Dismal content rankings

[erinhealthchoices]

Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight.

I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see.

The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have.

I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out...

Thanks,

Erin

[erinhealthchoices]

Thanks! All good answers. We have started by taking the complementary videos off the article pages to see if it is diluting our results. We're a small team so things take time but this is a good start.

[eTundra]

Also a very good point...

[eTundra]

Using the LDA Topics Tool in SEOMoz Labs reveals that a your keyword targeting is getting diluted by all the other stuff on the article pages... which reinforces Daniel's perceptions of your home page that too many things are going on at once.

I ran your article Chronic Disease Treatment through the LDA tool and found it only has a 51% relevance to the keyword "chronic disease treatment."  Your article is targeted well but it only makes up 334 words out of 641 total words that Googlebot can see on the page.  I would recommend making simple article pages that cut out all those menu bars and extra stuff and just includes your article plus a simple navigation bar.

Secondly, and more importantly, your articles do not seem to be garnering any links from outside sources.  I write for a niche B2B industry and I have the same problem - human feedback has said my articles are very informative but they don't inspire a link because they are so strictly informational.  Try using Google Insights to find trending topics related to your niche and then write a topical article that works in a reference to your website.

[Alex-Harford]

I've just had a very quick look and my first thoughts are you're committing a lot of keyword cannibalisation - basically you have the same phrase competing against itself over multiple pages (useful link:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization). These two pages for example:

http://www.healthchoices.ca/article/yoga-for-osteoporosis

http://www.healthchoices.ca/video/yoga-studios/yoga-for-osteoporosis

As you know, they have exactly the same video - why don't you put the article on the same page as the video? The video pages themselves aren't unique content from a crawler's point of view - they look like a search results/archive page. It makes more sense from a usability point of view (important for SEO) to do this too, and I wouldn't have the videos play automatically either. The navigation around the site seems slightly confusing as a whole.

You seem to have loads of superfluous code in your HTML, and far too many HTTP requests; can some of those script files be combined?

[DanSpeicher]

The home page, from my perspective, has too much information. One section is diabetes. One is osteoporosis. Another is Vitamin D. And that isn't even half of the front page. This combined with the two-column drop-down navigational buttons is a lot to process.

The drop-down tabs and rollover images appear instantly making the website interface feel jumpy.

I'd focus on simplifying the front-page and having less internal links directly off the home page.