I've hit a wall with my site... need warriors help!!

by Tim_A

Posted: 14 years ago 22 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hi all,

Reletively new here (well as a paid member).

I own a site that's not ranking highly enough for it's chosen search term 'Horses for Sale' which I know is a competitive one...

Just wondered if anyone could suggest some steps for me... we're currently about 28/29.

I've had offers from companies who reckon they can get us to page 1 but are quoting stupid prices (plus I'm really getting into this SEO lark!).

As it's just me doing the SEO... i can't really afford to waste time on dead-end strategies.

All the best, any suggestions really appreciated (link in sig).

Tim

#hit #site #wall #warriors

James Schramko 14 years ago

Content + Links.

It looks like you have a similar page title on most pages. Mix it up a little.

Add some decent articles / blog content and link in to the pages you want to juice up a little.

Many of you links are coming from link rings, directories and link pages so you need to beef them up with quality links.

Grab some blog comments, forum links and articles with RELATED phrases rather than just using the primary phrase.
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Ben Roy 14 years ago

What have you tried so far? Article marketing is an obvious method to use, as well as video marketing, Web 2.0 sites (like HubPages, etc), and social bookmarking. There's tons of information available on this forum about how to build links and rank better. Again, maybe share a little bit about how you got to where you are.
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Kevin Marshall 14 years ago

If the niche is competitive, it may take some time to get it competitive in the search engines. I don't really have enough information to be able to help you a lot, but you need to start writing articles for your site. Start backlinking the site and create bookmarks for the site. Start creating a lot of content for your site. How many pages are in your site? Does it have a sitemap? Is it indexed with Google? What is the PR ranking? How do people find the site? Are you finding blogs related to your site and promoting your site there?

Are you getting confused? You probably are if you're new to Interent Marketing. My point is that all of these factors (and other factors not mentioned) are going to be important to getting your site to rank. Getting a site to rank high in the search engines doesn't happen overnight, especially if you are new to Internet Marketing.
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- Tim_A 14 years ago
  
  Thanks so much for your prompt replies
  
  Right a little more info:
  
  we've been going a couple of years
  
  page rank currently 3
  
  links mainly from link-requests, directories
  
  no-articles submitted to date (okay so that one stands out!)
  
  people find us through word of mouth and banners (quite a distinctive logo)
  
  All seo has been researched by myself from scratch
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  James Schramko 14 years ago
  
  The links you have are low quality and you need to beef them up.
  
  Some good seed articles well written around phrases that relate to your topic submitted to Article Marketing Automation and linking to different pages on your site will get you an instant lift.
  
  Blog comments, forum links and press releases will get you some good quality links too.
  
  Links are the first place you should be concentrating on.
  
  [ 1 ] Thanks
  
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R Hagel 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Tim_A

I own a site that's not ranking highly enough for it's chosen search term 'Horses for Sale' which I know is a competitive one...

Hi Tim,

You said "it's chosen search term," which makes it sound like that's the only search term you're trying to rank for? Is that right?

First off, this post will likely get moved to the SEO forum, where the SEO whizzes will tell you how to rank better for your competitive term. However, my suggestion is to make a goal to rank for less-competitive terms (that's in addition to trying to improve your ranking for the competitive term).

For example, you could probably rank well for geo-related terms, such as "Horses for sale [state]." (e.g., horses for sale Wyoming)

Another example: A specific type of horse, such as "quarter horses for sale."

Or maybe specifics plus state, such as "quarter horses for sale Montana."

Also, you could rank for "buy" words, such as "buy horses California" or "buy quarter horses."

Now, I didn't actually do any keyword research, so you'll have to find out what ACTUAL words your market is using. But I'm guessing there are tons of words you can rank well for that might not get a lot of traffic individually, but collectively they add up.

If I misunderstood your post ("it's chosen term") -- and you're already ranking well for other words -- please accept my apologies and ignore this post.

