything. You can't market a bad thing, so good content is more a requirement than the solution.

History is something that Google is using a lot for various reasons, but just think about it like a potential customer looks at your company. The longer you exist, the more trustworthy your business is, the more stable your business is, the more trustworthy you are, etc. etc. etc. History is something that comes with time, you can't make your history be more than it is. All you can make sure of is that your history is good.


So do you really believe you should have a higher position? Actually you can't really tell because you'd have to read all the sites above you, check how popular they are AND know their history. Kind of difficult to figure that all out. Using common sense is the best way to get your site higher positions. And in case you don't have the HTML knowledge or time to obtain this knowledge, it is good to hire somebody or a company to do this part of the job for you.

[amjad_you]

Originally Posted by Dubbya

You've got a few issues that may be affecting your relevance and therefore, your results in the SERPs.

As thindenim suggested, try to get some more inbound links from related sites or directories. Yahoo! lists 384 inbound links but Google only lists 20. Shoot for sites with a PR4 or better but take what you can get without linking reciprocally.

Always use relevant keywords when given the opportunity to specify link text, be they internal links or if you're placing a listing in a directory or submitting an article.

Here's what I've found to be a few more contributing factors:

• You do not have a link to an XML sitemap on your home page.
• You do not have a sitemap.xml for Google (or a urllist.txt file for Yahoo!) in the root of your server.
• You don't currently have a robots.txt file in place in the root of your server.
• You've put your CSS stylesheet and some embedded JavaScripts at the very top of your page.
• You've used embedded JavaScripts.
• At 514 characters, your meta description is a MILE too long for it to be effective.
• You've used the same title, description and keywords for every page in your site.
• No relevant <h1>, <h2> headings, bolded text, hot links within page content.

Add a Sitemap:
Why? It's the easiest and fastest way to ensure that the SE's are aware of ALL of the pages you want in their indexes. Resubmit whenever you add or delete pages or content. This tells the SE's that you're updating your site with freshy goodness! Yahoo! has their own version, called a urllist.txt file but they'll happily accept the sitemap.xml file as well.

How to Submit Your Site Map to Google, Yahoo! and MSN

Google's Robots.txt FAQ:
How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?

Why use external JavaScripts?
HTML Tip: Reduce The Size Of Your HEAD

Write a great meta description:
Pay attention to the 160 character limit for Google and the 200 character limit for MSN. Keep your most targeted keywords and phrases at the beginning of the description. When it comes to meta descriptions, most often, less is more. The shorter it is, the more focused and targeted it'll be.
SEOmoz | Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Use unique titles and descriptions in every page.
This will allow you to focus your attack for each and every product and category. It's key in optimizing for findability.

Reverse engineer the search process:

Think about it like a person looking for orange potpourri. What are they going to type in to find what they want? "potpourri", "orange potpourri", "orange scented potpourri" or "orange spice potpourri". In terms of relevance to the most likely search phrase, a great page title would be "orange scented potpourri" and viola! There's your page title.

"Orange Scented Potpourri"

Look at your description in the same way. Give them what they want to know before they click.

Ask yourself if this is all the information a customer would need:
"Scented with orange spice fragrance oil, this 1 lb gift bag is now only $10.95 at ForgetMeNot scented gifts."

At just 108 characters, you've still got some room to play around and work in some more targeted keywords.

Put 'em together and wuddyagot?
Assuming that the SE's spider the page and don't trim it, it should look something like this:



Headings and other on-page factors:
These are all simple things you can use to make a significant impact on how well you rank. You'll need to optimize them for each page.

In product pages, the <h1> heading should be the name of the product, or the manufacturer's make, model or part number, if that's how it's most likely to be found in a web search query. Category pages can simply use the category name itself. Again, focus is key.

Now, go get em!

.02

hi Dubbya!
Your suggestion has solved my problem.
Thanks a lot

[scanmonkey]

Originally Posted by gigigib

Good Advice Scanmonkey. I've been trying to get creative and write some articles, but I think I've got "writer's block"! I'll work on it tho. But, I'm afraid that I don't know what Deeplink means.

You should just hire some article writers. Some of them are pretty good and charge as little as 1 cent per word.

[Black Cat]

Cracking advice, even after all this time Dubbya, it would have been easier to point the poster in the direction of an older thread, so great applause most go to your informal and helpful reply.

Although i may not post myself that much, i still loiter with intent!

[ushuiah]

Prioritize to use the keyword fragrance oil in your sig. You need to have more backlink using this keyword as your anchor text.