SERPS for secondary keywords but not for primary

[dartman]

I help a friend with her website and here is the situation specific to Google-
We can not find the site on a serp for her primary keyword (beaded jewelry) but we serp around page 20 for a secondary kw (handcrafted beaded jewelry) and have some decent serps for other secondary kw's.

On the primary kw (beaded jewelry) I have taken the time to run thru every serp page available on G (10 pages X 100 results per page) and could not find the site (www.jadesbeadedjewelry.com) listed. The site is young (Feb 06) and has PR3 on main page, PR2 on many internal pages. The site has 20+ pages indexed in G and we submit a sitemap to G on a regular basis. The IBL campaign has been ongoing and we pretty much limit the linking to good PR/SERP ranking sites rather then linking just for the sake of linking.

I'm not asking for a site review but for comments that may explain why G is picking up on secondary keywords rather then the primary.
I'd guess the site isn't supplemental or sandboxed.

MSN initially picked up the primary keyword and serped the site to pg1 however it's now drifted to between pg10 and 20.
Yahoo results are nuts. It serps internal pages rather then the main page for the primary keyword.

I'm sure this is a lot of information to digest but hoping some of the resident experts can shed some light on what's going on.

[meinking22]

Performance in SERPS is all about beating your competition. It sounds like your content is good, not sure how solid the on-page SEO is, but your off-page SEO plays a major part in it as well. I don't think it's strange at all that you are performing very well in secondary keyword phrases, but aren't a blip on the map for your primary keyword phrase. If I were you, I would delve more into the analytics of your competition and their SEO strategies to see what they are doing to score for the primary keyword phrase positions. That will tell you what you need to know.

Steve

[dartman]

Thanks Steve.
Believe me that I've researched many, many sites for the kw and frankly I do not see much in the way of good seo strategy - rather, I see a lot of poor seo. The conclusions I've drawn so far are that the top competing "beaded jewelry" sites have 1. much longer history and 2. a tremendous amount of link activity.
I have viewed the source and content of a lot of other websites for the same kw and feel the site we have is competitive to the point of content, design and navigation. I'm amazed that I find PR5 sites for this kw out around pg 70 of the serps. Go figure. So either something is missing or it's just going to be a wait and see for our site to gain age and more links in order to make some movement into the G results.
Appreciate the comment Steve but I still have the white flag waving. Other comments would certainly be appreciated.
Rick

[dartman]

For such an opinionated forum I find it odd that there has been only 1 response on this thread. Are all the experts too busy or just hesitating to take a stab at commenting. I would think the subject is a real life scenario - where the correct things were done in terms of seo but the results were not exactly what expected. If this situation happened to you, what would you do?
Rick

[Webnauts]

Rick, I do not know who do you mean with experts here, but here are some tips I can give you on-the-fly:

1. You've repeated keywords in your title. It's best to use your keyword phrase only 1 time in your title tag.

2. Your keyword density in your body is too low.
In order for your page to score high in the rankings with Google, you'll need to use your keyword phrase in the tags and body text of the page.

Currently, your keyword density for the body text is low.

Spam proof keyword density is between 3-4%.

So, your BEST bet when considering keyword density is to always see what the keyword weight is for top ranking sites for your keyword phrase in this engine and experiment with your percentages over time.

Remember, however, that keyword weight is just ONE piece of the puzzle, and not the most important piece either. Links in to your site from sites in your same theme area from sites that have good PageRank are more important for Google than keyword density.

Once again, you have to experiment over time and may want to consider evaluating what the keyword weight is for top ranking sites for your keyword phrase in this engine, then adjust your keyword weight accordingly.

3. Google will index dynamic content and will crawl pages with question marks or cgi references. While Google does crawl dynamic pages, they usually go only one level deep into a dynamic system. So be sure and include your dynamic pages URL on a site map, using text links to each of the dynamic URL's.

4. You meta tags do not seem to be search engine friendly. You can get some help using our tool here: http://www.seoworkers.com/tool/analyzer.html

[incrediblehelp]

Not sure what you mean here. Google and other SE's will rank pages on multiple keywords. They do see it as primary versus secondary. They see it in relevancy only. If the links to the page and the on page SEO is relevant to 1-2-3 keywords you will rank for all of them.

Now with that being sad it should be easier, competition wise, to rank for "handcrafted beaded jewelry" over "beaded jewelry". This alone could be the reason for your website to ranks for the secondary keyword better.

The bottom-line is that you were correct on your website being very young. Build your content and your IBL's will come, which will lead to high rankings in Google.

[dartman]

Thanks for the tips.

To try and illustrate a bit better - let's say my most imortant keyword was 'corvette' but my content made reference to 'chevrolet corvette'. I would bank on the term 'corvette' as the kw most people would use in a search. The problem lies in the fact that I may SERP very well for 'chevrolet corvette' but not SERP at all for just 'corvette'.

This takes me to my initial post here - we SERP very well for 'handcrafted beaded jewelry' but not at all for 'beaded jewelry' which is the most used kw for our product category.

I understand relevancy as Incred mentioned but here we have a 3 word phrase that "includes" the 2 word phrase we most want to do well on in the SERP but we do not find a result for the 2 word phrase AT ALL in the serps.

Hopefully I've clarified my question a bit better so if there are any additional comments or suggestions it will be most appreciated.

Rick

[incrediblehelp]

Well I don't see you ranking for either term. Also looking at the rankings the websites in the top 20 look pretty similar for both keywords, meaning if you get ranking for one more than likely have ranking for the other one.

Do you have a lot of IBL's with "beaded jewelry" in it?

[dartman]

Do you have a lot of IBL's with "beaded jewelry" in it?

Most all of the IBL's (25 or so) use "Jades Creations Handcrafted Beaded Jewelry" as the anchor text.
See CrankyDaves page here as an ex:
http://www.chainzonline.com/misc/links3.asp

A G search for "handcrafted beaded jewelry" gives us an organic result on Pg 8.
For "beaded jewelry" - nowhere to be found in the first 1000 results.
The index page has PR3.

The question which I thought was put rather simply at least twice in this thread is:
Can someone comment on why we get a Pg 8 organic listing for "handcrafted beaded jewelry" but no organic listing for "beaded jewelry".

Rick

[dartman]

Rick, I do not know who do you mean with experts here..

There are many of you that have way more seo expertise then I do. My knowledge comes from reading and researching and much of what I find in WPW from folks like yourself, Web, have been very useful in my maintenance of 3 websites.

2. Your keyword density in your body is too low. In order for your page to score high in the rankings with Google, you'll need to use your keyword phrase in the tags and body text of the page. Currently, your keyword density for the body text is low.

The kw density for "beaded" & "jewelry" was at 12% which I thought was a bit on the high side. In reading the page content these words were often repeated too much from a viewers perspective and started to sound a bit too repetitive so I cut back a bit and the resulting kw density was 9%. This includes the kw phrase "beaded jewelry" used in just about every title and alt tag.
I've reviewed some of the top ranked pages and find some have less density and some have more. I have to draw the line at repeating the same words over and over in the viewable content just for the sake of a SE. Then again I suppose we could come up with some additional main page content to pepper in more kw density that doesn't look like nonsense.

Links in to your site from sites in your same theme area from sites that have good PageRank are more important for Google than keyword density.

We have IBL's from the several of the top sites in our category. Beyond that we focus on exchanging links with sites that
have good PR (3+).

Thanks for the tips Web.

Rick