Review my site | need help with Yahoo

[islandwholesaler]

Hi all,

I run a website (Wholesale Clothing and Urban Wear Wholesale: Men, Ladies and Kids Wholesale Urban Wear) that has consistantly been in the top 3 for most of my keywords in Yahoo for the last three years. This year for some reason we've been slipping in the Yahoo rankings and have fallen off of the top 10 ranking for some of our most important keywords: "wholesale clothing", "wholesale urban wear", "wholesale urban clothing" and others. Thankfully, we are still ok in Google.

We use basic SEO techniques (tag optimizing, keywords in text, links, etc. - no black hat stuff or crazy linking) and count on daily updated content (new and updated products) to get better rankings, but these days Yahoo! seems to be ignoring us. Are we doing something wrong?

Anyone have an idea what we need to be doing or improving to get better rankings in Yahoo? Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks in advance for all responses,

Sam

Wholesale Clothing and Urban Wear Wholesale: Men, Ladies and Kids Wholesale Urban Wear

[alhefner]

I found your site on page two of a yahoo search using "wholesale urban clothing" as a search term. It looks like the sites above you are making just slightly better use of that particular key phrase.

It's an issue of the small details! Page two isn't terrible but I can see where you would want to be on page one for that term. You seem to be in a competitive market and every advantage is needed.

Perhaps developing more pages with a narrow focus on each of the terms you want?

Perhaps do more keyword research and see if there are keywords that would wrok better?

Keep plugging! You are not doing too bad right now and I am confident that you will eventually find the combo that puts you higher in Yahoo SERP without damaging the other SERP's.

[islandwholesaler]

Hi Al,


By "developing more pages with a narrow focus on each of the terms" do you mean perhaps a new page with less/no subcatgories?

I agree with your assessment since I see pages that rank higher have a very focused, simple architecture (i.e. a side menu of generic page links like "urban wear" etc) and basic clothing links like "Shirts" "Pants" etc.

I think there are two other things that may be preventing us from ranking higher:

1. Our structure of main page links, sections and subsections all listed on the main page may be viewed as spammy in Yahoo.

2. We have the same footer (verbatim) on all pages except the shopping cart which I have read in several SEO posts may be viewed as spamming. The text in this section does not strengthen our clothing-related keywords since it is actually more about company policies.


I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks again.

[alhefner]

It may be that you could use more categories / subcategories in order to focus your search terms. The link to "wholesale clothing" is pretty generic but, if that page (I didn't look) then has a subcategory of "wholesale urban clothing" and the supporting title, description, text... then that page could surpass the competition.

Keep in mind that the search engines are looking for the page that best fits the search terms. Though a single page is just part of the whole site, it is the page content that gets it into the SERP.

If you were to try and get your index page ranked highly for every search phrase you want, things could get well out of hand.

Of course, if you are only concerned with gaining rank for the wholesale side of things, a few simple changes to the page content could certainly help.

I see your intro to your wholesale section on the index page might rank it for "wholesale clothing" or "urban clothing" but if you want the index to rank for "wholesale urban clothing" you are going to have to actually use that term verbatim to get above your competitors. Consider using it in an <h2> heading with a link. That gives you both things in one. Also use the term in the description text once.

Just a couple of ideas for you to think over.