Why Can't I Rank!?

It can take over 90 days to get ranked or a new website based on google's new algorithm. are you building quality links? is your website indexed correctly? do you have a sitemap? you are probably missing a lot of things.

The revised ranking algorithm on Google greatly favors pages whose "semantic environment" is consistent. In simple terms, (basing on the great WSO called "SEOlater" around here somewhere), what this means is that the keywords you're trying to rank for need to "hang together" well - not just on page but also across your whole site. Another way to put it is to think in terms of "LSI" keywords (latent semantic indexing).

If "Google" were a "human", it could make sense of your page just by reading it. So, if you write about cars and want to optimize for "honda accord" and you fail to use words like "driving" or "changing gears" - whatever - a human reader will still have no trouble understanding what you're writing about. But an algorithm - a program - may struggle to establish just how relevant your article is to the keyword you're trying to conquer.

This is where LSI keywords come in. At the current stage of development Google appears to be using a statistical analysis of what words/phrases are the most likely to occur in company of other words/phrases. If it finds those phrases, it will give you extra points - depending on how statistically significant it thinks they are. If it doesn't find them, it will rank your content lower.

There are other considerations too. If you're targeting a particular keyword you need to be careful how you place it on your page in order to give Google an idea of what to focus on. In the past this was easy. Just get the "density" right and Google will get the hint. But right now it is more tricky than that. In fact, Google is trying to develop its algorithm to a point where it "can't be lead" to accept any keyword you force upon it. It wants to make up its own mind as to what is relevant.

But it's not quite there yet. And because of that it's still possible to "ensure" that you'll get to rank on just about any keyword you want - FAST (i.e. in days, then even in hours, once you get the hang of it). Having your keyword in the title as well as the URL is a huge component - as long as you ensure that the "best" LSI keywords are there as well (you can check those using Google Keyword Tool's Ad Groups, or - by using Latent Semantic Indexing).

The trick to that is the slightly esoteric concept sometimes referred to as "trust rank" - which appears to be a reflection of your site's semantic consistency and authority. The way you build your trust rank is by gradually phasing your keywords in, starting with the easiest ones and then progressing to more challenging ones, once you start ranking on the easy ones.

The "easy" ones are, typically, long-tail keywords. Discover LTK's that are quite unique but not entirely unknown. You'll find you can rank on those in no time at all. Sort your discovered keywords by "difficulty" and with each article you launch, gradually and patiently progress to the slightly more difficult ones. Also make sure to monitor "all" your keyword ranks at all times. Even keywords you've NOT deliberately optimized for (you can get those from your Google Analytics, traffic sources, search engines). This will tell you how Google sees your semantic environment.

Hope this helps. For more on that, and if you're so inclined, check out seolater here WarriorForum.