Am I missing something!?

[SEOMG]

I know there are no magic bullets when it comes to SEO, but I can't help wondering if I have done something stupid here...!

OK, so I really want to rank somewhere (in the future) for the term "Contemporary Garden Furniture"... It's competitive, so I know it'll be a marathon rather than a sprint, but I don't quite get what's going on at this stage in the race.

We are 1st in Bing for the term & 3rd in Yahoo. Now I know this does not mean much, but it does make me wonder why we are 286th in Google!!!

We do OK, & bring in traffic for longer-tail terms, but as part of the long-game, I'd love to understand where we are going wrong in the eyes of the big "G"..!

If we were 4th/5th page here, I wouldn't be posting this question, but we've built the site with SEO in mind, have a PR of 3 (I know if means v.little) and write all our own content. I'm wondering if it could have anything to do with the fact we don't link back to the homepage from within the site by using keyword anchor text..? We use standard logo/home links...

It would be great if anyone can see anything obviously wrong! I'll paypal a few beers over to anyone with a genuine idea..!!!

Best

Tom

[wige]

Google cares a lot more about off site elements than other search engines do. Probably your best bet would be to get high quality inbound text links, from pages that are on the topic of contemporary garden furniture, and contain those keywords within the link text, or at the very least near the link text.

[SEOMG]

Yeah, but with respect, we have been doing that & although I know that it's never 'done' as such, we have a reasonable amount of links from relevant sites with similar anchor text, so what I'm really looking for here is an idea as to why we are so far back in the SERPS, when a lot of our competitors have sites with less links/SEO work etc...

Like I say, if we were on page 5/6 etc, I would just get on with it, but I can't fathom why we are SO far back at present!

[wige]

How long has the site been up, with these backlinks in place?

[SEOMG]

The site has been up a good year now & for a good few long-tail phrases, we are ranking well (above sites much older and with more links etc), so it would seem all is OK in the main. I just can't fathom why Google is deeming our home page so off-target here...

We were 160th or around there a few weeks back, then we just dropped again! Nothiing relating to the home page changed & we've never tried any 'black-hat' link campaigns etc.

Odd - :-( ?!

[williamc]

98% of your external links come from exactly 3 websites. They are sitewide links on blogs. The blogs are relevent, but only a few of the links on each site are actually helping you much. You are going to need quite a few new links on different websites to compete. So out of approx. 800 external links, only about 15-20 are actually helping you in my opinion.

[SEOMG]

Cheers William - I know what you mean, but we've never courted links to date. I know 15-20 links is nothing much, but as you say, they are from reasonably relevant sources and I see many of the competition on the first few pages with less/poorer links...!

I know its a long game, I just can't understand why we are so very far back at this time. There are sites before us that may as well be optimized for toad-hurdling or something out there, they have so little to do with "contemporary garden furniture".

Appreciate your point though - inbound links are something we have to look at, but I always hoped we'd put a nice site together, then the links would come themselves after a year or two.

Cheers - Tom

[williamc]

I always hoped we'd put a nice site together, then the links would come themselves after a year or two.

Thats a common hope, unfortunately, to get people to link to you that way they first have to find your website. See the catch 22 there? You need to do some real link building to get the rankings to get the people to your site to have hopes of them wanting to link naturally. Then the next hope is that the naturally growing links will sustain the rankings you aquired the hard way.

[SEOMG]

Yeah, I know what you're saying & again, thanks for engaging with me on what's a pretty much 'piece of string' question...

We'll keep going with the links & see what happens. I still feel like something is odd about this at the moment. I'll keep you posted on changes if anything proves to 'fix' the 'problem'...

Best,

Tom

[kevinper]

I am in the US so after a search term I will type UK to get what I hope would be results if I was living where you do.

Here is a hint. You do not show up for Contemporary Garden Furniture but you DO come in 3rd for Contemporary Deck Chairs on Google.

Also, you have contemporary in your pages that should do well but you also need garden furniture. One idea is maybe to have on your pages, "From our Contemporary Garden Furniture Collection we present our Antibes Coffee Table." Just an example. You could make a whole section of Contemporary Garden Furniture or add the phrase in a few more places without spamming.

Another idea is to make another page where you are only trying for that search phrase. You could have a page on how to care for your contemporary garden furniture.

Basically, Google is not giving that phrase a high priority so you need to make it so Google will. It can be done.

[SemAdvance]

The site was built for SEO?????? That made me laugh after looking over the site, thank you I needed a good laugh.

A quick look at the coding tells me the bots are probably dying while trying to index your pages. The site WAS NOT built for SEO in any way shape or form.