Cheers,
Becky
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cashcow 14 years ago

The only way to move up is to get more links. I see you have a lot of them already!

I think you might benefit from writing articles (not sure if you are already doing this) because you can get some extra traffic from the articles themselves if you write them properly.

As suggested above, try getting your links (to your main and inner pages) out to everywhere you can....

Lee
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Ben Roy 14 years ago

To echo something that was said above, you should also be identifying second level keywords (less traffic, less competition) and starting to go after those. Put up articles or other content that match those keywords, and then do your linking to those pages. It all funnels up to your home page and your main keyword in the end, but you can pull some nice traffic off of those longer search terms in the mean time.
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- Tim_A 14 years ago
  
  This forum's unbelievable... thanks so much for your prompt replies!
  
  It's becoming pretty clear that i'm going to have to start writing some articles around the related searches such as 'morgan horses' and 'race horses' and include a link to 'morgan hores for sale' deep linked into the category right?
  
  So once i've written some articles, where's best to post them? My head's full of 'article spinners' and 'artcle submitters' etc. Are there a few good sites I can post them to manually, and monitor the results?
  
  Again, grateful fo your wisdom
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  James Schramko 14 years ago
  
  Exactly - phrases and deep links.
  
  Now - use Article Marketing Automation and manually spin them in the tool they provide to re-write all the lines.
  
  I am certain you will get massive results very fast because the articles are drip fed across a blog network.
  
  Note: I use this as part of my strategy to rank on page one for 'Internet Marketer'
  
  Thanks
  
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webcosmo 14 years ago

If I were you I would split the seo effort in two parts:
1. trying to rank for the main keyword
2. trying to rank for long-tail keywords. for example by horse names etc.
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cashcow

14 years ago

It's becoming pretty clear that i'm going to have to start writing some articles around the related searches such as 'morgan horses' and 'race horses' and include a link to 'morgan hores for sale' deep linked into the category right?

Exactly!

Here's some of the sites I like:

ezinearticles
buzzle
goarticles
articlesbase
website-articles.net
articleproductions

It's also not a bad idea to give your articles some link juice by writing more articles that link to them or by using one of the links in your resource box to link to another article (instead of having them both link to your site).

Lee

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Carl-Reed 14 years ago

I can reccomend three extremely awesome services which have worked miracles for my campaigns:

My Article Network

SENuke

Angelas Backlinks

No affiliate links there, but I HIGHLY recommend them.
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- rosetrees 14 years ago
  
  I wonder if some of the charities that advertise on your site would give you a reciprocal link, or a say a word or two about your site?
  
  I think everything else has been mentioned: video marketing, free sites such as hubpage/squidoo/weebly/webs/tumblr/yola with anchor text links back, articles.
  
  Also directory listings might be good - I use them a lot for my B&B sites - and can be helpful for more local advertising. You could target the UK county by county for more keyword depth.
  
  (Complete aside - I have a Shetland who came from Horseworld and a friend gets her companion ponies from the SWHP - both advertise on your site)
  
  Thanks
  
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Michael Kohler 14 years ago

For traffic, I would write articles. Do a Hub or Squidoo lens on specific keywords for your horse site. In regard to the site, when visitors come, I actually was expecting to see real horse pics. A long time ago in a marriage far far away, my x-wife use to sell horses and we, for an unknown reason, picked the sites that had live pics opposed to clip art. Weird, but either way they got our money. Great site, though.
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- NickArnold 14 years ago
  
  You're using the H1 tag for all of the links on the left hand menu. Why?
  
  H1 is one of the more valuable tags - use it once towards the top of your site with your keyword in there. In a small header sentance for example. You're devaluing the value of the tag using it on each link....
  
  Perhaps consider using H3 also.
  
  Reduce the size of your description...
  
  Some sort of text / news story on your homepage might help (that changes quite often) - i understand your adverts are probably updating often but does google see this as a major content change?
  
  Links / anchor text goes without saying - but i'm sure you already know about that.
  
