Trying to Optimize my site for one keyword any advice please
-
Hi, we are trying to optimize our site www.in2town.co.uk for the keyword of lifestyle magazine.
We are having trouble with this. We were last year number one in google for the keyword and then the end of last year we went to position four and now we are on the bottom of the second page and we are not sure what is happening.
here is the text view of the site
I am just wondering if we need to do a better description of the lifestyle magazine at the top as i know it says you should have your keyword within the first 100 words
Any help on trying to solve this problem and get the page back where it belongs will be great.
I know we have a lot of text on the page so google maybe finding it hard to find out what keywords are what but the only keyword we are interested in this page is lifestyle magazine, in the near future we would be looking at including lifestyle news
many thanks
-
thank you for this. so you are saying that i should have in2town before each title, is this in the url or on the page. so for example if we look at the following page
the title in the url is
gastric-band-surgery-patient-from-cleethorpes-awarded-damages-after-surgery-went-wrong
on site page title is
NHS Gastric Band Bypass Patient Awarded £35,000 Over Complications.
are you saying i should have in2town before the title, so it would look like, In2town
In2town NHS Gastric Band Bypass Patient Awarded £35,000 Over Complications.
or in the url. never seen this before would love to see an example.
Last year before we had problems with our hosting company where a huge mistake was made, long story but we lost thousands of pages, we were pr4 but now we are pr3
what keywords would you aim for on the home page.
This is all great advice, thank you for this, this advice is allowing me to make things better, and we are in the process of making the site bigger and better and trying to make it one of the best magazines out there.
-
Hey Diane, my advice:
First of all, if you are just trying to optimize the homepage for "lifestyle magazine", I would take out all the extra keywords from your title:
"Lifestyle Magazine | In2town".
The reason I would include the brand name is because Google is increasingly looking at identifying brands as a ranking signal. I would also include your brand name in all the titles in your site, so "Article Name | In2town". You want Google to see you as the definitive brand for this category.
Secondly, I notice that your site is only PR3. When I search for "lifestyle magazine", all the top sites are PR4-6. This is a fairly competitive keyword. You need to get higher authority links if you want Google to see you as an authority.
Thirdly, do everything you can to make your site the best in its category. Is your site really the best lifestyle magazine out there? If not, why should Google rank you #1? Increasingly it is becoming more difficult to "game" Google because they look at things like social shares, user metrics, etc. The best way to attain these metrics is to have an awesome site that users will rave about and generate these signals.
Finally, while it can feel good to rank for head terms like "lifestyle magazine", you will probably find that people searching for the term may not be your highest converting traffic. The traffic is not even that high. It's probably a better strategy to rank for hundreds of terms related to having a great lifestyle than ranking for the broad "lifestyle magazine" term.
-
can you give me an example of the way you would change some of our titles
-
From my initial glance, it does look a little like you are overoptimising for lifestyle magazine.
If it were my site, I would be rethinking my approach on that keyword altogether.
I would concentrate heavily on optimising all the articles for the content that they represent. For example, the article, members of staff too scared to take time off work. I would be looking at changing you title tag and optimising the content to appeal to people searching for articles, news, tipes etc specifically around that subject matter. You'd need to get creative for each one and do the research into what the exact message of each article is and who your audience is. What might they be searching for etc.
The title tags of each article do not need to be the title of the article. I would start with optimising each article one by one. The backlinks will come as your readers find exactly what they are looking for on an article by article basis.
If you optimise the content on your site for what it actually is, you will become known as a lifestyle magazine just as a matter of course. I'm not saying don't optimise for that, but I think you are focussing on the wrong topic.
If you do find people nicking your articles, try sending them a polite message telling them you have no problems with them borrowing your content as long as they link back. If they don't, give them the heavier email!
-
the article you have listed, this article was done a long time ago which we put on article base, the link is in the author box, not sure what is wrong with it, would love to learn what the problem is so in the future if we put any more articles on there, we will know
-
we have not received a penalty we know that much. if you were going to optimize this page, what would you do what we have not done.
-
one of the things we have had is people are sharing our content but basically not giving us any links and instead stealing the content. we have to keep to checks all the time and stop people from doing this
i have tried to make sure that the home page is not over optimized and as far as i can see it is not. i have put it through the seomoz tools as well.
