Hi everybody,
a short summary at the start:
I have my page (www.nlp-deutschland.de) since a long time positioned good, but not perfect in google. The best ressource is a forum wich brings me about 50.000 content-pages, unique and nice. My most important keyword is "NLP". I never needet to look for backlinks. There where only two pages above me: nlp.de, which is the direct key, and wikipedia.
Since about one year my page is suffering on google. Mostly it is because of competitors. I personaly think, they buy a lot of backlinks. I startet Seomoz PRO three months ago and I see, that they have about 5 times as much backlinks from other domains / c-blocks as I have. Round about, I got 100 and they got 500.
However, in the link analytics I also see that some pages with fewer backlinks are ranked higher. And I get so many different hints about SEO, that I don´t know anymore which one to follow. I am sure about what I am doing with backlinks, but I am not sure about onpage.
Here an example:
All my internal links are relative. As my key is also includet in the domain itself, it get´s no repetition in the url. One of my competitors, which has not the key in his url, just created a subfolder "/nlp/" to all of his pages and has absolute links in his navigation. This brings him the key to every single link in his navigation, while I have no key in the navigation, because it´s in the URL itself and the navigation is relative.
I was told that it would make a lot of sense to change the navigation to absolute links, just to get my key into every url of the navigation. Others say, this is bullshit.
Another question is double meta-description and meta-tags. With 50.000 content-pages it would be a huge lot of work to get them all done different (by hand). But it is shown as an ERROR in the SeoMoz-Reports. Are they so much important?
However, I just realize I have no clue about onpage-optimization. So what would you suggest are the most important factors onpage?
All the best, Julian!