  I think you're probably trying to optimise that page for too many terms also - there are lots of terms repeated several times as well as horses for sale - such as ponies for loan, ponies for sale etc. It seems you're trying to optimise this page for 4/5/6 terms? Google can't really tell the importance of 'Horses for sale' if there are various other keyphrases which are as just as prominent.
  
  Rememeber Google ranks individual pages so you're usually better off trying to rank your homepage for 1 term / 2 terms max and have landing pages that focus on the other terms you're trying to focus on.
  
  Hope that helps.
  
  Thanks
  
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  Nick Arnold Blog | Web Design Birmingham | Nick Arnold Twitter
  
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BlogDesign 14 years ago

Article Marketing
Social Bookmarking
Quality Backlinks
Unique Content

That should get you ranked
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- 1 reply
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- leclaims 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by BlogDesign
  
  Article Marketing
  Social Bookmarking
  Quality Backlinks
  Unique Content
  
  That should get you ranked
  
  Well put, you nailed it right on the head!
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  cma01 14 years ago
  
  I was going to say the same thing as Nick. The main categories of your menu are all H1 tags. There should only be one h1 tag per page.
  
  Then, when you try to click on that "Horses for Sale" menu link, it just opens the sub menu, it doesn't link directly to the "Horses for Sale" category.
  
  When you get to the "Horses for Sale" category page, that page should have the keyword phrase as the page title in an H1 tag
  
  What script are you using? Can you switch to SEF urls?
  
  If you're going to be doing the SEO yourself, having the right tools is a big time saver.
  
  Some of the programs I use are:
  
  For Research
  * Google keyword tool
  * Market Samurai - love it!
  * Traffic Travis (there is a lot of overlap here with Market Samurai, but I like the way the SEO competition section classifies how easy a term will be to rank on. It also has a cool page analysis tool that will quickly tell you what you need to fix on your page to rank better.
  
  For Content Creation:
  * Magic Article Rewriter
  
  For Promotion:
  * Magic Article Submitter
  * SocialBot
  * RSSBot
  * TrafficMania
  
  I also recently bought BigMike's VideoBot, but I haven't used it yet.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
  Signature
  "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."
  ~ Plato
  
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  Tim_A 14 years ago
  
  Wow thanks again for all the replies...
  
  Right, have got into gear and am writing some articles as we speak, which i'll spin and submit all over the shop I'll compile a list of article sites from your suggestions.
  
  Re: H1 tags on the links... yes, i think during the initial phases of our SEO campaign we over-optimised if you see what I mean (H1's are important... lets have 30 of them!!! :p)
  
  So as far as on-page:
  lose the h1s on the menu (restrict h1 to just 1-2 key headings on the homepage)
  
  Set the menu to open horses for sale page when clicked as well as menu (rather than just open the menu)
  
  News section to keep updated.
  
  lose a few terms (such as ponies for loan) focus on 2 main ones (horses for sale, ponies for sale)
  
  Articles section for more internal linking/keyword content
  
  Each page e.g. (morgan horses for sale) to have h1 header and a sentence or 2.
  
  Off-Page:
  articles, articles, articles
  
  better quality links, and deeper links
  
  social bookmarking
  
  Again all comments are really welcome... i get the impression this is going to be a busy christmas...
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Tim_A 14 years ago
  
  Okay so i've started a few articles and am sending them out through various sources... i'll keep on top of them and keep adding more...
  
  Next on to the H1 tags... how many should I have on a page ideally? Is one enough?
  
  I plan to strip the site back to target the 3 main keywords (Horses for Sale, Ponies for Sale and Horseboxes for Sale) so that might help focus it a bit?
  
  As always, any advice/suggestions appreciated.
  
  Tim
  
  Thanks
  
  Signature
  
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Trieu 14 years ago

Its alll about backlinks. Get as many as you can especally high PR ones. If you struggle in writing articles, I suggest go for Angelas backlink packets first
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