Nothing I doo seems to work

Hi guys first time poster, I am a member of a few other similar sites but just found out that Matt Cutts is a member here so I am guessing that it's one of the better ones.

I am a web designer and part time in-house seo at a manufacturing company. psbspeakers.com
I have look high and low on why my site is not showing up in google. and I have come up with nothing!

search for PSB Speakers #1
Search for speakers not in the first #1000

bing seems to put me anywhere between 10-40 for the term speakers but in google I am nowhere!.

Can anyone see anything at all that would get me band by google for one specific search term? Maybe Matt Cutts can use my site as a bad example in one of his videos ;-)
A few years ago and a few different variations of the site ago it was a crappy table site with about 30 pages and it was ranked #1-3 for the term speakers! Now the last incarnation of the site, the one that I designed and built with seo in mind is even worse off then the last. I have read site after site, white paper after white paper and forum after forum and I have not seen anything that says I am doing something wrong.

a big hug to the person who can figure this one out.

thanks so much for your time

 

Men I don't really know, just a few days I had discussed the same problem for one of my websites. Check out this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2371841 here you may find something to hang on to.

 

thanks themaniac,

I do believe that it is something fundamentally wrong with the site, not the links to it or the search terms. That's why it is so hard to diagnose. In every conceivable metrics i look at I should at least be in the top 50 if not the top 10 for the term speakers (comparing my site with competitors). So there really has to be something physically wrong with the site itself.

 

speakers is a generic term and not really targeted. home theater speakers, computer speakers, car speakers, motivational speakers, you know what i mean.

this keyword has over 9 million global broad match monthly search results and highly competitive. if you just started your seo, you should pick less competitive terms that are more targeted. once you get ranked for less competitive terms that are highly targeted to your business, you can then focus on the more competitive terms. with a right budget and time spent promoting, you CAN rank for speakers but it will take a while. in the meantime, focus on long tail keywords and get the traffic flowing.

 

sultanofseo,

Thanks but that is not my problem. the site has had people linking to it with the term PSB "speakers" for 15 years I understand all the general seo stuff. but like I said in the post above all the metrics I can see makes me think I am being penalized for something. type in speakers... i am not in the top 1000. that seems fishy as there is a tone of crap, from say result 100+

 

you're not being penalized, your competition just has more backlinks targeting your keyword

 

Hey Kevin just had a quick look. When did the re design take place? When rebuilding the new site did the url structure stay the same? If not this is why you went down with the Titanic. Redirects should have been set up pointing to the new pages so the old authority would pass through. It is a bit difficult looking at the way back machine to tell which pages of the old site were was passing the authority to rank for "speakers" Now you are starting seo from the start again. There are some on page issues that you could clear up and start a new off page campaign targeting the new on page changes.

 

that happen all the time, its part of the competition... you need to work harder or get better links and optimize your site better than before.

 

Like sultanofseo said, "speakers" is literally your Mt. Everest of Keywords. You're competing against bestbuy.com, klipsch.com, amazon.com, crutchfield.com etc. I realize you're not even in the top 1000 (kind of curious what tool you're using for rankings beyond 200), but looking at your backlink profile, your main anchor text that links to your site is your brand: psb being the most, psb speakers being the 2nd. You might want to build more links with just "speakers" in the anchor text and looking at a couple less competitive phrases like "tower speakers" (where you rank #48) and "bookshelf speakers" (where you rank #32), you might want to build backlinks with this in the anchor text. Start there and maybe you can get to page 1 for these phrases which have decent traffic themselves (1300 exacts for tower and 2900 exacts a month for bookshelf).

Since I can't see your GA, it's hard to tell how much you really are getting. It does look like a long history within the site and so you're competing against those old links to a certain degree, trying to improve the density of these other phrases vs. "psb speakers", but competing with other sites, it looks like focusing on more specific speakers with backlinks would be better. A quick tip on the Tower Speakers page: psbspeakers.com/products/tower-speakers, but your images could be optimized. The first image: img.php?101027144501-SYNCHRONY_ONE_cherry.jpg/260" width="260" alt="" has no keywords in the alt text related to "tower speakers" and the naming convention for the speaker doesn't have "tower speakers" in it either. Another tip, but in your h2 tags, you have the name of the speakers which is good obviously from a usability standpoint, but the 3rd speaker in you name "Imagine T Tower". Looks like you have some room for "speaker" to the end along with the next 3 sets of speakers. And looking at your homepage briefly, how about a set of anchor text links in the footer with all the types of speakers like "Tower Speakers | Bookshelf Speakers | In Wall Speakers | etc." which would replicate over all the pages. While interlinking isn't as good as external links pointing into the site, it does help a tad. Looks like there's a few more things you could do, but gotta run.

 

Speakers is a highly competitive keyword that why you do not find your site in the 1000 searches. Focus on Google then use the other way to target your keyword like long tail keyword target this and your main keyword will benefit from this. Its effective for high competitive keywords like speakers.

 

Hi Kyliesweet,

did you look at a few of the other sites?

my site has:
links with "speakers" in the text from good PR sites - well over 300
links to a page like paradigm.com (another speaker company) with speakers in the link - maybe 20-50
Not to mention that I have "speakers" in my url and title and they do not.

Ok maybe paradigm has more links to their site but I can point to very low Pr sites that are ranking for that key word where I am no place not even in the first 1000 results.

 

Hi Speshilk.

it seems that your the only one here that actually looked into my site. thanks. thanks for your suggestions, but I think my issue is bigger then a few alt tags. Also All the tools that I see tell me that i should not have more then 15 of the same term on a page so your suggestion of a key word footer would be detrimental i think.

