Website not appearing in top 100
-
A few months ago, we launched the website www.gunnersdirect.com. The main keyword target for this website was "arsenal shirts", which you can see is at the very start of the page title.
In fairness, limited work has been done to the link building, etc due to time constaints so I would not expect it to rank at the top.
However, it does not appear to rank even in the top 100. This gives me major cause for concern, as surely Google should at least recognise the website, albeit in a lowly position?
Does this point to some underlying coding issue or penalty? What would you recommend we do to turn round it's fortunes?
-
Lonnie
Above are good points but I think on their own wont put him up the SERPS for the keyword combination alone as it has 40-60K searches per month by some pretty established UK players.
He should do them but there is a lot of additional work (aka slog) along with Aran's points above for a start
-
Hi Simon,
Here's a very simple rule of thumb to follow on any given web page. The most important part of any given web page is the title. Therefore if you want Arsenal Shirts as your focused keyword for your site, try this:
-
'Gunners Direct Arsenal Football Shirts' as your Title
-
You have no H1 tag, therefore make one that reads; Arsenal Football Shirts, Kits and more at Gunners Direct
-
Immediately after make a H2 tag (you have no H2 tag) that reads; "Arsenal Shirts, Football Shirts, Kits - Shop Online at Gunners Direct.
-
In your head tag, place commas inbetween each keyword. Do not capitalize any words in your meta description except for the 1st word of the sentence.
-
Add Arsenal Shirts at the beginning of your first sentence of your content. Spread the term at least 4 more times within your content. This is course depends on the volume of your content. Bold the keyword, Italize it and also underline the keyword at least once.
-
Add a cornerstone content page about Arsenal Shirts. Tell us why you created this site is an example. Make this page awesome! Recommend at least one authority site link (content driven) above the fold on this page.
-
Build at least 3 more unique articles about Arsenal Shirts which all point to your cornerstone content page.
-
Add Arsenal Shits at the bottom of your home page in the very last sentence.
If you do these things i describe above, it will not take long to get listed well with Google. It works everytime I do it, no matter how much content I have on the site.
Good luck!
-
-
To be honest I don't know. The search volume is in the 40K region sotough space for those two words.
If I was you (hate that phrase :-)) I would spend some effort on looking at something long tail I had a quick look at keywords for this and there are some 'nice' candidates with relatively modest compeition.
-
cheap Arsenal shirt
-
new Arsenal kit 2011
-
arsenal shirts cheap
-
arsenal shirt sale
-
-
As Kieran pointed out you have quite a bit of duplicate cotent, thus I expect you have been pushed right back in the SERPs.
Also the lack of links to your site could be an issue as your site currently carries very little authority, especially when compared to your competitors. But this is a good thing (better to work with no links than hudnreds of bad links!).
I like the site, its nice a clean., but one thing i did notice was the lack of social integration. I recommend you incorporate some kind of social sharing (i did recently and its definitley helped my SERPs).
You could also create some social accounts on twitter/facebook etc (don't know if you already have) and start talking to your potential customers (theres always alot of footy banter!)
Consider writing some original articles on Arsenal and getting them posted on other fans blogs (with a link back to your site of course).
Your niche is great for the amount of people whom you can engage socially, on twitter, blogs, facebook etc...mine is a real nightmare (coat hangers, who wants to talk about them?). Use the social side of things to your MASSIVE advantage.
-
Hi Kieran,
Thanks for your email, I will look into the product descriptions as I agree that could help. However, would you not expect Google to at least acknowledge the site for "arsenal shirts", even on page 10?
Simon
-
Hi Simon
As a Man City fan I had to be brave and open the site but it looks like a nicely built Zen Cart site and he calls to action are good (wont be buying one by the way).
You say main keyword target in your question and this is often asked here and my first advice is not to focus on a narrow keyword set. I would look at a list of keywords in the 3-4 word range and at least have list of 15-20 word sets and direct your pages in this direction.
The football / soccer shirt space is really busy and I would spread my wings in the keyword space a bit to try and capture some of the other keywords (I was prompted Arsenal Shirts for kids when I typed in a quick Google search)
I would also spend some serious time on your product descriptions and try and make them unique and richer for people and for search. For instance at random I picked
_emulate the skills of star players like Aaron Ramsey, Marouane Chamakh and Thomas Vermaelen. _
and there were at least 4-5 sites with this identical text (and yours wasn't even there). This does not help.
