Looking for some Guru SEO opinions

I think I know a decent amount about seo, but for some reason I'm really having a problem on 1 of my sites. So I thought I would see if there are any gurus here that can help me out.

The site in question is www. njshore-rentals .com (remove spaces)

I'm trying to optimize the homepage for the keyword "Jersey Shore Rentals"

One of my deep pages (www. njshore-rentals .com/New-Jersey-Shore.php (remove spaces)) is outranking my homepage for this keyword.

I cannot get my homepage to rank at all for this keyword.

The domain is over one year old.

A google query for this keyword will place the deeper page on about the 7th or 8th page. The home page is nowhere to be found.

The home page has pr3 and the deep page has pr2.
The home page has all of the keywords in the title whereas the deep page does not.
The home page has many inbound links with the keyword as the link text.


So why I am having such a problem getting this home page to rank well for this keyword? Yahoo and MSN both place me in the top 5 for this keyword.

What am I doing wrong for google?

Thanks ahead of time for any help.

Carl

 

Your 2-word terms "New Jersey" and "Jersey Shore" are more frequent than your preferred 3-word term, so either whittle down the number of instance of NJ & JS and repeat JSR term more (which is actually probably going to look less natural and a lot more spammy) or simply build more external links with the anchor text based on the JSR term.

 

Anchor text on backlinks will help.

Make sure you mix it up though. Do a variety of different anchor text links, with the majority using your preferred keyword should help.

How much content is on the main page as opposed to the deep page?

I wouldn't be that surprised that the deep page has better ranking if the content is more relevant.

Look at the content and the anchor text would be a good starting point.

Cheers

 

I really never thought of this.
I wonder if this could really be the problem?

And since I don't have any back links with the 2 word terms, I won't rank for them either.

Which tool did you use to do this analysis?

 

A few pointers from me.

• No use of h1's
• Nofollow all the pages that will never rank for anything - for example Privacy Policy, Disclaimer
• Improve this: <meta name="description" content="New Jersey Shore rentals"> to get a better CTR rate from the serps. You can use up to 160 characters
• You are wasting link equity on many location pages with no properties listed. Either remove those pages until you have properties, or at least nofollow them
• Your page title is bordering on keyword spamming, I would shorten it to target only your main terms

I'd also look at redoing the logo and the map image as its very grainy. The higher quality a site looks design wise, the more likely people are to link to it, so design issues can become SEO ones too.

You might want to consider killing off your link exchange scheme, or at least not make it so blatant. I'd remove the paragraph telling people what anchor text to link to you with. People will see your resources page and understand that link exchanges are available, you can then discuss anchor text in private - no need to broadcast the fact you are trying to force everyone to use your search term anchor.

 

Thanks for the great advice. I guess it really doesn't matter that my contact page has a PR2, lol.

 

Well the way to look at that is you have flowed enough pagerank to get it to pr2 (i'm assuming no external sites link to your contact page), that pagerank you flowed to it could have been saved and used to benefit your actual property listing pages.

Couple of other things I missed, you should not have your privacy policy and disclaimer open in new windows, that will only annoy people.

Your blog is in dire need of some work. Its using the standard wordpress skin. Its abandoned also - 2 posts in June, 1 in July then none in August. You've got a day left, are we going to get a September one

I would either set some sort of posting timetable, at least one post a week. Plus at least install a free theme on it as the standard one looks awful. If you can't do this I would remove the blog. I'm pretty poor at keeping a bunch of my blogs regularly updated, so I need to set myself targets - like I need to make a post on Monday and one on Thursday etc or I'd never get it done.

 

It could certainly be just a part of the issue - Vic's done a greater analysis of your page, so there's some good pointers there.

Not necessarily so but by using your 3-word term you'll be adding some weight to "Jersey Shore" anyway; no problem there though, that's just a natural side effect.

http://ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/spider/spider.cgi?lang=

 

Thanks for all the great tips.

By the way, I bookmarked www.ranks.nl

 

You have a title for the logo but no alternate text. Just put "Jersey Shore Rentals" there and you will rank way better.

 

hello,
really nice question, see Google give good weight to landing pages. based on the keywords which is searched by visitors and relevancy of the that keyword into landing page it give rank to particular page. Now with compare to your home page, internal page must have more relevancy and due to that reason your internal page is getting higher ranking.

 

Now that I'm researching this more, I noticed that a google search for my domain name (njshore-rentals), does not have my home page on the first page.

The blog and other pages from my site appear first with the homepage nowhere to be found.

Could this be a penalty of some sort? I'm just puzzled as to why the other pages in my site would rank higher than my home page especially considering all of the work that was done to the home page.

 

For me your homepage is first result and blog is second.

 

You are confusing me with njshorerentals . com

I have the dash (-) in my domain

 

Yes, I see your site at the top.

 

I won't claim Guru status, but will chime in with my two cents.

I see just under 1600 backlinks pointing to your site. A good portion have your desired anchor text, which is good. Keep getting more, and get some with just "Jersey Shore Rentals."

You have a duplicate content problem. www . njshore-rentals. com (PR 3) and www . njshore-rentals. com/index.php (PR 1) are both indexed. There are two things you can do to solve this problem. First, use the URL removal tool in Google to deindex /index.php. Second, use a 301 redirect to push /index.php to your top level domain.

Your blog directory is indexed with and without the www. That is another duplicate content problem.

You should use a 301 redirect to direct non www traffic to its www counterpart. Do it across your entire domain, which will catch any other pages I did not identify.

Once you get rid of the duplicate content, your homepage will certainly start ranking better.

Good luck...

 

Thanks for Give This great tips

 

OK,

Now here is another question.

One thing that I did notice is that the "last time crawled" or the cached date for the index.php version (PR1) and the non index.php version (PR3) is the same.

Since they crawled these 2 different addresses at the same time wouldn't they be smart enough to figure out that's it's the same page without me doing a 301?

 

I will go with you

 

No. The fact that both URL's have different Pageranks does indicate they are being treated differently by Google. /index.php is duplicate content, and that is why your homepage is not ranking for your desired keywords.

Never trust an algorithm to be smart. Use what tools/coding you have at your disposal to make sure your site can be efficiently indexed and that duplicate content is eliminated.