I looked for my site in "speakers" up to 1000 by going to google.com/ncr and then turning my results to 100 not 10 that way I can just search the page for PSB every time i go to the next set of 100 search results. and like i said I am no where.

PSB Speakers # 1
Speakers #infinity

NOTE* I used to be in the top 5 for the term "speakers" a few years ago so it seems to me that I should still be in the top 1000 even doing no seo on the page. Also I am not naive enough to want my #3-5 position back, I understand that I will not be able to compete with amazon or best buy for that term. I just would like to be included in the top 1000! gr

All these people who tell me the most basic "add more back links" does not account for me not being even included in a term that from all matrix should have an ok ranking... the term:
1. is in my url
2. in my title
3. I have hundreds of backlinks with that term in it from high pr sites
4. my site is 15+ years old

 

HI CaboChris,

Thanks for looking into the site for me.

The latest re-design was done over 1 year ago. I made sure that the pages that did change url's had a 301 redirect to the new url. Even if i did no 301's the home page's url did not change so really there is no reason why it is extremely under performing for the search term "speakers".

In the last 6 months i have done the following to try to improve the site performance

- Rel canonical links to cut down on duplicate content.
- better cashing to speed up load times
- more social integration

The only thing I can see is I have 3 h1 tags on the home page. which is a no-no but I have read that it is of little consequence.

 

Hey Kevin
Lets say on the old site had a specific inner page that had 5 authoritative anchor text ("speakers" )backlinks built to it and you did not 301 at all, those BL are now gone and not passing link juice or authority.
These 5 BL that were powerfull could out rank any site with 300+ crappy BL for the term "speakers".

ITS NOT BL you have a pretty good BL profile (really good) actually So this is where I would sink all my teeth into on page issues. Speshilk is correct you need to get alt tags in there don't leave any rock un turned before your rule anything out.

I just did a crawl on the site and your Top key word is "image" from on page metrics.

One thing I see on the site is there is no interlinking throughout the content and pages you should be anchoring "speakers" from the content to other pages.
Also in the Nav Menu there is no link with speakers. Nav is one of the a first crawl point when spidered.
When crawled spiders/robots read the site in Linux so I just ran a Linux crawl and there is not one link that is speakers.

Some of your meta tags I would change up to focus around speakers. Some desc are a bit short and I would eliminate all your Keyword tags or chop it and use ONLY 3 you are using 13 on the home page. In one of Yahoo patents they use meta keywords as a spam signal.

 

Hi CaboChris,

Thanks for the input. I am worried about keyword stuffing if every link on my page had "speakers" in it (I think that would do more harm then good).

So your saying that a few more links and alt tags will account for a 1000+ penalty? I could see these things helping if I wanted to increase a few sports but, man something seems fishy to me.

 

Hey kevin Im not saying stuff the page but nothing on the site is telling robots we are about "speakers" You have many phrase variations which is awesome but nada about the single broad term which should have top level hierarchy. If you look at your page in Linux you can see exactly what robots see. With Panda running now every 3-6 weeks this is a complete site wide evaluation and you are not showing them what you are about. Robots are like kids you need to hold their hand and show them on the page. Since the first run of Panda last Feb we have been struggling to recover a single broad term for a client and just back in November we are back on page one. Do you know for sure you were penalized? Does your webmaster tools confirm a penalty if so they will tell you exactly what the penalty was for! Then correct and you are good to go. If you have skype or g talk you can hit me up there are so many variables that need to be looked at.

 

hey Cabochris,

skype is firebook23 add me if you like

is 20+ variations of speaker not enough to tell google that we are about speakers? it's in the url and title for goodness sake. even if your right don't you think I should still be listed in the top 1000+

 

just found this in my code that the CMS is spitting out.... psbspeakers.com

take a look at the "keep reading" links seems that right after it there is a duplicate link attached to nothing.


it seems that after the "keep reading" links the CMS puts in a extra link to the same page that's not attached to anything. could google be penalizing my home page on everything but my branded keyword based on two accidental hidden links?

 

So, what I know about links on a page is that google will scan or give credit for the first one for each url. If you're giving different pages credit for different keywords, it may still be helpful. I don't think it would be detrimental, but from what you're telling or writing, you should only go up? This post by Rand Fishkin talks about google spidering 100 links per page:

seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

So, not sure what you mean by 15 phrases. If you're talking about your phrase showing up no more than 15 times, that's not necessarily the top end of the limit because there may be a need for a phrase to show up 15 or more times on a page. And frankly, I've seen a number of top ranking sites show up fine with footer links like that, BUT with that said, that's not the only thing that will help. And I was only suggesting maybe 3-4 or 5. They would be different phrases.

Thanks for showing me how you're finding if you're int he top 1000. Interesting.

Thanks for the history on the past rankings too. Your site does look like one that could rank frankly if it weren't so competitive, but the anchor text does look weaker.

You mention you have 100's of backlinks with the term from high pr sites, but when checking you on open site explorer or majestic seo, the first page of "top links" all have "psb speakers" or the like as your top backlinks. Maybe you need to get even better links with "speakers", "bookshelf speakers" etc. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to see how many of the backlinks you're talking about, but the ones that seem to matter don't seem to have the phrases you're telling me you have. I'm not trying to argue, but that's just what I see.

Frankly, I have a client that had a similar problem where they had plenty of links, they are a great business and they weren't ranking or getting traffic for the phrases they wanted. We finally got them ranked #2 for a phrase were were targeting, but it's not bringing them as much traffic as they were hoping. We did that after about 3 months. However, now we're switching gears and trying to help them with other terms, but it does take time.

 

Pull them out and see what happens. Also, give the "give us feedback" link a try at the bottom of the serp. I know it helped one of my clients when I gave feedback.