Page rank question

[jasef]

Hi all,

pretty standard SEO question that I'm sure you are all getting asked day in, day out... the following page:

http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/

It's targetting keywords "portable dvd", "portable DVD player", "portable DVD players" & "portable dvd player for car". The page gets a grade A via Moz analytics On-page grader for the keywords. We have incoming links and I believe the page is structured correctly with all meta tags, H1 etc and tried not too overload the tags with keywords. We have the keywords in the URL etc.

We are still stuck on page 2 for all phrases.

Any thoughts or suggestions as to what we are doing wrong please?

Any help would be great.

[MikeRoberts]

I completely understand wanting to target both. Since your title tag is too long, it seems to me that it would be better to choose one of the other to shorten it. Keep it in page copy and meta description where natural though... don't go changing that. But your title needs to be closer to 64 characters long. Plus Google takes into account pixel width to determine how long a title can be before it gets truncated.

As to the redirect. Link equity does get passed with a 301. As long as the links are relevant, authoritative, and/or not spammy then that's a plus.

[jasef]

Thanks Mike.

External links... all of our external links point through to our old page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/products.jsp?cat=1 ... and this old URL 301's through to the new one and we have quite a lot of links through to the original URL (37 root domains and 419 total links). As I understood it that link juice would mostly be carried through to this page (I hope). So in theory we have good external links to this page...? Does it matter the age of these links... I couldn't see in Open Site Explorer whethere there was anything that aged the links and then down valued older links?

Historically I have found that to get a decent rank on a plural we have had to include the plural version otherwise the ranking lags behind quite a lot and is much further down on the SERPS. We used to be around position 1-4 on page 1 for "portable DVD players" on our old site up until a couple of years ago, but "portable DVD player" at that time was languishing down on page 3! So I have always targetted both singular and plural terms as separate keywords generally.

Page speed... we're on the case and totally agree with you there. Not good enough.

Thanks for your pointers. If you could comment on the external links / 301'd URL I would be grateful. I'm also surprised you think we should just target either the singular or plural for a keyword term. Do you think this is a more recent change for Google?

[jasef]

Cheers for the reply. I have added a link for this product category to the bottom of the site since its once of our main categories... trouble is theres only so much room down there and we cant do that for every category we want to rank for!

External links ... yes. And social shares... we have done little to no social SEO what so ever but just about to embark  on this now!

[MikeRoberts]

Your title tag is too long and repeating "portable dvd player" twice in the title looks unnatural personally. Yes, I know one is "player" and the other is "players" but Google already understands plurals so its not always necessary to hit both the singular and plural of something in copy.

Checking Google Page Speed Insights, you're scoring a 57/100 on the site. I'd look into some of their suggestions to improve user experience.

I'm not finding any external links to that page using Open Site Explorer. You might want to bolster the page with some good inlinks and social shares to give it a boost.

[S_Curtis]

Hi

Have you tried adding a text link to the page from your home page? You could have some SEO links at the bottom to "popular" pages you want Google to take more account of. We have seen small improvements when doing that. A few external links to that page would help event more. We've also had sucess with social sharing of pages, particulary on Google+.

Hope that helps?