Hello,

I've been trying to figure out why I'm ranked so high for one of my keywords & so low for the other. Anyone know why?

One is "vintage dresses" I'm #2 on the 1st page of Google.

the other is "vintage clothing" but I'm on like page 22 or something.

I have been studying SEO for a year and have all my code & keywords in place. I have more backlinks than most of my competitors & they are legitimate links too. I am a very successful clothing biz and get lots of press and links.

I sell mostly dresses and think that somehow google follows my traffic. I have tried adding the word "clothing" to my dress section but it hasn't worked so far (3 weeks) maybe I need more of that word in the dress section?

what do you think???

thank you for your advice.

brigitte

Have you analyze the competition on that keyword?.May be the keyword which is in 2nd position have less comepetition as comparison to your another keyword.or may be u have not wrkd (off page) properly in that keyword.Content is also paly a great role in SEO.so emphasis on content and seo wrk.all the best....

Check the keyword competition. Then start building links with that keyword as your anchor text.

Just the 2 keyphrases?

what about the hundreds of others that you should be targeting?

How do I analyze the competition? I know that keyword has allot more competition for sure.

When you say links you mean text links on my page out to other sites, correct?

I do not have trouble with my other keywords it is only the most popular and important one that I am trying to improve.

thanks

forgot to ask ellie... what do you mean worked off page properly?

my content is good, I sell vintage clothing and have tons of it on there.


I have analyzed all the sites I compete with and their code is no different than mine, in some cases they hardly have any code or content on their sparse sites so there is no hard rules in SEO I guess.

Clothes is more generic than dresses, so there's more competition. It's harder to be #1 in Google for things like "transportation" or "moving around" than for "727 Boeing Jet" or "1983 Dodge Dart with 4 doors" and you're seeing the same thing. It's long tail versus short tail.

try to use some more keywords including clothing word in order to support vintage clothing. This wud help you...........

See this graph, clearly vintage clothing is a bigger keyword. Similar pattern can be seen in overture stats. On google there are only 7,260 pages which have vintage dresses in their title (in a way trying to target that pharse, if we can assume that) as opposed to 220,000 pages which have vintage clothing in their title. Apart from larger competiton, another important thing to consider is backlinks, analyze your backlinks and your competitors backlinks, i am sure you'd be able to see clearly why your site is ranking poorly for that term.

I think you should try to use vintage clothing more as your anchor text...

I'd suggest to you that your SEO campaign has succeeded in spite of your best efforts, not because of them. It's not really your fault; the prevailing wisdom suggests that you have to go out and get backlinks because backlinks are everything. Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, backlinks.

The problem with the concept, and the part that most people miss (primarily because they're sheep), is that backlinks are internal as well as external and the way you structure your pages can have an impact on these backlinks as well. For example, you have links to home.html (which is a dead link, by the way) and vintage_clothing_home.html . Have one home page, and only one home page. If you need to work the text into your vintage_clothing_home.html page and make that your home page (which makes the most sense), then do that.

That leads me to my next point...navigation. How does a user interact with your site? Is it easy for them to get to what they want to? Does the navigation change? In your case, it does. Users get turned off by that quite a bit and leave. The more users that you can convert, the more likely you are that they will tell others and the more business (and backlinks) you'll get as a result. It's an exponential growth thing.

Finally, your blog. I will admit that I don't know bugger all about fashion and that I couldn't care less to find anything out about it. Having said that, I look at your blog and the first thought that comes to mind is "this was done because someone told her to do it." Get a blog. Get a blog. Every site needs a blog. Blogs are useful. Blogs are the future. Every site will have one. ALL HAIL THE BLOGOSPHERE AND THE UTOPIAN FUTURE IT WILL BRING.

Now...I have a blog. And it serves a purpose. But I don't tie it to my main company site for good reason (it's a personal and experimental playground, and because it doesn't fit my main company site; I also don't want a million user comments to sort through from people who would never become customers.)

Does your blog serve a user purpose, or is it just there to create more "content" for SEO reasons? Based on the one comment on the first page of the blog, it appears to be the latter.

To sum up my point in a sentence, I'd say this: Stop worrying about the SEO aspects of things, unless you can do so and enhance the user experience or at least not hurt it in the process. Most of the elements of good SEO are those of functional design, and this is where you can succeed where others fail.

Oh...and stop rank checking. It's not doing you any good, either. If you want to know if you're doing well on a search term, check your site stats and see if you have any referrals there.

Adam, you forgot to mention the most important aspect of SEO wisdom: It's because the LEADERS say so.......

Oh that's right. I questioned The Leaders. I should know better than to question The Leaders.

I have more backlinks than my competitors. My site is a very legitimate clothing site that gets written up by major fashion magazines so it has many 1 way back links too. I have neglected trading links this past 2 years so I may do that again.

I have a question to you ADAM, seo expert, I do not have 2 home pages, I have one. I changed it's name from home.html to vintage_clothing_home because that is what all the SEO "experts" said to do (That does not make me a sheep by the way). I deleted the old one off of the server, so what do you mean by I have 2? exactly.

I have analyzed my site stats and my navigation is fine according to my customers. It's as easy as a DR. Suess book to navigate. I don't think that is why I'm so low for the one keyword. 90% of my traffic lingers in my dress section.

And I really don't think my blog is an issue.

Originally Posted by PGV

I have more backlinks than my competitors. My site is a very legitimate clothing site that gets written up by major fashion magazines so it has many 1 way back links too. I have neglected trading links this past 2 years so I may do that again.

I have a question to you ADAM, seo expert, I do not have 2 home pages, I have one. I changed it's name from home.html to vintage_clothing_home because that is what all the SEO "experts" said to do (That does not make me a sheep by the way). I deleted the old one off of the server, so what do you mean by I have 2? exactly.

I have analyzed my site stats and my navigation is fine according to my customers. It's as easy as a DR. Suess book to navigate. I don't think that is why I'm so low for the one keyword. 90% of my traffic lingers in my dress section.

And I really don't think my blog is an issue.

If you want I can run an analysis on your site and against the top position holders for your keyword. The report will show you exactly what your competitors are doing and tell you what you should do to obtain a top position for your keyword. Send me an private message with your email and I will run you a report. ; )

Oh wow. yes thank you. Is that a thing that all people can do online? or some special software you have to buy?

Originally Posted by PGV

Oh wow. yes thank you. Is that a thing that all people can do online? or some special software you have to buy?

It's a thing that all people can do if they fork out the 500.00 for the program. I ran your report already and if you want me to send it just hit me in private with the email.

And of course a 500 whatever piece of software will tell you to do exactly the same thing as other owners of the same software get told to, so the end result is precisely nowhere.

Site analysis is not about software, in the same way that SEO is not about doing what the programmer of some software thinks is the best thing to do. Though all the "experts", probably the same ones that suggested quite wrongly as well, that "vintage_clothing_home" is really good for a home page name. that is complete drivel of course because when a site is set up properly the "home page" file name should NEVER be seen.

mister-p is correct in one thing

It's a thing that all people can do if they fork out the 500.00 for the program

And there is the basis of the entire problem in the SEO/SEM world. Anybody can download WebCEO, SEOElite or any of the dozens of so called "optimising tools" and then pretend to know what they are doing.
IF these people do NOT understand what REAL SEO is about, they can do FAR more damage when they start messing about with changing filenames, fiddling about with the useless metric of "keyword density" and "doing" the myriad of other useless things they could waste time (and your money) on whilst missing the important things.