Hi i am looking for any help i can get on how to improve my sites ranking. My site is the home page for a chain of local car dealerships. The site has been around for 7 years and has a page rank of 3. In webmaster tools i show 39,000 back links. I have done a lot of work over the last few months trying to improve this sites rankings. but for 4 of my most important search terms i cant seem to break 7th. I have looked at the sites above me and dont see what is makeing the difference any input would be very appreciated. my site is http://www.billdodgeautogroup.com and my search terms im trying to optimize for are maine hyundai maine GMC maine cadillac maine buick
First of all take a look at the Google Cachje version of your home page and then look at the text only version, next do the same for each of your competitors. The hyperlinks on the home page look a bit weird to me, I'm not even sure if Google will crawl some of them, try changing them to normal hyperlinks <a href="" title=""></a> also put in a title attribute. Put up some pages about each of the terms you are after, make them informative and don't keword spam, link all of these back to the main target page with the term in the title. Get some deeplinks from related sites in the same area (Maine), with the same niche with the trems you want in the anchor text,
Do some quality link building and always check for the priority of the keyword. You should include the highest priority keyword in your content (don't overdo it) and in the meta description part. Try to change and experiment on your on page optimization tactics. Hope this will help you to gain more higher rankings.
thank you mick i have looked and generally look at the cache and text versions every day and cannot find anything that would make the difference. also can you explain what you mean by normal hyperlinks?? that is how my links are. are you talking about the links with the java script in them? these links toggel the display of divs with quick links to our sites for specific brands. ex kia, hyundai, cadillac, bmw. google does not seem to have any trouble crawling my site it has found all the pages and generally ranks very well i just need to do better for these specific terms.
Sorry my bad, I had a quick loook saw those jav script parts and assumed that it was part of the problem. I did a site: search in Google and saw that 120 odd pages had been cached, if it were my site I'd work out the main themes and try to develop them throughout the site with plenty of descriptive text in each area, rather than loads of links from the home page, the links are ok, but you need a lot more text on there. Links are usually the main reason that sites rank, try to get a few pointing to your home page and deeplink to subpages, mix up the anchor texts around each theme, it should work, also go take a look at your competions link profile in Yahoo Site Explorer and yours, its showing me 189 backlinks to your site, Google Webmaster tools may show many more but I bet they don't count them all, the Yahoo SE is not a bad start for comparison, then you need to look at the quality of the links, the more relevant they are and the higher the PR of the site providing the link, then the better your chances of ranking.
most of the pages Google has indexed in those 120 dont exist any more. the site was originally built and maintained by a large company but the owner wanted an entirely new site from the ground up when i took over. we currently have about 50 pages but this is growing very rapidly. last week we added a blog that gets on average 3 to 5 new relevant and original posts a day (this has not been indexed yet last crawl was the day before it was added). i am somewhat limited as to doing major overhauls to the look of the site as we are a medium sized corporation and there is lots of administrative red tape involved with any major redesign. (such as additions of large amounts of text to the front page). they are very concerned about the astetic value of the page.
I can understand asthetics, well as long as the pages get crawled then focus on the internals, the blog will help, but the main factor will come down to links, if everything on site looks like having maine GMC content for example, then the only missing factor will be links from elsewhere confirming that.
The main thing Google aims in improving your page rank is voting system means the number of back links your web site received. if it is from relevant trust worthy sites that is from your web site category Google will give an extra mark for this, so that it will automatically improve your web site PR
Do some quality SEO Link Building for your website and you will slowly increase your rank. BTW, it is not #7 now.. it is #10 for http://www.billdodgeautogroup.com/ and #12 for http://www.billdodgehyundai.com for "maine hyundai" keyword search in Google.com