Trying to Optimize my site for one keyword any advice please

[ClaireH-184886]

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

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5U281SBmDlUJ:www.in2town.co.uk/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=uk&strip=1

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

[ClaireH-184886]

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

http://www.in2town.co.uk/gastric-hypno-band/gastric-band-surgery-patient-from-cleethorpes-awarded-damages-after-surgery-went-wrong

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.

[TakeshiYoung]

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.

[ClaireH-184886]

can you give me an example of the way you would change some of our titles

[littlesthobo]

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!

[ClaireH-184886]

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

[ClaireH-184886]

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.

[ClaireH-184886]

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

[BeardoCo]

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.

[trickshotric]

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."