I would also look at making your URLs more search friendly. Zen Cart has some plugins to accomplish this for you and wouldn't hurt either.
http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&cPath=40_47&products_id=231
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How new website / blogs can earn backlinks?
Hi, As link wheels, link pyramids and paid links are penalized by google and the only chance to get back links is to earn them. My Question is that with a new website / blog, how a newbie with no relationships with established bloggers, can earn links? Because writing quality contents and detailed posts (e.g. more than 3000 words posts twice a month) still would benefits for those blogs having already traffic to share these contents and in case of new blog, due to very low traffic, it would take months or years to enter in the game. Please propose step by step strategy / plan / footprint for newly born website and marketers. Thanks
Link Building | | Kashif-Amin0 -
Links from Directory Websites with NoFollow Tag
In reviewing our root domain links, I noticed that many of the directories (like Yellow Pages, Insider Pages, Merchant Circle, etc) that there are no follow codes included in the link to our website. Is this a common practice for these directories? Also, I wanted to confirm that this would not help in our link building strategies with any relevant "link juice." Below is a copy and pasted (with some extra characters that shouldn't have copy and pasted), but the key note here is the no follow tag that was included in this link to our site. Visit Website Thanks as always MOZ Community - cheers!
Link Building | | Leithmarketing0 -
How Effective Are Links Between The Same Company's Websites With Different Domain Extensions?
Morning! The main competitor of an eCommerce site I'm working on has a total of 31 sites for 31 different countries. Each one of these sites has a different domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .it etc.), and every single one of these sites' pages links to all the other homepages through a dropdown menu on the navigation bar. When I pop the .co.uk URL (our main competitor) into Open Site Explorer, I'm advised they have a 45,079 links from 475 domains. If I look at 'just discovered' links, most are from their own sites - I guess MOZ picks these up every time a new page is created. Now, these guys are huge in the UK. They rank in the top 10 for pretty much every single search term and, to put it into some kind of perspective, their Search Metrics score is 33,000 compared to our measly 160! Don't get me wrong, they do get some decent links from authoritative sites, but it seem most of their links are from their own sites. How does Google view these? Does my competitor have these thousands of 'internal' backlinks to thank for their current position? I've just checked their .kr URL and this has 12.5 million(!) links from just 450 domains. Do every single one of these links pass equity? Or does Google just look at one from each domain? Thanks, Lewis
Link Building | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
1000 of links on my website ? is it good or bad
Hi guys my site: www.dorchdanola-netbutik.dk is a e-commerce store, and generally we have many links on all pages because of the many products and categories. Im not sure if this is actually bad or good? I've been told that it will definately harm my site when google crawls it. The thing is that google visit my site often and I still have good pageranks in google. So does it actually harm my site having all these products and categories? And what can I do about it if google see every page as duplicate content? I also link to my social pages like FB, G+, e.g. Should I put rel="nofollow" or rel="me" on these social links? Thanks guys!
Link Building | | Dorchdanola0 -
Company on top website, no hyperlink
Hi - my company's name and website have been mentioned on 3 major websites but there is no hyperlink. Does this totally destroy any SEO value of these mentions? So disappointing, since it's hard to ask a reporter to include a hyperlink / they usually can't.
Link Building | | smartsitting0 -
Linking between your own websites- yay or nay?
Hi Guys I have 4 different niche websites in the healthcare area and wondering is it a safe strategy to link between them? I'm not sure if this is frowned upon by the search engines. I have heard the term 'link wheel', but I'm not sure if this is what a link wheel would be. I do have 2 sites that are much more important than the other 2. One is a directory of practitioners and the other is my main site of my healthcare business. The 2 other websites are smaller niche markets that I also service. My directory was previously hurt by the Penguin update because I was using Linkvana and blog networks and the anchor text was too specific. I have discontinued using any blog networks or 'quick link' strategies. I'm now implementing a guest posting strategy on reputable websites. I want to do everything buy the book now and thought I should check before any new linking strategy. Thanks in advance! Clinton
Link Building | | ClintonP0 -
What are top 10 best link building places after penguin?
Can some one help on this. I am looking to build 1 way links to rank a new website. Besides blogging and social bookmarking can some one recommend what works post Panda and Penguin.
Link Building | | oneseocompany0 -
Should I interlink all the websites my company owns?
Our company has several websites where visitors can request quotes for home improvement. I'm thinking of making each site deeplink to each of our other sites, to create more linking domains and make all our sites help each other. Is this a good idea? Or will Google recognize that i'm only promoting our own websites and see this as a bad thing?
Link Building | | Skydreamer0