Onsite SEO is still important to Google. They look for headlines, content, and links on the page using the target keyword term.

No where on your home page is your keyword term used, so it would be almost impossible to rank well for that term, without some heavy hitting anchor text link building.

Additionally whatever links you see your competitors may or may not have, does not mean those are all of the links Google values.... or if values any of those links. Working off assumptions won't help.

Further as was previously noted the very few anchor text links to your site won't move you up in the rankings much if at all.

[mgandy]

SemAdvance you don't have to be so harsh. We were all new and learning SEO at one point or another. Although I do agree with you that the site needs to be optimized better. The keyword Contemporary Garden Furniture is a fairly competitive keyword but Its possible to still get good rankings for. I would recommend optimizing the links, title tags, <h1> <h2> ... and keyword content on your site along with building backlinks. There are numerous ways to building links but I prefer creating on content blogs that have dofollow keywords links pointing towards your site.

Hope this helps

Thanks,

MG

[imvain2]

Although, I don't share SEOAdvance's methodology of bringing up observations, I do share some of his observations.

Like: What page was built with SEO in mind for the term Contemporary Garden Furniture?

I personally, haven't seen proof of the headline <h1> "SEO trick" that is repeated. Usually no proof is provided other than other people's opinion is always quoted. I'm not saying it does or doesn't work, I just haven't seen proof of it working.

With that being said, onsite SEO is something that is still valuable unless you can have inbound links from HUGE sites (like SEOAdance mentioned).

[andrew-bkk]

I can really understand this guy's problem. I'm at page 1 number 2 on Bing for my term, but half-way down page 2 for the same term on Google. It's a real bummer!

I like this guy's site: the photography is good and the design is clean, but it occurs to me that the yellow Flash bit ought to be replaced with a chunk of useful content. I'm sure site visitors would appreciate a bit of an introduction, and I'm sure Google would, too.

[billmarshall]

Well your site is missing something fairly obvious - text content! The home page has virtually none and the category level pages aren't much better. You only really get useful content at the product level and by that point you're too far away from the home page to have sufficient PageRank to matter for the more competitive keyword phrases. Nearly all your backlinks go to your home page so there's an imbalance there.

There are other issues (some fairly poor title tags in there and some of the links from the blogs are images and look very like paid links) but it's likely to be that fundamental lack of text content at the front of the site that matters most. Ditch that Flash on the home page and tell people and search engines what your site is about.

cheers

[SEOMG]

Point taken Semadvance & I'm glad it gave you a laugh old boy!

I guess what I meant when I said SEO had been considered with this site, is that I tried to optimize each product page for a specific term, made sure I created original content, created optimized title/description/alt tags etc... In short, I waas mindful of the (admittedly small) amount I know so far & made sure there was no spammy elements.

What's interests me here are 2 main points...

1) Id say the larger percentage of "Home Pages" for sites similar to mine are also similar in that they rarely have much content. I feel a bit daft now after SemAdvance has brought to light the lack of content on this page, but none of my competitors have made any effort to add content in this way... (The top ranking site has no content on fact and is a Flash based site !).

2) What we are actually saying is that I need to create extra content on the home page in order to make headway with the search engines. I was always under the impression that anything added purely for search engines was probably a short-term strategy, so was hesitant to add a load of surplus text on the home page.

In short, I need to sort the home page content & cheers for the pointers. I guess I always compared myself to the competition however & it's odd that such well-ranking competitors don't seem to do this...

SemAdvance - one final question, I get your point on the content & genuine thanks for the kick up the rear on that, but you mentioned a look at the code suggested spiders would have problems. Can you expand at all. I would be chuffed to raise this with the developer team we use!!

Tom

[williamc]

Tom, theres nothing in the code that would hinder googlebot in the least. The links on your page are easily spiderable and I find no missing or damaged tags in the least.

[SEOMG]

Big thanks for input all... For product pages with content, I rank quite well, so it's odd that I assumed my home page would be different & would rank with minimal content!

William, thanks for the nod on the code - much appreciated.

I'll work on the homepage content & see where it takes us..!

Best, Tom

[williamc]

Just do not neglect the links. You need far more of them.

[deepsand]

A quick look at the coding tells me the bots are probably dying while trying to index your pages.
Setting aside the fact that 'bots are just dumb beasts which simply fetch stuff like a browser does, precisely what is it that you believe would befuddle an indexing engine?

Bear in mind that, if a text only browser can distinguish between code and content, then so too can any and all components of an SE.

[SemAdvance]

SemAdvance you don't have to be so harsh. We were all new and learning SEO at one point or another.