I think the problem maybe is that looking at the page, google is not sure what it is with all the different text and articles we have on there, the word lifestyle magazine is not shown that often
-
based off what you said I bet you over optimized your site for "lifestyle magazine". Like Richard said the best way of receiving links is having a magazine that beats your your competitors. Just to throw it out there people may be more willing to share your website content if the sharing icons weren't so discombobulated at the top. I would also think about using such a harsh black font color and font size. Makes it hard to read if someone is reading a longer article.
-
You have an quite a bit of unnatural Anchor Text with the key phrase "lifestyle magazine"
Just 2 examples (but there are many more)
http://www.young-baby-how-to-succeed.com/One_in_Ten_Parents_Do_not_Sterilise_Their_Babys_Bottle.html (unnatural text only used to fool Google)
http://katyroofers.net/resources.php?cid=8&page=4 (spammy looking page)
I have seen much worse than this but it might be worth submitting a reconsideration request to Google to see if you have been given a penalty.
If this is not the case you need to "produce a magazine that is much more popular than the competition and acquire higher quality links."
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
-
Meta keywords shown in Google SERPS as site description
I'm seeing Google display meta-keywords in the SERP description for some sites (at least a half dozen that I've checked). I BELIEVE IT IS AN AJAX ISSUE BECAUSE: The sites all use AJAX to display content. So the meta-keywords are in the header, and the javascript that displays the content. Non-AJAX parts of the site display properly in Google SERPS The meta-keywords don't visibly appear anywhere on the page. When I turn off images and Javascript in Chrome I don't see any hidden keyword text. I BELIEVE IT IS A GOOGLE-SPECIFIC ISSUE BECAUSE: Each site displays properly in Bing and Yahoo SERPS - the meta-description is the description. However, (as expected) I see the same strange meta-keyword activity in Aol search In Screaming Frog's SERP preview I see the meta-description as the description. Google has been ignoring met-keywords for years. Any idea why it's appearing in the SERPS for these AJAX powered sites? I found one other person who saw that Google may be reading and displaying their content in AJAX even though that content is meant to appear on a different "page". No one on that Google Forum seemed to understand the person's problem. The only reason I get it is because now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. I know the Moz community can do better, so i'm posting about it here.
Technical SEO | | AlexCobb0 -
Two Sites - One Domain
I just want to be sure, but if I install a Wordpress blog in a subfolder of a HTML site, Google will see that as one site, not two different sites, correct? Even if there is two index files?
Technical SEO | | jshiraz0 -
Photography Sites with Same Developer - Why Is One Ranking & Other Not?
I'm currently confused about the difference in ranking between two competing sites, created by the same agency. http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home (302 redirected from http://jmayphoto.com...yeah) is not ranking well, and I'm not surprised. However, competitor http://www.shanrenee.com/ is ranking within the top 5 spots for a primary target keyword (dallas wedding photographer) and I don't understand how it's doing so well. I definitely see differences, but not enough to explain how Shan Renee is one page. What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
What if my brand name is my keyword?
Referencing the new 'over optimization' penalties.. What if your company name was "Buy a Burrito" and your website website was buyaburrito.com (not a real site), and your main keyphrase was "buy a burrito". Will Google treat all Branded Terms as exact or phrase match keywords and penalize you?
Technical SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Www. version of my site shows nothing in Open Site Explorer
When I first setup my site the domain was learnbonds.com. I moved hosts a couple of months ago and as part of the process I asked them to make the site show as www.learnbonds.com which they did. Now however when I goto www.learnbonds.com in open site explorer it says there is no data. When I enter learnbonds.com into open site explorer it gives me data but says that the site has been redirected to the www. version which shows no data. Also in google webmaster when I try to set the preferred domain as the www. version it gives me the following message: Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.learnbonds.com/. Please verify http://www.learnbonds.com/. I am concerned that this is hurting my SEO and would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks Dave
Technical SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Remove Site from Google
How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
One Page - Targeting Multiple Low Searched Keywords.
Hi, First "Question" on SEOmoz, A client has requested me to have all the traffic going to the main/home page. In total its 25 Keywords and competition is pretty low, lets say "Builder In City", all the keywords are the sames except for the citys. "Builder In London" "Builder in Birmingham" Builder in Cardiff" .. and so on. Will it be ok and do-able to target 1 homepage with 25 keywords and expect decent results.
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0