Rank 3 in MSN, 11 in Yahoo. NOT In Top 1000 in Google

[JonathanR]

My site is federal-prison.org

For the keyword Federal Prison, I am number 3 and 11 in MSN and Yahoo respectively. However, I don't even make the top 1000 in Google.

Can anyone help shed some light on this? I do rank high in google for longer phrases such as surviving federal prison.

I have looked at my competitors who rank in the top 10 in google for federal prison and I really can't grasp how they are there. federalprisoncamptour.com for example has no PR and has only a handful of links from low PR pages. Yet it makes the top 10.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[JonathanR]

Anyone? I still can't figure it out. Maybe something to do with Trust Rank?

[askloz]

simply put... more links

[dburk]

Hi JonathanR,

As Loz wrote, get more links, but you also need to do a much better job of on-page optimization. i.e. Your H1 tag has no relevant keywords and your internal links are mostly using images instead of anchor text, a big no-no for SEO. You could also use more descriptive, keyword rich URLs.

[JonathanR]

Thank you for the responses. dburk, can you please elaborate on this point:

...your internal links are mostly using images instead of anchor text...

Sorry, I'm not sure I follow.


Also, by keyword rich URL, do you mean for example:

Replace this:

/toc.php

with thsi:

/Federal_Prison_toc.php

If I do that to the URL for every page, will it really help?

Thanks!

[strauss]

When giving the positions to anywebsite in MSN, Yahoo and Google which has some requirements like MSN considers browse rank, Yahoo considers trust rank and google considers pagerank, so i think depending on these parameters you have got that positions.

[martinsejas]

Hi Jonathan,

I've read about other people's experiences and they've also had the same problem as you. It seems to me that since Google is by far the most popular and used search engine on the Web, there are more people vying for top spot on Google. Another thing that you should be vary about is that a good PageRank does not mean that you have a good search ranking. This may seem strange to you but it's true. Research the meaning of Pagerank on the Web and you'll find material explaining why.

So my solution to your problem is mainly adding more links. Simple as that.

Good luck with it!

[askloz]

I dont see that he's using mostly images than anchor text.

Few things that he could do.

tidy up the code, it's a real mess. He has a cascading style sheet, but it's not being used all the time. So that will need to be changed. And tidy up the CSS stuff, a lot of it is not even needed and short cuts can be applied to reduce the amount of coding to get the same result.

menu links could be absolute, rather than relative.

the meta robots is not in the right order:
title
link rel style sheet
meta description
meta keywords
meta robots

Some might not think it matters, but coding sites as they are are taught in books are the proper way of doing things.


There's far too much white space in the page.

text gets cut off half way through a line (in code mode), it should all be on one line, would appear to me that he's using an old version of dreamweaver.

Optimizing the loading time on your pages can be increased by at least 50% after removing all that junk.

Not much in-content linking going on: doc a --> doc b, etc.

no use of the title attribute in your a, b, h1 tags, plus h1 tags lack keywords.

lack of keywords in the last 25 words of the page. lack of keywords in the top 25 words.

sort that out and try and get around 20-30 backlinks from different websites. do that for about a week, and since you're in a easy niche to rank for in search engines, it shouldn't take long to get to first page or even number 1 in 2-3 weeks. or sooner.

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi JonathanR,

As Loz wrote, get more links, but you also need to do a much better job of on-page optimization. i.e. Your H1 tag has no relevant keywords and your internal links are mostly using images instead of anchor text, a big no-no for SEO. You could also use more descriptive, keyword rich URLs.

[JonathanR]

Thanks askloz for all the comments. I just sent you a PM.

Also, can I ask your opinion as to the effectiveness of constantly adding content to this page:

The latest legal and prison related news

I was under the impression that the SE's look for new content and so I had this page added to the site. But if its only the content on this one page that is changing, will it help anything at all?

[Solidsnake]

There are a lot of reasons... only few5 quality backlinks will put your site on top of them...

[strauss]

And even if you are not following the rules and regulations of the google it can easily penalise your site, this was also one of the reason for not getting the rank in google.

[JonathanR]

Originally Posted by strauss

And even if you are not following the rules and regulations of the google it can easily penalise your site, this was also one of the reason for not getting the rank in google.

Hi strauss. Are you referring to the problems with the code and order of the meta tags that askloz pointed out?