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
-
Google isn't crawling my website page
I have been trying to get indexed my inner page's title tag but still I cannot see this. It has been almost a week. I have done "Fetch as Google" even though I cannot see this. What can be the reason?
Link Building | | ksmith880 -
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 -
Google Don't allow to publish duplicate content for other website?
Hi All, How can share other website content in our website and same for other user, how can share our content on his website? Everyone is saying, sharing content will be good but Google saying you can add duplicate content so i want to know process for content sharing to earning natural links. Thanks, Akhilesh
Link Building | | dotlineseo0 -
How do websites get links here...
Does anyone know how people get into the "Top Links on This Topic" section of the Huffington Post? I can see that the "Around the Web" section is curated by someone, in this case "Jeff Muskus" but there is no indication how the Top Links on This Topic appear on a page. The only thing I noticed is that the original article appearing in HP is almost a year older than any of the referenced links. Image: http://epicscripts.com/HuffPo.jpg Original link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/abuse-victim-lawsuit-trea_n_549542.html
Link Building | | cgman0 -
Who can advise in real-time delay until rich text snippets first appear?
Community, Has anyone here implemented rich snippets for clients/own properties and can advise how long it took for them to appear in Google Thanks
Link Building | | tomypro0 -
Do No follow links from social media platforms transfer authority or value when they link to third party websites?
With social media playing a bigger role in SEO (since the Panda, Penguin updates etc) and how search engines rank sites now, does anybody know why Twitter for instance has 'no follow' when I check my client's websites under 'inbound links' on Open Site Explorer?
Link Building | | caroline19770 -
Where to start on building links for a news website? Should I focus on promoting individual articles or create linkbait and create friends with influencial bloggers/editors/ and news websites in the same niche?
Where to start on building links for a news website? Should I focus on promoting individual articles or create linkbait and create friends with influential blogger/editors/ and news websites in the same niche?
Link Building | | purch0 -
Duplicate content when uploading articles on other websites
Hi, We regularly write articles on our website and then submit them to different websites with link backs or sometimes without link backs. If google crawls these websites and our website, will it penalise us for duplicate content? Does it make a difference if we put link back to our site or not? If Google sees it as duplicate content, what should we do as a solution? Thanks
Link Building | | Essentia0