I'm having a lot of trouble ranking for my target keyword

[havefunandlive]

In the entire time of having this new website, I've never ranked for my target keyword. It's highly searched, yet non-competitive, so it should have been easy, but google is refusing to let me on the SERPS for this particular term.

After doing some backlinking, my keywords in google webmaster tools exploded and contained over 72 keywords, one of them being my target keyword. It said I was ranking 3, but I could never see it.

On the next update, I only had 20 keywords and my targetted keyword was not on the list.

The number of keywords seems to fall every day, and I'm not sure why.

I have the keyword in the domain name, the title, and in the description. It also appears in a keyword-rich article on my site.

Why can't I rank for this particular keyword? When I used article marketting, I was able to rank for my target keywords on the same night.

[Easy Cash]

How old is the domain?

How much content is on your site?

[havefunandlive]

I have about 7-8 articles on the site. They're pretty long, especially the one I made rich with the keyword I'm targeting.

The domain is probably about a month old.

I've done a good amount of SEO, with a 94% percent SEO rating on whois domaintools.

[Kappa]

I am having this same problem. Additionally, Google Analytics says that searchers have found my blog using this search term, but when I check to see if I'm ranked I get nothing. My blog is updated regularly, has over 50 posts, etc. I am ranked for non-targeted keywords, and get plenty of traffic, but I want more!

Do I just need to do more backlinking? There are several sites on the first page of my keyword that have NO backlinks. I have about 60.

[FrankPinch]

Backlinks will do you good for sure, but good related backlinks. Great on-page SEO is very important, specially if it's medium+ competitive. Every website is building links, but not every website is search engine optimized

FYI: a one month old domain is not ideal for serps

[Kappa]

Originally Posted by Kappa

I am having this same problem. Additionally, Google Analytics says that searchers have found my blog using this search term, but when I check to see if I'm ranked I get nothing. My blog is updated regularly, has over 50 posts, etc. I am ranked for non-targeted keywords, and get plenty of traffic, but I want more!

Do I just need to do more backlinking? There are several sites on the first page of my keyword that have NO backlinks. I have about 60.

I tried google webmaster tool and I can see that that Google has not visited my site in a while. I am on a backlinking mission for the next 2 hours, I want to see if I can induce them to crawl my site again.

[havefunandlive]

I have more than half of a thousand backlinks for my site's domain and for a couple of my inner pages.

What I really want to know is why google showed me ranking for this keyword in webmaster tools while I really wasn't, then took it back.

I must have been able to rank for it doing something, and it happened a few days after trying a new backlinking technique.

After trying to backlink my inner pages using the same new technique, I haven't seen any changes to my keywords.

Any more thoughts?

[Mike Linley]

You might also try social bookmarking..I had my new site indexed within hours of bookmarking and backlinking it...I also bookmark and backlink every new article/post I put up..if you are optimized right and your doing your keyword optimization right and you did your research right I dont see what could be the problem? good luck! -Mike Linley

[havefunandlive]

Originally Posted by mikelinley

You might also try social bookmarking..I had my new site indexed within hours of bookmarking and backlinking it...I also bookmark and backlink every new article/post I put up..if you are optimized right and your doing your keyword optimization right and you did your research right I dont see what could be the problem? good luck! -Mike Linley

I've actually done a lot of social bookmarking as well, using social marker.

"if you are optimized right and your doing your keyword optimization right and you did your research right I dont see what could be the problem?"

That's the thing! I've read up on all of this stuff and made sure I did it all correctly (putting the keyword in the domain name, keyword rich articles on inner pages, keyword in title, etc), get high SEO ratings, and have approx. 1 thousand backlinks for the domain and a high volume of backlinks for my targetted inner pages, yet still google gives me nothing.

I'm starting to think it's my domain name.

Currently it's <my longtail keyword>blog.info.

quick edit: the reason why I think this makes a difference is because webmaster tools always ranks me for keywords such as "<longtail keyword> blog" "<longtail keyword> blogs", and other variations like that.

Maybe I would have had more luck if I just went with <my longtail keyword>.info...?

edit: yep, that's taken. If adding the word "blog" to the end of it would kill my results, then would adding "HQ" have the same results?

Would I rank if it were a ".com" domain instead?

[Ken Durham]

most likely it is because of the age of your site. Many new sites will rank for a few days to a week then drop back out of site. Just keep pushing as you are and eventually you will come up the ladder.

[M0n3yMan]

when you say its non-competitive how are you measuring this, most people will take the number of results returned in quotes or allintitle numbers which isnt a very good way to measure how competitive the words are.

you need to analyse many factors of each site on at least the first page, which includes the ammount of backlinks that page has as well as what sort of backlinks, the anchor text of those backlinks + more then you willl need to study other onpage factors as well as interna linking structure of your competitors pages.

there are over 200 points that google takes into consideration when ranking a site.

[havefunandlive]

Originally Posted by M0n3yMan

when you say its non-competitive how are you measuring this, most people will take the number of results returned in quotes or allintitle numbers which isnt a very good way to measure how competitive the words are.

you need to analyse many factors of each site on at least the first page, which includes the ammount of backlinks that page has as well as what sort of backlinks, the anchor text of those backlinks + more then you willl need to study other onpage factors as well as interna linking structure of your competitors pages.

there are over 200 points that google takes into consideration when ranking a site.

I've taken a lot into context and consideration in finding that other pages on these SERPs are not competitive, starting with the fact that a first page result is only a long essay on a white background and only has a small amount of backlinks. That's easily beatable, so I could definitely make it to the front page. Some of these front page Search results have no backlinks what-so-ever, yet they've ranked pretty easily.

I'm not expecting to make 1st on this result. I'm aiming for 3rd, considering the difficulty beating the more trusted results.

EDIT: also, there's only about 1,000,000 search results.

[crystalq]

Add more content to your site.
Do more backlinking.
Write and Submit articles.

Submit each of your pages to your twitter account.

[Easy Cash]

The domain is one month old and you already have over 1000 backlinks?

How did you get so many backlinks so fast?

I think you may have answered your own question - quality?

[masonpan]

OK Guys, to sound like the total newbie that I am, how do you do backlinks?

[Easy Cash]

Originally Posted by masonpan

OK Guys, to sound like the total newbie that I am, how do you do backlinks?

The aim is to get links on other people's sites pointing to your site.

There are many ways to do this.

Firstly, you could make a comment on someone's blog, and in the text - create a link pointing to your site.

You may need to use html or in may happen automatically when you post a comment.

This is just one way to get a link.

[MarkMilan]

Originally Posted by Kappa

Additionally, Google Analytics says that searchers have found my blog using this search term, but when I check to see if I'm ranked I get nothing.

I had this thing happen, and I found that I was getting visitors from Google's image search rather than just ordinary search results.

[Kappa]

Originally Posted by MarkMilan

I had this thing happen, and I found that I was getting visitors from Google's image search rather than just ordinary search results.

I hadn't thought of that, maybe they are searching for image or news. Thanks learn something new EVERY DAY!

[havefunandlive]

Originally Posted by Easy Cash

The domain is one month old and you already have over 1000 backlinks?

How did you get so many backlinks so fast?

I think you may have answered your own question - quality?

I bought a WSO from here that's really useful about fast backlinks. They're all from sites with a high amount of PR.

I also have Paul's backlink packets on top of that, which I.... Must have done wrong, because I've done over a hundred of them but only had 4 of them show up. hahahaha!