Ahead in all metrics, and not even close

[thedjbay]

For my chosen keyword(s), I rank below the #1 entry by far, am a little beneath the #2 in all metrics, but way ahead of the #3 entry in all metrics (domain authority, page authority, links, etc...). I don't even come close to the first page, however.

I'm figuring there's something horribly wrong (and probably obvious) that I'm doing and just not seeing.

The site in question is www.thedjbay.com and the most important keyword of choice is "tampa dj."

I'm not sure if maybe there's some other metric I'm not getting, or something really bad I'm doing with my site overall.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[RyanKent]

I am doing my best here Marc but I am not entirely clear on what information I can share that has not already been provided in this Q&A.

Google crawls the web and adds web pages to its index. When a user performs a search query, Google then offers the "best" result based on numerous factors such as relevancy, quality factors, trust factors, importance of page, etc.

There are over 200 metrics which are evaluated to determine ranking. One of those factors is the title. If a title exactly matches the searcher's query, then the ranking will benefit from that match as Google sees the page as more likely to be relevant.

Does that help? If not, first try reading the following article: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag. If you still desire help, please let me know exactly what information I can share that will assist you.

[RyanKent]

Should page title be exact match page title and/or your targeted keyword?

I am not entirely clear on the question. Your page title should reflect the keyword focus of your page.

With respect to EMDs, that is not an area I care to focus. If you follow the rest of SEO best practices, you can rank at the top without an EMD.

[ShaMenz]

Awesome! Last I heard the new version was due sometime this week.

Thanks for that

[RyanKent]

I am using FF 6.0

I believe SEOmoz resolved the compatibility issue. If not, there is a compatibility add-on you can use to make it work, or there is a copy/paste 1 line of code hack you can use as well. Try it and if it doesn't work I'll look up the article which has the information.

[ShaMenz]

OMG! I'm gonna lose my mind!

I had not realized it was there and of course right now I have no MozBar for FF due to the update problem, or are you by chance using Chrome Ryan?

[RyanKent]

Sha, I agree with your assessment 100%. I would just like to add keyword highlighting is part of the MozBar. The 3rd icon (a pen) shows the mouse-over text as "Highlight Links or Text". Select the last option (Keyword Highlight) and you will find that functionality.

[ShaMenz]

hmmm...all good comments, but have you thought about the possibility that you may have a problem with keyword stuffing?

I count 58 instances of "Tampa" in the home page code, 172 instances of "DJ" and 18 instances of "Tampa DJ"

What is perhaps more important from the Search engines' point of view is that the reason I noticed the over use of these terms is that the text flow and usability has been quite severely impacted.The text doesnt flow naturally when you read it and by the time I got to the end of the footer menu I really didn't want to ever see the word Tampa again 8(

It is a very easy thing to get so caught up in finding ways to use your keyword terms that you lose track of how many times you have already done it. There are a couple of tools you could use to help sort this problem:

• If you have a campaign running for the site in the SEOmoz Pro App, make sure you have your chosen keywords loaded and then use the On-page feature to identify and correct problems. (If you don't have paid Pro you can always check out the SEOmoz 30 Day Free Trial)

• OOPS! Scratch that next bit - Ryan just pointed out that the highlight feature is now in my beloved MozBar...YES!! One less bar I need to keep installed 8). I keep the SEOBook Toolbar for Firefox installed so I can use its Use the keyword highlighting feature in the MozBar (Check Ryan's post below for how to find it). Basically, you type your chosen term into the toolbar, click the highlighting pen and UH OH!! now you can see that there might be a few too many instances of your term on the page...  This is actually a tool I find really handy and easy to use - it's actually the only thing I wish was in the Mozbar (HINT, HINT Mozzers!!)

Hope this helps,

Sha

[oznappies]

You site looks great, quite clean and fitting the colour and mood for a dj. There are a couple of things though I notice as a web developer:

1. Your youtube links are not embeded (from a facebook feed), so someone clicking on them leaves your site - you should have these embeded so they can be played on your page with out leaving it and use links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq6gFOXeOFk&rel=0 for the embeded videos. The rel=0 means when someone plays your video they will not see related videos when it ends. Those related videos could be from competitors.

2. Some of you anchor text text start 'Click here ...' that is really not strong key word use unless you are trying to rank for the keyword 'click here'. If you look at Google adwords you can find other keywords that Google thinks are a close match for the one you are targeting and then see how many people use that keyword. These would be more useful than the click here keywords now.