MG

I was not being harsh, I was being honest, and if you note I thanked him for the laugh, harsh would have been not thanking him. I cut to the chase and sometimes that may appear to be mean spirited but its not meant that way. One thing with the Internet as a form of communication is user intent is often misconstrued by thers at times.



Setting aside the fact that 'bots are just dumb beasts which simply fetch stuff like a browser does, precisely what is it that you believe would befuddle an indexing engine?

Bear in mind that, if a text only browser can distinguish between code and content, then so too can any and all components of an SE.

There are a couple issues that came across but the biggest would appear to be in the head tag.

<base href="h ttp://w ww. bau-outdoors.co.uk:80/" /> (spaces added to prevent parsing)

Xenu cannot find it as a link however it reports it has over 18,000 links pointing to it and the index page has a couple of 100 more. ( had to stop the fetch)

I believe this creates two scenarios

1. Infinite loop.......

2. Manufactured false duplicate content....but the SE cannot figure that out.

Other issues I see are invalid coding of some links and the extremely long urls for the images may cause some issues.




SemAdvance - one final question, I get your point on the content & genuine thanks for the kick up the rear on that, but you mentioned a look at the code suggested spiders would have problems. Can you expand at all. I would be chuffed to raise this with the developer team we use!!

Tom

You do not need to add a load of extra content, but you would want to have a paragraph or two if possible using the keyword several times within.

Heading tags usage might offer an easier alternative......

Your top two images should use the keyword as alt text ie "contemporary garden furniture image" the rest of the alt tags should be empty or simply use the word image.

Looking at the link counts to the home page it would also appear you are under a filter for tripping a threshold in the amount of links acquired. Even though it is inadvertent on your part, Search Engines maintain a database of historical and empirical data and use that data to determine a baseline, and if your site exceeds that number significantly, it could cause a filter to be applied.

By your own statement of interior pages ranking well and where we see normalized inbound link counts for these pages (under 50 for most), this would seem to validate the home page being under filter.

Hope that helps.

[williamc]

Actually looking over the past 2 years he has aquired links fairly steadily with only a few spikes, apparently when large sites applied a sitewide links to his site. Nothing that unusual there. No filters suggested from that either, it is actually quite common. The site currently has 2,213 links, has lost in the neighborhood of 150 in the past. Not hardly an overly high number at all for almost 2 years. Maybe you dont use majestic, raven, linkrep, or the like to get accurate counts?

As for the base href, that is compliant, tho the web port of 80 is really not needed, it does not hurt anything in the least as far as reliable spiders go. I have never found zenu's internal spider to be overly reliable. Unix wget is however when allowing it to recurse and traverse all links, and that shows there being just over 300 pages in the site. Right around the same as google itself sees, showing that google has no issues in spidering the pages, and traversing the navigational system.

I am interesting in knowing which links you seem to think are 'invalid coding', being that I see not a single one that is not html1.1 compliant..

The image filenames, while long, are not that abnormal either, and would not hinder an engines bot either. I know for a fact it would not hinder any bot I wrote, and I still feel as tho all 3 major engines spiders are far better than I would code for my normal chores and needs.

And it is standard for interior pages to only have links from the homepage and other internal pages. It is not abnormal in the least for 100% of the inbound links for a website to be pointed at the index page either, in fact it was the normal way of doing things before deep linking became the norm, and again, does NOT show any suggestion of a filter as such.

[williamc]

SEOMG our internal reporter does show a few things you might want to get on top of tho.




Report Last updated February 21st at 7:00am
Page Rank: 3
Pages In Google: 317
All Inbound Links 2,499
External Links 2,213
Wikipedia Links 0
Government Links 0
Education Links 0
Alexa Rating 2,120,820
Alexa Links* 23
Technorati Blog Mentions: 0
Twitter Mentions: 0

Cache
Archive.org: bau-outdoors.co.uk (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bau-outdoors.co.uk)
Google bau-outdoors.co.uk (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLC,GGLC:1970-01,GGLC:en&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fbau-outdoors.co.uk)

Owner Info
Owner: Bau Associates
Phone Number:
Email: info@bau-outdoors.co.uk

On Page Info
Characters in Title 52
Page Title Contemporary garden furniture range at Bau Outdoors
Total Page Size 199,654 KB
Nunber of Objects 33
Code to Text Ratio 13.86%
HTML Size 30,292 bytes
Size of HTML Images 26,973 bytes
Size of CSS Files 30,318 bytes
Size of CSS images 4,421 bytes

[SEOMG]

Once again, many thanks for taking the time to comment on this.

Williamc, really appreciate your opinions & report. I'll get on it and see how we go. SemAdvance, your response always seems good natured to me! I make a number of people laugh I'm afraid! Cheers...

Tom