I run http://swforceunleashed.com, a site for an upcoming star wars game. I've only found one competing site, forceunleashed.org. I've compared our two sites on alexa for "reach" on the alexa comparison graph and mine is consistently higher than the other site.

Yet when I search google for the main keyword, force unleashed, .org is currently #8 and I don't show up until the 4th or so page. Is there anything obvious that I am doing wrong that I could improve to move up in the serps? Anyone have any advice, or is it just google being google?

Well there is much more involved than just traffic. If they gave the highest position to the highest traffic sites it would be impossible for a new site to get in there.

Try to work on getting incoming links from good PR sites, directories, etc and use anchor text relevant to your site.

Yes and I would also add that the Alexa toolbar isn't particularly reliable as a traffic estimator, especially at around the 400,000 mark as yours is. I've found that I can get an decent Alexa ranking by browsing one of my own sites even though it gets around 100 visitors a day.

You have a similar number of indexed pages and backlinks to your competitor, but I think the opposition shades it because their posts are longer on the whole and you need more content. Also you competitor has the right idea in setting up a forum. If you had a forum people could add content for you for free.

Rather than just short blog entries I would do more to make the site more of a "resource" on force unleashed. For instance in one of your posts you link to a Force Unleashed article "Brett’s Production Diary". I would have re-written that article, or paid someone to do it, and then added a link to the original.

Some great advice from both of you - thanks!

- study your competitors strategy to get links and try to get the same
- posting forums with your signature
- submit articles to articles directory
- use video marketing,
- flickr
- links and anchor text are the key to rank well and to get more traffic.

Getting links from high PR sites does not guarantee you traffic FROM those sites. While it is an unlikely scenario, your traffic could be coming more from the sites that link to you than from the search engines who have indexed your content. I have an inbound link to one of my sites from a PR8 site. The link itself sends me next to no visitors, but the ranking boost more than makes up for that.

And I agree with the above poster who said Alexa's numbers are horribly skewed.