3. You are getting 2 404 errors - loader-small.gif and like.gif and most images do not have preset width and heights which means the page continually adjusts size as images are loaded on the first visit.

4. You may also want to consider HTML5 sectional markup to tell Google where the important content (section,article) is on the page and what is just navigation (nav) or sidebar (aside) content. Not sure if Google gives weight to this yet, but they will at some point.

Hope that help with the usability side of the site.

[SteveOllington]

There's a lot of code to crawl through before you reach the indexable content. I remember reading somewhere that there is a way to externalize viewstate, that might help.

You might want some internal links with the keyword in the anchor text pointing to the page... i.e. your sitemap could, instead of just "home" be "Tampa DJ Homepage" or something.

You don't have many linking root domains, and of your incoming links, you need a few that have the keyword in their anchor text too.

[asimahme]

Agreed and well said Ryan.  If your performing DJ events, try to ask for a link back from your client or wherever you are hosting your services.  Also you could run a DJ contest for best mixes in 30 sec's on youtube or in a audio format, and target all DJ bloggers/music bloggers and have them send you their audio/video's that will be part of the contest, or have them host it on their website and link back to you.

Either way just be creative in your linkbuilding efforts. I'm sure you'll find ways to build links to this page.

Hope my random comments help

[RyanKent]

That page is in Google's index. Do a search "thedjbay/tampa-dj" and it appears as the #3 result.

Your next step is to optimize the page. Ideally you want only one page on your site to be the focus of any given keyword search. Since you have a "tampa dj" page, focus 100% of your efforts on that page. When you use "tampa dj" on other pages, try to limit the use to only once or twice. When it is used on other pages, use anchor text to point to your tampa-dj page. Also, try to get some local links pointing to that page with good anchor text.

In the end, make sure you are not competing with yourself (cannibalization) for the "tampa dj" term. Only one page on your site should have that phrase in it's title.

[thedjbay]

The site has been up for about two years, but I wasn't actively working on SEO for it until about 3 months ago. The link building, so far, has been a painfully slow process.

[thedjbay]

Thanks! I've gone ahead and tried that bit about the title. Unfortunately I can't do anything about the domain -- pretty much all the good domains were already taken. I actually made a page on my site called http://www.thedjbay.com/tampa-dj about two weeks ago, though I imagine that hasn't been crawled yet.

[RyanKent]

Hi Lawrence.

It sounds like you want to compare your site (ranked 24 in Google) with the #2 and #3 sites ranked for "tampa dj". I notice the following major on page factors:

#2 site: mytampadj.com Title: Tampa DJ - Complete Music DJ and Video. URL mytampadj.com

**#3 site: spinmasterdj.com ** Title: Tampa Bay DJ Events - Flawless Weddings and Receptions.

#24 site: thedjbay.com Title: Find a Professional Tampa Bay DJ | The DJ Bay - A Tampa DJ Service

A page's title is a very important ranking factor. There are many factors involved in the title. The major ones I will highlight are whether there is an exact match, whether the keywords are used in the title as a non-exact match, the position of the keywords in the title, and the number of words in the title.

Your title has 13 words, so the weighting of each word is diluted. Also, "Tampa DJ" is at the end of your title. If you wanted the best ranking title possible purely for SEO ranking of "tampa dj" then your title should be "Tampa DJ". Naturally you also need a title which looks good for your site, and you have a competitor's site named "TampaDJ.com" so those are considerations. Notice the title of the #1 site? "DJ Tampa FL - Tampa DJ, Tampa DJs". Their title has the fewest number of words, matches the exact phrase once and partial match twice more.

Another important factor is the URL. The #2 ranked site has the advantage of having your search term in their URL.

My best suggestion would be to emulate the #1 ranked site as much as possible. Specifically, create a unique page on your site for the search term "Tampa DJ". The URL should be something like: http://www.thedjbay.com/tampa-dj

If you really wanted to focus 100% on ranking as high as possible, setting aside all other factors, then the page title should be "Tampa DJ". A more reasonable title would be "Tampa DJ | TheDJBay".

There are other factors you can adjust, but the major starting point would be the URL and Title.

[asimahme]

From what I am seeing it looks like the other websites are beating you in terms of incoming links, and the amount of different root domains linking to their website.

If you work on gaining more incoming links from different root domains and improve your domain authority as a whole, than you should see a growth in rankings.

I am not sure how old or new your website is but that may play a factor as well.

That's just my two cents.