I have been marketing my website for awhile now and have made some large business moves with the brand. The only problem is we are not seeing much traffic from search engines daily and not ranking well for the keywords we are targeting with is country music, country music news, and a few other smaller searched. I was wondering if anyone had any tips for me to rank higher for these keywords. Thanks in advance and website link is in my sig the first link.
First off, you need to make your site more seo friendly - you have no meta tags, the site is not using the <h1> tag in the correct capacity. You need to have your keywords appear more on the site if you want to get ranked in that very competitive space. There are a ton of things you can do yourself to improve your site, but first read some of these articles to see what you can do on your own first: http://seoarticles.seoforgoogle.com/ Hope this helps. Paul
Yes thats helps at all. To my knowledge I do have meta tags on the website. I am using wordpress and using one of the SEO plugins. When I check my source code it shows my meta tags. I only have these on the homepage as I was told by someone who runs an SEO company that your other pages work better without defining meta tags for articles so it can be spidered and searched for meta tags, is this true or a mistake? I have been doing marketing for years but when it comes to SEO that is where I am having my troubles.
Metatags mean very little. Focus on your title tags, h tags (as said before) and first few words of copy of each paragraph. Your site is not optimized for for the keyword - country music. This is a very broad and popular keyword. Run Adwords for a month and see what keywords related to country music, etc are best to get traffic to your site. Then optimize the crap out of your site for them. It doesn't sound (or look) like you know to optimize a site. I suggest you pay someone to do it for you. It will pay for itself quickly.
The meta description tag is important. If present, it is displayed by Google when the page appears in the search result. What you put in there (and in the title tag) can influence whether people click on your entry or not. The advice to use H tags and mention keywords frequently (but not too frequently) is good. Don't forget you can put keywords or relevant phrases in the ALT property of images as well. The other good bit of advice is to get backlinks from other sites that are relevant to yours. That's easier said than done, though. The only quality backlinks are those that naturally occur. You can help the process along a little by subscribing to relevant forums and blogs and posting replies that mention your site where it's appropriate to do so. If forum members who visit your site as a result of that feel it's useful, they may start posting links to it too, which is exactly what you want to happen. But I am really skeptical that it is possible to improve SERPS by paying for someone to do it. You can't make quality backlinks occur. I think a lot of the SEO services you see advertised are a con. I've tried directory submissions, I've tried article sites and I've found that Google takes no notice of links from those at all. It's as if it knows that these sites only exist so webmasters can try to artificially boost their site's rating which, if it's true, makes a lot of sense to me. So I don't believe there is any quick solution to getting lots of search engine traffic (except PPC ads, of course.) You have to create quality content that people will link to voluntarily because they think it's worthwhile for other people to see, and then wait for those links to build.
you need to continue posting in "Do Follow" forums like here at DP as this will help boost backlinks to your site
The thing I do not understand is the website that ranks number for "country music" and "country music news" is www.cmt.com which I do not see any h1 tags saying "country music news" on their website. That is the part that is getting me and I dont understand.
Use proper meta tag, do not use doorway pages. Also, try to get link from othersite which has related content. Do not try to mirror site, it might affect your PR in google.
Spend more time researching SEO, etc. Regarding why CMT ranks #1 - they are part of MTV networks, have their own massive blog, forum, newsletters, community, thousands of quality backlinks - ultimate linky goodness that overwhelms all on site SEO. For your site, start with the basics and go from there. No one will tell you exactly what to do for free. Either take the time and read everything you can about SEO (and try it) or hire someone qualified to do it for you.
Keyword phrase anchortext backlinks from blog sites and forums will improve SERP some. Publish Great Articles in Article submission sites. Google seems to respect ezine and a few others. This will boost SERP also.